Bolero (1984)

By strange twist of fate, I happened upon the John and Bo Derek sex film Bolero on the exact same day that I saw Until September.  Oh, cruel fate!  Why do you mock me!?

Both films have a commonality.  They both feature otherwise talented people trapped in a story that we are expected to believe just because we’re watching a movie.  And here’s the leap of faith the Derek is asking for: He expects us to believe that his wife, Bo Derek, is a young woman who has just graduated from an exclusive British college (which I think goes unnamed) who is still a virgin and who wants to take her vast fortune and fly around the world looking for a man who will deflower her.

Bo’s first stop is Morocco where she meets an Arab sheik (Greg Benson) who whisks her away on his private plane to an oasis in the desert where he falls asleep in, I think, an opium overdose before she can capitulate to copulate. 

Bored with the sheik, she then moves on to Spain where she meets a toreador named Angel (Andrea Occhipinti) who herds cattle, owns a vineyard, fights bulls and agrees, time permitting, that he will take her virginity. Unfortunately, he is gored by a bull in the ring in such a precise way that he is no longer of any use to her plight.  The scene of the man getting gored by the bull is one of the strangest moments in the movie.  Bo sits in the stands having cocktail conversation with several other women and when the tragedy strikes, John Derek immediately cuts to a shot of a trumpet player.  Doctors race to save the man’s life and his request to his new lover is that she get the dogs back home.  Priorities, you know?

Bo determines that her lover will recover and will return to the bedroom and, given recent events, decides to become a bullfighter herself.  That’s the exact moment that the Sheik tracks her down and kidnaps her.  Tied up in his biplane, she frees herself and jumps over the side.  How she got to the ground without being killed is apparently not very important.

And so, to the question you may be asking.  Yes, there are sex scenes in the movie – three of them, a lot more competently photographed and performed than the ones in Until September.  And yes, Bo Derek is a gorgeous woman with an amazing body and her husband indeed knows how to photograph her.  And yes, the movie is so ridiculous that you could recommend it on a so-bad-it’s-good kind of basis.  I wouldn’t recommend it, but proceed with caution.