Pulp International - Judith+Fritsch

Mar 2 2022

Everyone in class is expected to give an oral presentation.

The Japanese poster you see here, which is quite striking, was made to promote the West German sexploitation movie Schulmädchen-Report 5. Teil - Was Eltern wirklich wissen sollten. Quite a mouthful. In English it was known as Schoolgirl Report Part 5: What All Parents Should Know. Still a mouthful. There's a reason for that. These films, of which thirteen were made, are legendary—or maybe infamous is the appropriate word—for pioneering the idea of sexploitation flicks as documentaries. We've talked about a few of them, specifically numbers three, seven, and eleven. The tail end of the title for this one—What All Parents Should Know—gives the film a gloss of scholarship, as if scientific research went into its making. But it was a fig leaf. People watched these movies to see nudity and sex, not to educate themselves. And if anyone actually hoped for education, well, they were steered horribly wrong.

The movie consists of six vignettes. In the first, three high schoolers bet during a rural field trip that they can lay their straight arrow teacher. In the second, a man is seduced by his granddaughter and ends up on trial. And so it goes, from scenario to scenario, all of them strange. None of the performers involved, female or male, would win a beauty contest, but a few are appealing, such as Sonja Jeannine, who features on the poster, and Ingrid Steeger, who was a stalwart in sexploitation films and men's magazines. While a couple of the vignettes have serious undertones, they're mostly meant to be tongue-in-cheek. What is incredibly serious, though, is how far the envelope gets pushed thematically. Grandfather/granddaughter incest? That's not good at all. We can't recommend the film, but we love the poster. You won't see it anywhere else. Schulmädchen-Report 5 premiered in Sweden in 1973 and opened in Japan today in 1974.