Passion Fever (1969)
* (out of 4)
Doris Wishman bought the Greek film PYRETOS and planned on releasing it in America but she lost the dialogue translation and since she didn't know Greek she pretty much had no way of knowing how to dub it or add subtitles. With nothing left to do she decided to edit the entire picture down, add new (dubbed) dialogue as well as nude inserts. The end result is PASSION FEVER.
The film centers on a young playboy who goes around looking for women to score with. He finally meets one that he actually likes but will he be able to keep her? Or, something like that. PASSION FEVER is certainly a bit better than those Jerry Warren hack-jobs where he'd buy Mexican films, add new scenes with American stars and release them as a new movie. I think it's easy to say that Wishman was behind the eight ball when she made this and it clearly shows.
There's really nothing overly entertaining here. Obviously it's impossible to judge the original movie since it apparently ran 85-minutes and this thing has been chopped down to 54-minutes and that includes the new footage! So you're missing more than half the picture and what new footage is here is somewhat funny to watch. Basically whenever the "real" movie has the lead character bringing a woman into his room, we then cut to the new footage shot by Wishman.
This "new" footage is shot so that both the actor and the nude actress have their heads cut off in the frame so that you can't see that it's new people and not the original actors. Obviously this looks extremely cheap and fake and what's worse is that many times the clothes don't match the original or new actors and it's just a really cheap thing to do.
Then again, what else was Wishman to do? Perhaps find someone who did speak Greek and could give her a translation?
