a review of 波丽露

FLOPUARY #14: A completely wild miscalculation of the acting capabilities of Bo Derek, who spends the movie trying to manifest herself as the softcore porn version of a wacky screwball heroine. In one scene she'll be writhing around naked covered in honey, and in the next she's making cross-eyed faces like Jerry Lewis while smoking opium; The result is neither sexy nor funny or even vaguely charming, since it's all played with the sincerity of a Merchant-Ivory production. Everything else about the movie reeks of overripe '70s sexploitation sleaze, with broadly silly romantic subplots and bodice-ripper level interludes which in different circumstances might make this a fun guilty-pleasure film. But the biggest stumbling block in that sense is the utterly dumbfounding inclusion of multiple nude scenes with what turns out to be a very young (and in fact underage) Olivia D'Abo, where I'm at a loss to explain why John Derek didn't go up on criminal charges wherever this film originally screened. (Indeed, this is why I'm only giving this largely inept but not otherwise wholly unwatchable movie a 1/2 star, the lowest possible star rating on Letterboxd. It's my warning that there's some questionably-legal material in here that you might not expect based on the MPAA rating.) It's almost as though the film's utter failure at the box office has somehow kept it off the the moral/legal authorities' radar entirely all these years. It's doubly weird that it's available on free ad-supported streaming, which makes me wonder if there's anybody at Tubi or Roku who vets the largely shovelware content selections for anomalies like this.