Monday, September 26, 2011

Lemon Popsicle (1978)

"Lemon Popsicle" is a teen flick set in 1950's Israel, but made in 1978. It's spoken in Herbrew language, but unfortunately overdubbed in English. Subtitles might've made for a better translation. I would say that "Popsicle" is similar to "Porky's", but this movie actually predates it by 3 or 4 years. I think "Porky's" is kinda bad anyway. Funny enough, 1982 is the year that "Lemon Popsicle" was remade for America as "The Last American Virgin" which is by the same director as the original, Boaz Davidson. Would you believe that there are 8 or 9 of these "Lemon Popsicle" movies? The third one in the series is "Hot Bubblegum", which came out (again) in 1982. That seems to be the only other one available via streaming at the moment.
This movie was crude, but also kinda sweet and funny at times. It went from one extreme to another. There was more nudity than any American movie would have shown at the time. For instance, during some scenes of undressing, you can casually see someone's weiner, while back in American (a few years later), you can hear Amy Heckerling being told that "Fast Times.." character, Damone's penis is too "aggressive". How odd.

There was a ridiculous amount of 1950's era music crammed into just about every scene in this movie. In my mind, I kept getting "Puppy Love" and "Put Your Head On My Shoulder" mixed up. Then I thought about the Doug Clark & The Hot Nuts parody which was something like, "Put your legs 'round my shoulders". ha. "Baaay-Bee".

2 comments:

  1. The most extreme one is Hot Bubblegum and the worst one is Private Popsicle. If they had subtitled it I wonder how funny it would be? I was amzed by how they got the rights to some of these songs? Everytime they beat huey in hot bubblegum they play Labamba over and over.

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  2. There was somebody on one of the Netflix reviews complaining that the translation wasn't correct and that it was offensive to Israeli culture. I think they thought it was too Americanized or something. I didn't realize the subjects in this film were bound by a specific country, they seemed pretty universal to me. I didn't quite understand that, but I don't know anything really about teenagers in Israel.

    Yeah, you figured it would have cost a crap load of money to license all those songs.

    "La Bamba" over and over? Oh funny, I guess that's like hearing "Puppy Love" in this movie a billion times.

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