Sweet Teen (1976)

Overrated and overhyped

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

If you know anything about 70's Italian exploitation films, you know that they tended to be made in these imitative cycles where a whole bunch of similar films would be released within a one or two year span. Some of these cycles were inspired by big Hollywood hits like "The Exorcist", but others were more homegrown like the Italian "lolita" films, which all seem to have been inspired by the Ferdinand Dileo/Lisa Gastoni film "The Seduction". These films all involve older men being sexually tempted and/or seduced by much younger woman, perhaps a niece, a stepdaughter, a girlfriend's daughter, a daughter's friend, or even the man's own daughter! Obviously, these movies are pretty "politically incorrect" by today's standards, but, in their defense, they always featured actresses well over eighteen, who were often not remotely believable in the "adolescent" roles they played. The three most famous Italian "lolitas" were former Miss Teen Italy Gloria Guida, Ornella Muti (early in her career), and Jenny Tamburi (from "The Seduction"). Other actresses to play this role included Eleanora Giorgi, future hardcore star Lili Karati, Ely Galeani, Rena Neihaus, and even a young Nastassia Kinski. Sonia Viviano in this movies is perhaps the oldest-looking actress to ever take on "l'adolescent" role. She was kind of an obscure actress, but eventually became a kind of Italian sex symbol--albeit only in Turkey(!) where she starred in a lot of Turkish-Italian sex comedies.This movie is about a middle-age businessman who marries a much younger woman (former Miss Italy Daniela Giordano), but is carrying on with his sexy secretary (Dagmar Lassander). He somehow still has the energy, however, to lust after his wife's visiting niece (Viviano), although that's perhaps not surprising as she constantly lolls around in a short mini-skirt with her panties in full display or lies naked in bed playing with her puss (I'm talking about her cat--get your mind out of the gutter!). In the funniest scene she gets alarmed by a noise and insists on sleeping in the same bed with her "uncle". The man eventually hatches a hare-brained scheme to pay another man, a handsome butcher, to seduce his wife so he can file for divorce and be with the niece. But, of course, it all goes horribly, horribly wrong. . .This is not a particularly good movie. The story is just OK. Alfonse Brescia is a pretty lousy director who has given the world stinkers like "Naked Girl Killed in Park" and "The Beast in Space" or the merely adequate "Knell, the Bloody Avenger". This is redeemed somewhat by very generous nudity from Viviano, Giordano, and Lassander--and Malissa Longo also appears in a bizarre but pretty sexy cameo as a lesbian doctor. Still, it's not currently available in English--and probably never will be, given its obscurity. So all and all its pretty miss-able.