Secrets of Sweet Sixteen (1974)

"Was Schulmädchen verschweigen" or "Secrets of Sweet Sixteen" or "What Schoolgirls Don't Tell" is a West German film from the year 1973, so this one is over 40 years old already and it is an unofficial addition to the famous German Schulmädchen series. It came out around the same time as the fifth film and the title already says that this one is apparently even more controversial than the other films as it shows us stuff that not even school girls like to talk about. This includes many controversial aspects, such as pedophilia, rape, satanic orgies and more. If you know a bit about director Ernst Hofbauer and these Schulmädchen films, then you will know that he tries to make it look shocking and yet educational all the time, but it completely fails from that perspective. The acting and writing, especially the latter, are so bad that I just cannot take this seriously as something other than soft-core porn. And lets be honest. You have to be really really horny to see something in this film in terms of being turned on. Speaking about the plot again, let me give you one example from very early on. A pedophile lures a young girl into his home. Two young women watch this and they go to his place and strip naked to get his attention away from the girl until the police arrives (that they called earlier). The man is seen unconscious the moment police officers enter his apartments and the girls are completely naked. Oh well... I guess this says it all. I was glad this film ended after 75 minutes already. Highly not recommended, it's a mess

The "schulmadchen report" films were a long-running series of 70's German sex comedies where barely legal actresses played barely illegal "schulmadchen" characters in pseudo-documentary, sex-related situations, always involving plenty of nudity and softcore fumblings. These films quickly gave up the documentary pretensions and people-on-the-street interviews in order to focus more exclusively on the sex. This is a particularly strange film though even in the context of this bizarre series.As other reviewers mentioned, it starts with the near molestation of a small child (definitely NOT a turn-on for most people). Fortunately for both the little girl and the viewers, two older girls come to her rescue, not by calling the police or anything, but by taking all their clothes off and offering to sex-up the creep! The next story is actually kind of a sexy mother-daughter story where a teenage girl overhears her mother setting a romantic rendezvous with a potential lover and plots to stop it (guess how?). The daughter and mother are both very attractive, but the filmmakers again seem to endeavor to turn off the viewer, first with lots of nude footage of overweight and elderly women at a health spa, then with an unpleasantly realistic rape scene. The next two vignettes are just silly (but not necessarily funny) stories of teenage sexual fumblings, one of which features the beautiful Swedish nymph Cristina Lindberg of "Thriller-a Cruel Picture" and "Young Playthings" fame (which, I have to admit, was my main motivation for seeing this movie in the first place). The movie then ends on a ridiculous but pretty funny note with a satanic cult endeavoring, quite unsuccessfully, to find a young virgin to sacrifice in modern-day (as of the 1970's anyway) Germany.Aside from being in very questionable taste in a few places, this is actually a surprisingly entertaining film. In fact, despite a plethora of attractive young women eschewing both their morals and their clothes, I would not recommend this not so much for the sexual content as for the sheer wacky energy of the whole enterprise. It is pretty sexy I guess in places, despite its appalling lapses of taste, but more than that it is quite a bit of fun (and it has Cristina Lindberg).

Fans of this genre (i.e. 70s European soft-core/nudie stuff) will be happy with this film. Although it begins with an uncharacteristically disturbing (attempted) rape scene, it recovers nicely as two of the heroines dis-robe to keep the bad guy occupied until the police arrive. After that, it's fun & games. A lot of nudity as you would hope and expect, the film is a series of erotic encounters with young and beautiful women (who are DEFINITELY and safely over the age of eighteen, so ignore the title). The particular copy I saw was from a video store and had some obvious edits during a few of the predictable scenes, probably to keep it within an "R" rating for U.S. audiences. Anyways, if you enjoyed those 70s naughty B-features at the drive-in and you happen to come across a copy of this film, it's worth a look.

For the most part, this is a run-of-mill softporno, as so often in German films from this period consisting of a number of episodes around a general 'schoolgirl' theme. What makes it unusual though, and interesting from a 1990's perspective, is one episode of extreme political incorrectness. Erich Padalewski plays a paedophile whose selected victims prove more sexually demanding than he can handle. The briefness of this episode increases the mood of nonchalance which is completely absent from similar contemporary American films like Warfield's Teenage Innocence.