Verdict
Summary
The appeal of sex comedies of the ’70s and ’80s – especially from other parts of the world – is getting to watch a long-gone time in places we’ll likely never visit, and lots and lots of nudity, and that’s all there in Thong Girls, but there’s more than a touch of genuine, authentic feeling here that Franco was able to capture, and I can honestly say that I kind of loved it because it took me there and the bittersweet sadness and joy of the characters is perfectly conveyed.
Plot:
It’s the last week of summer in a beach city in Spain, and everyone is trying to connect with a partner for one final fling.
Review:
Most of the tourists have already gone home as the summer boom wanes down in the beach city of Benidorm, Spain, and a handful of “last call” tourists scuttle about the boardwalk and beach, looking for one last fling before they return to their normal lives. One Spanish lothario connects with a French beauty (played by Muriel Montosse) who is hiding the fact that she’s dying, and when he falls hard for this woman, he has no idea the heartbreak he’s going to feel after assuming that this gorgeous girl was just going to be one of many conquests. There’s also a pair of aging-out ladies (one of whom is played by Lina Romay) who languidly sunbathe (topless) their days away on the beach, but one of them is a silly, foolish woman out for a quick lay with just any man who notices her, while the other (Romay) is secretly a lesbian and gets jealous of her friend when her sexual attention towards her is not reciprocated. Also on the beach is a muscle head training for a bodybuilding competition who brings home a cute chick whom he is nothing but a gentleman to, and when he offers her the chance to live with him and cook for him, he ends up falling in love with her, not realizing that she’s actually a man, hiding his true self from this big hulk of a guy, whose pride is deeply shaken when he eventually finds out the truth. Other mini stories include a Dutch photographer who is fascinated by the garish architecture in the city who keeps bumping into (literally) a pretty roller-skating babe whom eventually convinces him to take her out on a date, and when they finally have sex, she reveals herself to be a gold digger, thinking that this “Brit” (she can’t tell the difference between Britain and the Netherlands) will take her with him when he goes back home in a few days. Concurrently, there’s a pair of little girls whose mother takes them to a transvestite lip-synching concert at a gay nightclub where the girls are stunned to find out that their father is a transvestite. When they embrace and accept him, it means the world to him.
I can’t tell you why exactly, but Thong Girls affected me in a way I found surprising. I went in fully expecting nothing but junk, as I find a great many of filmmaker Jess Franco’s movies (he made this), but for esoteric, almost unidentifiable ways I found this trifle of a movie very sweet and melancholy in a human fashion that struck my heart. Somehow, I actually (miraculously, really) got into the headspace of these characters and found myself lost in the aura of the film, which is truly mind-boggling. How did Jess Franco do it? There’s nothing really special about the nearly non-existent plot because there is no plot to speak of. It’s just characters intermingling and moving through their lives at the twilight of a moment in time, and we can feel it fading like the sunset. The season is passing right before our eyes, and the longing, the needing, and the connections feel real somehow. The appeal of sex comedies of the ’70s and ’80s – especially from other parts of the world – is getting to watch a long-gone time in places we’ll likely never visit, and lots and lots of nudity, and that’s all there in Thong Girls, but there’s more than a touch of genuine, authentic feeling here that Franco was able to capture, and I can honestly say that I kind of loved it because it took me there and the bittersweet sadness and joy of the characters is perfectly conveyed. There’s nothing else to say. It’s a special little movie, but it may not feel that way to anyone else. That’s the beauty and magic some movies have.
Severin’s recent Blu-ray release of Thong Girls comes in a really nice 2K scan, which is likely the best the movie will ever look in its existence. It comes with an audio commentary by a Frano expert, an interview with a Franco-phile, and a bonus featurette.
