|
|
|
The Young Seducers: 3-Disc Movie Collection
R0 - America - Full Moon Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (28th May 2025). |
|
The Film
 " Get ready for a triple-shot of Eurosex with Erwin C. Dietrich's THE YOUNG SEDUCERS trilogy, a rollicking and ribald collection of charming, cheeky erotic comedies that will get your juices moving! Framed like a semi-serious minded social issues film, THE YOUNG SEDUCERS films follow a gaggle of tabloid reporters musing over the phenomenon of randy young women targeting dirty old men for sex, with each new scandalous story re-enacted for the audience in frank and explicit ways. Buxom gals seek sex on buses, in classrooms, on the football field, backstage and everywhere and anywhere they can lock their legs around any willing men - and women - who will satisfy their lusts! Full Moon is proud to present these Dietrich skin classics in gorgeous, digitally remastered, fully uncut presentations culled from Dietrich's own 35mm negatives." The Young Seducers: With the various "porno reports" (sex exposés) having run its course – a veiled swipe at the long-running Schoolgirl Report series and its various suburban offshoots – the editor of a magazine gathers his writing staff to pitch stories for a new segment inspired by a lawsuit involving a fifteen-year-old girl and an older man; that is: "men who are victimized by young girls." First up is the story of a Rosemary (Lonely Wives' Rena Bergen) who regularly pretends to be a college student, this time seducing a painter ('s Herbert Kluever) by posing nude for him. Next up is a girl ('s ) who "services" customers at a service station that has a loyal clientele. Bored student Helen (The Swinging Stewardesses' Evelyne Traeger) threatens suicide to get her chemistry teacher's (Obscene: The Case of Peter Herzl's Claus Jurichs) attention, blackmails him into sleeping with her, and then accuses him of rape. Following that thread, the paper's sole female writer relates an anecdote about a repressed female piano teacher seduced by her pupil Susan (Angels of Terror's Ingrid Steeger). A young girl (Penthouse Playgirls' Margrit Siegel) likes to play "The Princess and the Pea" riding buses around the country on the laps of male passengers (including Nude Django's Raphael Britten). Danish football player Larsen's (The Sex Nest's Bernd Wilczewski) comely neighbor (Overnight Models' Margit Cizek) looks for help repairing her vibrator, a stage actor playing Romeo is interrupted in the middle of his bath by a teenage fan looking for more than an autograph. An English student (Wolf Fuchs) with seemingly no interest in the opposite sex is seduced by his landlady's teenage daughter (Kathrin Heberle). A serial hitchhiker (Renate Pelster) has a woodland romp with a guy who picks her up, the sight inspiring four joggers to hire a girl (Salo, or The 120 Days of Sodom's Dorit Henke) for the evening's entertainment. Only after all of them have related their stories do they realize that each of them may be telling on themselves. Director "Michael Thomas" was actually Swiss Ascot-Elite producer Erwin C. Dietrich who had been dabbling independently in West German genre cinema since the late fifties – including a trio of Edgar Wallace-esque krimi (Strangler of the Tower, The Nylon Noose, and The Secret of the Chinese Carnation) – and even served as co-producer on The Wild Geese and then produced two pseudo-sequels hilmsef with Codename: Wild Geese and The Commander but was better-known as a prolific purveyor of softcore sex comedies from the late sixties through the eighties also encompassing some alternate hardcore versions and straight hardcore works when it became legal in 1975 with over a hundred producer credits and nearly fifty directorial ones before his death in 2018. His aforementioned sex films included a profitable run of films by Jess Franco (Jack the Ripper, Blue Rita) and several more efforts by himself signed with the "Michael Thomas" moniker. While most of Dietrich's sex films found a balance between copious nudity, near hardcore sex, and glossy production values – along with the presences of starlets like Steeger, Brigitte Lahaie (Fascination), and Karine Gambier (Voodoo Passion) – The Young Seducers looks and feels like a dashed off cash-in on the "report" films. The Schoolgirl Report films paid lip service to socially-redeeming value with an each installment purporting to address an issue involving teenagers and sex in reference to the earlier "white coaters" and the Scandinavian sexual education films. The theme of The Young Seducers, on the other hand, is more directly a horny middle-aged man's fantasy, with the teller of each vignette revealing that the duplicity of the underage female was eventually exposed. While the Schoolgirl Report films were built around relatively "developed" short pieces, The Young Seducers feels like a bunch of sexual scenarios dashed off and the framing story an afterthought. The vignettes themselves deliver copious nudity but little in the way of "suspense" given the theme or even anticipation. However slight, the film did well abroad and presumably enough for the German train route cinemas to merit two more cash-in sequels.  In The Young Seducers 2, playboy screenwriter Manfred Gregor (Inn on the River's Manfred Greve) hires pretty secretary Ruth (The Young Seducers' Rena Bergen) to take dictation for his latest skin flick. A regular seducer of pretty on-call secretaries, Manfred conjures up the story of Rose (The Young Seducers' Dorit Henke) lusting after her instructor (Mark of the Devil's Günter Clemens) at an Austrian ski resort. When he discovers she is not on the pill, he moves on to other ski bunnies and she hops a train and finds more agreeable company in a sleeping compartment. A battle of the sexes is waged over their disagreement as to whether Rose is promiscuous as Manfred believes or emancipated as Ruth claims, with Manfred trying to arouse Ruth with his knowledge and experience of seduction and Ruth trying to prove that merely reading "The Sensuous Woman" does not an expert in female sexuality make. Other vignettes include a woman (Naughty Nymphs' Melitta Tegeler) at a bowling alley who is tired of being one of the boys and shows them how they differ, a lonely film buff (Bibi's Stefan Stein) who pines for his neighbor Anne (Verführerinnen-Report's Anna Kristina) but misses all the signals until she decides to take the initiative, Babette (Yvonne Schneider) who decides to gives herself to a classroom crush (Banging in Bangkok's Claude Martin) during a game of hide and seek at a castle during a school outing only to learn the harsh truth about first love, a horny duchess in disguise (The Young Seducers' Margrit Siegel) whose hunting grounds – a cinema showing Dietrich's Champagner für Zimmer 17 – are shared by a literal lady killer (Voluptuous Vixens' Carlo Monti), a frustrated white couple fantasize encounters with the other halves of a black couple who have made the papers, a girl (Sex Service's Christa Free) hitches a ride with two horny truck drivers, and Dietrich muse Ingrid Steeger is back as a British girl working as a housemaid servicing her employers (The Sensuous Housewife's Birgit Jordan and De Sade's Friedrich Schoenfelder) and their teenage son. Like the first film, the screenplay of The Young Seducers 2 is credited "Manfred Gregor" which producer/director Erwin C. Dietrich (elsewhere credited as "Michael Thomas") used throughout his career much like globe-hopping, tax break-seeking producer Harry Alan Towers (Night of the Blood Monster) credited himself as "Peter Welbeck" for his screenplays; although, here, Manfred Gregor is a character played by Greve who seems more embarrassed than boorish. Gregor's office is the same apartment used for the first film's magazine office with the same giant medieval-styled painting and these scenes are cleanly photographed if rather sterile while the vignettes are more slickly-photographed and seem a bit more "designed" in terms of color schemes. Although it starts out with what seems will be a through-character whose adventures will be subject to the motives of the narrator, the likely shooting method of capturing scenarios on the quick and later finding a framing device shows in how quickly Rose is abandoned for other characters – some of which do not even rate a name – with not a hint of sexual suspense or mortal peril even in the cinema story with the killer intercut with footage from the aforementioned Dietrich thriller (the star of which Tamara Baroni gets a shout-out in the dialogue but not her more prolific character actor co-star Herbert Fux). The twist of the first film is repeated and is just as hard to swallow.  The Young Seducers 3 takes a slightly different tack with nymphet Babsi (Ingrid Steeger again) who has been shipped off to a private Catholic school in the countryside by her divorcing parents hopping the wall and hitching a ride with a traveling salesman (The Sex Adventures of the Three Musketeers' Jurg Coray) and keeping him entertained and his hands on the wheel with a series of stories about her classmates who she claims have no need of what the nuns call "sex education." The last time Linda (Hay Country Swingers' Karin Hofmann) ran away from school, she supported herself by taking a job on a vineyard picking grapes and the cherry of the owner's inexperienced young son (The Innocent Abroad's Christian Van Bergen). Tone-deaf concert pianist's daughter Melody (Veil of Blood's Claudia Fielers) plays "silly sex games" with an older family friend (The Young Seducers 2's Raphael Britten) in a scene that suggests that she knows more about the physical side than the emotional of intimate relations, having him "play house" with her posing in a frame for a wedding tableau vivant and "delivering" a baby doll. Sent to the countryside by her mother to learn "self-reliance" Viola (Vacation Temptations' Chitta Coray) takes matters into her own hands when lumberjack Jack (Rolls Royce Baby's Roman Huber, described by colleague Eric Falk as a "master fucker"). Heidi (The Young Seducers' Margrit Siegel) and Lorna (Porno Baby's Jenny Jones) "work as a team" on a stranded motorist (Hostess in Heat's Rolf Heubi). Nadine (Husbands Report's Nadine De Rangot) has a passion for motorbike racing but she also offers herself as the prize to the winner (The Young Seducers 2's Carlo Monti). Corinne is having an affair with an older, married man in the forest. When the old forest ranger tickets them, her boyfriend convinces her to seduce the old timer only for Corinne to discover that he has learned a lot from mating his pet rabbits. When Babsi and her salesman take a room for the night, she finally tells him about her own adventures as the object of middle-aged men's fantasties working as a nude model. Following the formula of the previous two films including the loosely-connected vignettes, The Young Seducers 3 plays better because of the greater screen time for Steeger and, once again, an overall slicker look more in line with that Dietrich's regular cinematographer Peter Baumgartner (Mad Foxes) brought to his "classier" erotic films. The cast has a few more recognizable (and attractive) faces but the vignettes are still pretty random and slight – apart from the forest ranger episode which is actually kind of sweet not just in conception but as performed (and not just by the bunnies) – compared to Dietrich's more polished and explicit 1979 pseudo-remake Six Swedish Girls in a Boarding School. A look at the rest of Dietrich's filmography reveals not only why he would take on these quick cash-ins but also why he could drop the series as pretty much any current popular trend could be transformed into a variation of the formula. 
Video
While the series title translates as something along the lines of "Virgin Seducers", The Young Seducers title comes from the U.S. Hemisphere Pictures release although it did get later reissued as "Centerfold Spread". We do not know of any VHS releases of the film, so Full Moon's 16:9 anamorphic 1.85:1 windowboxed presentation marks the first widely accessible version of the film originally issued separately and now as part of this three-disc set. The film was released by Dietrich's label in Germany on DVD in 2006 but Full Moon's disc is derived from Dietrich's subsequent 2015 Blu-ray which we have had confirmed has also been windowboxed with thin borders on all four sides of the frame. The Dietrich HD remasters were all submitted to a degree of digital video noise reduction but the NTSC DVD seems to adequately represent the film's patchwork texture (further supporting the idea that the vignettes were captured on-the-fly and only later compiled under a framing device).  Released by Hemisphere as "The Young Charmers" and then reissued as "Hungry Lips", The Young Seducers 2 is a retroactively-applied title either by Full Moon themselves or by earlier parties tying the three films to one another in English references. Dietrich's company put out a DVD in 2006 as part of their Ingrid Steeger Collection even though she has a small role, but Full Moon's 16:9 anamorphic 1.85:1 widescreen DVD – released separately in 2018 – is derived from the same master as Dietrich's 2015 Blu-ray which we have also had confirmed has thin borders on all four sides of the frame. An overall slicker film, some noise reduction has made the film look a bit smoother than the first film with fair skin and blond hair nearly indistinguishable in a few bright exteriors and interiors.  The Young Seducers 3 was released in English theatrically in a few territories as "Calendar Girls" which was also the title Full Moon originally used when they released the film on in 2018. The disc is this set appears to have been reauthored with The Young Seducers 3 title in the menu and as an added subtitle to the German title card on the feature presentation. The anamorphic 1.85:1 widescreen presentation is also derived from the master Dietrich struck for his 2015 Blu-ray which, like the Full Moon DVD, differs from the transfers of the earlier to films by only being matted at the top and bottom of the frame. It is the best-looking of the three films although that is not really saying much. The film is slicker, more brightly-lit overall, and mostly shot on either daylight exteriors or sets so even with noise reduction, a fair amount of textures are apparent while some of the more saturated colors may run together a bit like Nadine's red hat, red hair, red blouse, and red vinyl jacket. 
Audio
All three films sport only Dolby Digital 2.0 mono tracks of the English dubs, presumably provided by Dietrich since the Blu-rays had the dubs which he did not originally include on his DVD editions. The tracks sound pretty clean overall and the voice performances range from disengaged to corny. There is a lot of offscreen dialogue which makes one wonder if that was true of the German dubs or if the English dubbers just took some liberties. All three films are scored by Dietrich-regular Walter Baumgartner (Love Camp) although just like the sex scenes, one wonders if these are original tracks or just pulled from his library. Either the export version or American release of The Young Seducers dropped the ending or whatever source Dietrich used for the track was incomplete as the film's coda reverts to German with burnt-in English subtitles (making one wonder how the American version actually ended without the lame punchline). 
Extras
None of the three films have much in the way of extras apart from German-language theatrical trailers (2:13, 2:42, and 2:28 respectively) – the latter trailer under the recut reissue version title "Die Blonde mit dem süssen Busen" and trailers for other releases. 
Packaging
All three discs are housed in a standard keep case with a censored cover (the single-disc releases featured reversible uncensored covers).
Overall
With The Young Seducers: 3-Disc Movie Collection, Erwin C. Dietrich responds to the Schoolgirl Report formula with an even more formulaic franchise, but he does deliver a lot of skin and quite a bit of Ingrid Steeger.
|
|||||
|