Fred and Loathing on The Internet

I Call This Move The 'European Union'

2026-Sep-20

It would be a waste to devote a whole blog post to Rochelle, Rochelle. It has few redeeming qualities, even for its genre. There are far too many other European erotic tales told on screen that should come first if we were to dedicate a whole blog post to just one. Any single entry in that genre of cinema is not something the writing staff here at fredlambuth dot com is prepared to pontificate professionally in this publication.

Don’t get us wrong, we love the stuff. Each and every film of this type we’ve seen has been delightful. The Italian produced ones are the crowd favorite amongst the office screenings. As much as these films are enjoyed here, none of us feel we could come up with a few thousand words to describe what we liked or did not like about any one particular movie. Talking about what was well done or what was poorly executed rarely applies for these types of films.

There are not many artistic choices in a European movie that was made just to have on-screen nudity that are worth bickering over. Arguing about the merits of each facet of these movies would almost come down to demonstrating one’s preference in on-screen nudity. Rather than an argument about how the movie could be improved. No, I’m afraid there is not any one particular Eurotrash film that any of us feel capable enough to meet the challenge with the right acumen. We have strict standards here at the blog. However, we can go broader!

In the subject matter, not in how course our language can get when talking about dirty movies. Some definitions of terms might be in order. At the time of writing this blog post, dirty movies (let alone European sex comedies) are a bygone idea. A term that might give people who first hear it ideas about photographs that have been soiled. Dirty movies ( feature length cinematic productions that show some nudity or sex) were developed as a concept to meet a need that can now be met with more convenience for the viewer and less production costs for the distributors. The idea dissipated slowly. At the same pace that porn could be delivered directly to its audience.

Dirty movies used to have a place in society. Long ago. Back before the internet could let any Tom, Dick, and Henry log their opinions on the Web in some sort of web-log. This jab at the internet allowing amateurs to publish their idle thoughts on other people’s web platforms is unrelated to the topic of dirty movies, but something worth mentioning none of the less. Our blog does not qualify as one of those common rubes out there on the Web making accounts on some business’s Web stack. The reason being that the editorial staff is also the deployment team. We own the printing press and the domain. We are involved in every step of the process of getting fredlambuth.com to the masses!

Now back to the subject: the pre-internet days. Let's go even further back. Far enough back in time to reach the era before home video media. In this era, the movie theater was the only game in town. Film reels could be played on some very expensive equipment usually reserved for film professionals. Except for a privileged few, everybody had to rely on a whole building to watch a movie. This building could only screen cinematic features if it could sell enough tickets to keep the place open.

Movies of all sorts would be bottlenecked by this chunky means of distributing films to a paying audience for the first few decades of the medium. In the theater only model of film distribution, perhaps there were movie makers who wanted to make movies that could reach their niche audience. It would take the serendipitous connection of film distribution coupled with a large swath of consumers that can reach a movie theater screening the film at the right time.

Besides being a difficult distribution chain for a cult movie to find its audience and for its backers to collect a profit, this bottleneck also slowed down how fast pornographic films could reach any audience that did not have expensive film projection tools at home. Unless you had rich pervert friends, the porno theater was the only means of watching recorded nudity in motion.

The commercial appeal of hosting these tacitly in-demand films is obvious. Despite the ease of selling tickets for recorded sexual interactions, the decision of a movie theater owner of whether to screen pornography or not carries repercussions. It is a change in notoriety for a movie theater that is difficult, almost impossible to revert. Once a building equipped to screen motion pictures is known to screen any porn material, it will become known as the porno theater. As far as I’m aware, in the USA, there are no porno theaters remaining in operation. It would be hard to imagine any widescreen theater projecting porno material still in business by the late 1980s, once home video equipment was ubiquitous.

Given the quick consequences that come with putting porno titles on the movie theater’s marquee, just how are you going to get dirty pictures into an American movie theater that is anything other than a screening house that exclusively caters to porn? There were so many American men out there that wanted to see some randy action but could not bring themselves to risk an appearance at the local porno theater. Or perhaps they do not even want to see something as hardcore as what most porno viewing enterprises end up becoming. There was a theater ticket buying market that was not being served.

There was a product that met these narrow conditions for showing some adult material amongst respectable members of society. A product that glossed over the nudity with a little bit of added romance, comedy, and exoticism. Also a willingness to edit the material to meet the several different minute standards about onscreen penetration each US state, or even county, defines uniquely.

For a narrow stretch of time between World War 2 (1945) and the dawn of affordable home movie viewing technology (1980s), conventional movie theaters could get away screening tawdry European films ripe with nudity. These films could reach ‘softcore’ limits of what kind of bodily pleasure is happening on screen. Moreover, they could be played at the same theater hosting more mainstream stuff. Perhaps the movies being played in the same theater as these trifling Eurotrash sex titles are usually not the latest big budget hits coming out of Hollywood. Instead you’d find smaller productions. Ones distributed to just a region instead of the whole country.

They were still theaters in the respectable side of town that had normal movie going consumers. These tawdry Euro nudity movie romps pleased the section of the Venn diagram where the total American movie going audience met the American man looking for a little bit of filmed nudity. This sliver was big enough to get every Tomasso, Deiter, and Yuri in Europe to get enough money to film some girls giggling in between very obvious comedy skits. Well, perhaps not every. And they were likely looking to serve another audience first. This sliver of American movie goers was not the target audience.

The ‘Euro’ in these movies only means something to me, an American. The original target for consuming these porno adjacent films were Europeans looking for onscreen nudity. I imagine that the punishment or enforcement would be looser for porn publishing over in Europe, yet the strict dichotomy between a porno and a normal movie theater would still exist.

Once the bottleneck of the movie theater being the only way to show any type of motion picture, dirty or mainstream, was ruptured, the softcore European feature length film product started to flounder. The truth as to why these movies could sell tickets was now being found in the raw. There was less need to have an ulterior motive to allow nudity and/or sex to be presented for mass purchasing.

Softcore pornography, and Europe’s ability to sell it to the international market, did not die immediately as soon as most consumers in the developed world acquired either a VHS, LaserDisc, BetaMax, or DVD player. Even after the internet finally cut right down to a transaction between porn producer and porn customer, new softcore Eurotrash movies still eked out life. For what reason, I could wager some guesses. Either way, it could not last forever. I’m sure the idea lives on through OnlyFans girls doing comedy sketches.

How I came to find these films was more visceral than an analysis for their market trends. Thinking about how these movies got made arrived to me well after I enjoyed them viscerally as a horny adolescent. One that had access to video signals distributed over coaxial cables. This was Mexican cable TV, so the channels offered there did not have the budget of HBO or Showtime. Channels from this provider, like CineClub Oro 1 or CineCanal, could afford the distribution rights to old movies, foreign movies, or very cheaply produced American movies that went straight to home video. Sexy European movies were among the late night offerings of these low budget channels.

My memory tells me that I indeed saw Rochelle, Rochelle. The slightly musical erotic adventure of a young girl's journey from Milan to Minsk made famous by its appearance on the famed TV sitcom Seinfeld. This famed reference perhaps biases it as a standout among curated lists about European nudie movies. To me it’s no more remarkable than Bottoms Up Bavarian Style or The Naughty Nun.

I have not been able to find it on Tubi.tv. That web site has proven to be a treasure trove of memorable movies from my teenage years. The ones that I never bother to learn of the title yet cannot forget. Rediscovering cinematic volumes from this sensory rich yet fact sparse field of my memory has been more evocative of distant memories than even childhood specific odors.