Geekscape After Dark Reviews Schoogirl Report, Volume #7: What the Heart Must Thereby… (1974)

In Daniel Pinkwater’s The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death (incidentally, one of my favorite children’s novels), the horrible villain, a wicked criminal mastermind, liked to torture his kidnapees by tying them to a theater chair, and forcing them to watch German comedies. It is in that spirit that I must approach Ernst Hofbauer’s surreal erotic classic “Schoolgirl Report, volume #7: What the Heart Must Thereby…,” recently made available from Impulse Pictures DVDs.

While Germany has produced some very notable films and filmmakers (F.W. Murnau and Werner Herzog spring immediately to mind), I think any of us would be hard-pressed to name any popular or famous German comedians. What’s more, when one thinks of German eroticism, one usually thinks of Isla, the She-Wolf of the SS, and other rough-hewn, overtly fascistic, spank-and-torture-centric films. So you can imagine my twisted eager dread when sitting to watch what was billed as a rompy, lighthearted German sex comedy. Either this was going to feature a lot of uncomfortable rape scenes, a lot of unfunny jokey dialogue, and a stern, broody tone that would be a bone fide bonerkiller.

I am happy to report that Hofbauer (1925-1984) kept his rape scenes to a minimum, that the goofy dialogue was unfunny but tolerable, and that the tone was almost akin to a tuba-rich, lager-ready Bavarian circus. But with a lot more pubic hair. The end result was fun, sexy, and kept me happily off-balance.

The setup is as follows: Our heroine, the virginal teen Elka Deuringer, visits her hunky Aryan brother (Johannes Buzalski), only to discover that he has been enlisting her 17-year-old classmates to work as prostitutes in his makeshift brothel. When one of the customers comes onto her, she screams, the police are summoned, and everyone is taken to court. From there, the film is a series of sexual flashbacks, as each of the hooker schoolgirls gives court testimony to how they came to work in the brothel to begin with. Each of the vignettes is a flashback, which makes me suspect that entire sequences were cannibalized from other porn films of the day (a practice that is all too common with both porn and early genre films). That clothing and cars change model is a definite clue. That the setup dialogue is given off-camera is another.

We get the story of a young girl losing her virginity in a shower to a blonde hunk who looks more than a little bit like Roger Daltrey from The Who. We hear the madcap story of a trio of teens who, in exchange for free ice cream (!), seduce a horny Italian waiter, much to the chagrin of his wife, leading to a naked chase through a hotel that would feel in-place in a “Police Academy” sequel. We hear about a woman who used to seduce motorists only to rob them (and the surprisingly dark consequences). There’s the story of a nerd who likes older men (the nerd was, for my money, the prettiest of the lot), who supposedly exploits books to seduce them, in the scenes that are the film’s most unintentionally hilarious. There’s the Bavarian classroom antics, about which you can intuit. And, most bawdily, there’s the almost Shakespearean story of a Gaby (Puppa Armbruster) who plays a little identity swap in order to nail her teacher.

This film was shot in 1974, right during the post-”Deep Throat” boom in American hardcore. This film contains no closeup hardcore sex or on-camera penetration, but is chock full of naked schoolgirls, giggling, wet, nubile bodies, kissing, and oh-so-much groping. It’s of a distinct European tradition of porn, which was, to some of us more porn-attentive viewers, ubiquitous in the mid 1970s: The bawdy, pseudo-comic softcore romp. Complete with some rocking mid-’70s jazz jams (in this case, by Gert Wilden).

Porn and comedy have always been strange bedfellows, and, like exes who need to stop sleeping together, are always accidentally finding themselves in bed together. The comedy in porn is rarely funny, and often distracts from the sex. But then, I think I’d rather have cheesy jokes in my unrealistic porn setups that ennui and melodrama.