Fresh and Exciting

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

Exploitation has curiously become a highly positive word for younger film fans, for reasons too mysterious for me to penetrate. But the bowdlerized U.S. version of this porno HANSEL & GRETEL shows the negative connotations the word should signal.On video display courtesy of Something Weird, the English-dubbed movie cuts away every time a sex scene commences, leaving five minutes or so off the running time. The audience is being exploited -suckered if you were, just as hard-up patrons back in the '30s or '40s were bamboozled into paying to see the birth of a baby or other trivial "forbidden fruit". That's what exploitation in cinema really means: a polite euphemism for fraud.Vet German director F.J. Gottlieb delivers a colorful, fairly goofy sex romp in this update of the familiar fairy tale. The handsome title couple (he's a bland German blond who the idiotic SWV shill misleadingly calls a "Michael York lookalike" despite no resemblance whatsoever) are driving along on holiday when a felled-tree in the road stops them. Beautiful Hexe (Barbara Scott, her breasts hanging out of her blouse) is a countess who picks them up, and takes them for a stay at her castle atop a nearby hill.It's mainly sexual hijinks there, as Hexe seduces both of them, one by one, and a buxom maid Majd (Erika Rambach, who I wish had made more films) also services Hansel when not playing the voyeur, admiring the dongs on the stallions in the countess's stable.English-version is not only truncated but saddled with a terribly cutesy and fey narration by "Oskar", treating the target audience with the utmost contempt. By the time H & G sort out their pre-marital hang-ups, and escape the clutches of the Countess (read: witch), this quite defective print has worn out its welcome.It's a shame, because Continental professionalism has been reduced to garbage by American distributors. All-knowing latter-day pundits like to make fun of "Euro sleaze", "Euro trash" and the like, but the guilt for these guilty pleasures lies westward.