Pastries - (1975)

Description: AKA: Touch of Sweden
Pastries is a comedy-farce coupled with explicit sexual experiences designed for erotic excitement and pleasure. It is one of the biggest orgasmic films ever made. At the last count, there were over 50 of them. Pastries, a motion picture with a cast of very beautiful people, all free of sexual inhibitions. They let it hang "up", as well as "out". Pastries is Uschi Digart at her very best. Uschi puts on everyone. Reality becomes fantasy and.... fantasy becomes reality as one explicit sexual scene follows another.
Scene Breakdowns
Scene 1. Judy Angel, Nora Wieternik, others
Scene 2. Sandy Dempsey, guy
Scene 3. Starlyn Simone, Sandy Dempsey
Scene 4. Sandy Dempsey, Ron Darby
Scene 5. girl, Duane Paulsen
Scene 6. Barbara Mills, John Keith
Scene 7. Sandi Carey, Duane Paulsen
Scene 8. Uschi Digart, Chesley Noone
Review:
At first glance, Pastries (a.k.a. A Touch of Sweden) seems like a cheeky take on Uschi Digard's rise in the sexploitation film world. Footage of Uschi getting off a plane and some Swedish travelogue introduce the film's wraparound story that has a vacationing Uschi telling a Swedish friend about American culture and more importantly her adventures in Hollywood. And how did Uschi get noticed in Hollywood? Simply by doing a spot of hitchhiking, naturally, she doesn't have long to wait before the screech of brakes, and a smile from a man who claims to know a film producer. With blunt hilarity Uschi tells him "I'm going to be an actress….I'm going to make allot of money". Unfortunately for Uschi, the film she gets involved with isn't exactly a top-drawer affair, which seems appropriate as neither is Pastries itself. An early sex comedy from Joseph F. Robertson, who began in B-movie horrors (he produced The Slime People in 1964), before embarking on a four-decade-long career in porno. Robertson's early productions were its fair to say technically rough affairs, even seen on pristine DVD his Pretty Models All in a Row (a.k.a. The Photographer) still looks like excerpts from a suburban swingers' dirty home movie than a real film. In what for all the world must be an in-joke the cheapskate director of the film within a film in Pastries tells Uschi "I'm using 8mm because I'm trying to save money on film." Uschi is not impressed.

A surprise appearance by Count Dracula, who menaces Uschi on a Mariana, allows the film some time to turn its attention to naughty nurse Sandy Dempsey who is forever on the look out for marrying a rich man and currently has "Richard the Millionaire" in her sights. Fussy Richard however is only after a 'virginial' wife, which might be a problem given that Sandy, as a fellow nurse points out, has "screwed everybody in the hotel apart from Harry the doorman and that's because he's 69". Where there's a will there's always a way however, as a fellow nurse whips out a grotesque gynecological instrument that looks like something out of Cronenberg's Dead Ringers, which she promises will restore Sandy's nether regions to a more innocent time. Mercifully for Sandy we don't get to see said instrument in action, and the results successfully fool Richard played by goofy porn actor Ron Darby (the Dwight Frye-a like in Satan's Lust) who is his usual hammy self, slobbering over women and running around in a joke store sheik outfit.

Elsewhere Rocky Incognito, a country singing star so self absorbed he lives in a room full of pictures of himself, enjoys the amorous attentions of several nurses, feeding one conquest the immortal piece of bedroom talk "play that like you're playing an oboe". While Selma the aforementioned oboe player, who depending on the scene is either a nurse, maid or secretary, tries to seduce Nigel, a gay hairdresser. Naturally with little success ("its nice but you're just not Ralph" he tells her) though she does come to the rescue when, in by far the film's crudest moment, he has an embarrassing accident with a coke bottle.

Pastries somehow manages to be both horrendous and fascinating at the same time, there is barely any sense of continuity (in one scene Uschi is a budding Hollywood starlet in the next she's working as a nurse, and its never clear if the film is meant to be set in a hotel or a hospital) and the abrupt editing generally chops off scenes in mid sentence. All of which coupled with relentless cutting to and throw between various unconnected story lines, creates the impression of someone madly channel surfing between three different films. Originally the film looks to have been shot largely soft core with only the 'Rocky Incognito' segment tentatively venturing into hardcore, on top of which hardcore inserts have been added later. These include some traditional attempts at making the new hard footage match up with the soft, often though hardcore footage is cut into the film without any rhyme or reason, it simply appears, often right in the middle of scenes. Curiouser still is the use of hardcore inserts on an almost subliminal level, as if visualizing any amorous thoughts that were forming to the back of the audiences minds, a nice shot of Uschi's cleavage, cue quick flash of hardcore, a shot of Uschi suggestively eating a banana cue predicable flash of hardcore fellatio, etc, etc.

There are hints of a zany, MAD magazine type sense of humour at work here, thinking especially of the scene where the doctors have a game of darts in the middle of performing surgery, and if the film gets nothing else right it does give the great Uschi more than her usual allocated amount of screen time, and despite her heavy accent, quite allot of dialogue to boot. Whether she's seducing a shell shocked soldier or a nervous photographer with a jealous wife, avoiding Count Dracula, or stripping in a public phone box much to the bemusement of a down and out wino (director Robertson himself), her scenes register as far more naturally sexy than the grainy, recycled porn footage that surrounds them. Just don't be surprised if after the film expiries around the hour mark, your left shaking your head and asking "what on earth was that all about".