La compagna di banco

... hot? Or not? It will depend on your view on this, on how much you'll enjoy the movie. I'm not fond of the pranks too much, but I appreciate that the movie really sticks to its guns ... from start to finish. Add to that a lot of nudity and a lot of silly comedy and you'll either have a blast watching or be completely offended by it.

Yes stereotypes and yes cliches and offensive material will be shown ... view it as a museum art piece ... showing you a certain time frame from a certain "era" and what people thought would be funny (and mostly worked) ... so many sex comedies in the 70s showing a lot of skin ... under the disguise of comedy and pranks and ... blocking others of reaching a .... well lets call it highlight. Not a masterpiece and probably just riding the wave other movies laid the road and blueprint for ... but fun enough if you are not thinking too much about it and have the right frame of mind.

Professor Cacioppo (Gianfranco D'Angelo) and his dogsbody Salvatore (Alvaro Vitali) are two clumsy idiots working as teachers who share a flat because of their meager income. They are so poor (how poor are they?) their dinner consists of the fruit the students brought along for them. However, the prank loving students booby-trap the fruit. This is remarkable since they are still in high school as opposed to studying technology. The biggest practical jokers are as always three boys (one handsome bloke flanked by two ugly ones), complimented by three girls (one pretty, two plain). The rest of the class is just window dressing. Class beauty Simone (Lilli Carati) is supposed to to lure local Casanova Mario (Antonio Melidoni) into a trap to dish out some payback. Thus the stage is set the stage for the usual nonsense and slapstick.

Mario lives above his father (Lino Banfi in a supporting part)'s tailor shop, meaning he and his pals can spy on women undressing through a hole in the floor (as opposed to the usual Porky style bathroom peephole). One of the customers (Nikki Gentile) turns out to be a gangsters moll, so Lino starts acting gay as soon as the mobster arrives (accompanied by Ennio Morricone inspired Maranzano twang). The naughty boys then convince Salvatore that the blonde bombshell is interested in him, leading him into several potential dangerous situations. Meanwhile Professor Capioppo, who teaches both physics and gym, is introduced to a new colleague, a giant woman (Francesca Romana Coluzzi), who naturally falls for him. This leads to some amusing scenes of awkward dating (her strength equals her size) but is ultimately overshadowed by their tendency to fall victim to their student's jokes.

Of course Mario and Simone start falling in love. She also has an older suitor in an orange jeep called Frederico, but his reason for being in the script remains unclear to me. Confusion abounds when Simone takes Mario to meet her parents and he think's she's pulling his leg (that's what you get for crying wolf too many times). His own family, unaware Mario has presented a heirloom as a gift to Simone, accuse her of being a thief and the whole kit and caboodle end up at the local police station for a family reunion. Naturaly none of the schemes turn out quite the way they were planned, but rest assured the pretty people will remain untouched while their respective friends end up with a greater affection for one another, and the silly teachers with egg and cake and whatever else you can think off on their faces. None of which explains how and when these teenagers learned to build such ingenious explosive devices...

6 out of 10

This is another goofball Italian sex comedy with a collegiate/high school setting (even though everybody here looks way to old to be in high school). It features all three of the Three Italian Stooges that appeared in lowbrow Italian comedies of that era--Alvaro Vitali, Gianfranco D'Angelo and Lino Banfi. Vitali and D'Angelo are very impoverished teachers who are the butt of a lot of juvenile pranks by their students, but they eventually pull a few pranks of their own. Banfi is the shop-owner father of one of the students, who in a random subplot, falls in love with a voluptuous Mafia moll at great risk to his own life.

The window dressing here (or perhaps the better word would be "undressing") is provided by the above-the-title star Lili Karati. Although she had plenty of lusciousness to spare, as a comedienne Karati was a second-rate Gloria Guida (with whom she appeared in the classic Fernand DiLeo film "To Be Twenty") or a third-rate Edwige Fenech (the reigning queen of these type of comedies). She is most famous for eventually becoming a hardcore porn star in the 80's, but in the 70's she was mainly known for goofball movies like this where she typically appeared in a lot more scenes than her clothes did. Here she plays a rather mature-looking schoolgirl being ardently pursued by Lino Banfi's handsome son (somehow the very unattractive Banfi always has a handsome son or beautiful daughter in these movies). One of Karati's schoolmates (and shower room companions) meanwhile is played by Bridget Petronnio, who later appeared as the menaced virgin in "House by the Edge of the Park". Petronnio is mostly known for sleazy Italian horror movies and thrillers, but she also played a lot of second banana roles to Karati or Gloria Guida in movies like this.

The generous nude scenes by Karati, Petronio and the other Italian actresses can only really carry this movie so far, however, and it is generally pretty unsuccessful as comedy. Neither Vital, D'Angelo, or Banfi are really at their sharpest, and rather than there being any coherent conceptual comedy, the movie is mostly just a string of cheap gags and pratfalls recycled from other of these "scholastic" Italian sex comedies. The genre itself probably has little appeal beyond a lot of drunken Italian movie-goers of the 70's (and, of course, me), but even so, this is not one of the better films.