The crowd outside of the Enzian Theater is stonewalling. No one wants to leave. Some wanted a drink at the theater’s Eden Bar, but it’s closed and now a drink will require commitment. Some drift off reluctantly. Others loiter like it’s a yard sale and they’re waffling over the Nagel prints. I’m a loiterer.
And good things come to those who refuse to take “Go home” for an answer. Had I left I’d have never been asked, “Do you know about the 3-D porn?” Suddenly it becomes clear as rain why so many people are loitering. An Enzian employee, beloved of God and soon to be the BFF of pop culture perverts, found a film called “The Four Dimensions of Greta,” circa 1972 and is going to privately screen it, glasses and all. The crowd, all leftovers from the Florida Film Festival, is buzzing with excitement and rightly so. If you can have unbidden 3-D soft-core Euro-trash with an audience full of people you like on a Wednesday night what can’t you have?
An instructive preview tells us that the film has four segments, signaled by cliché swirly-hippie psychadelia; that means it’s to put on your 3-D glasses and experience it as though you’re at the party looking at holographic boobies as big as your kitchen door! (it's hardly porn, by the way; not even soft-core as I recall) But wait! This is the 70’s. No one used the phrase ‘delayed gratification’ back because there was no other kind. Before you get to 3-D you have to watch the plot in which those scenes are embedded like shrimp in a summer roll.
This isn’t a bad thing, especially since the star of the film is Tristan Rogers who later rose to fame as Robert Scorpio from General Hospital (there’s also a cameo by Rocky Horror’s Richard O’Brien). Rogers plays Hans Wiemer, a smarmy playboy with German accent as thick and weird as bloodwurst who is hunting for Greta in swinging 60’s London. During a lull he hooks up with lost love Sue (though one gets the idea Sue wasn’t so much lost as mislaid). Sue is one of several glaringly cookie-cutter blondes, all of which resemble Greta who is played by Leena Skoog, worth mentioning because her name is Leena Skoog. Her wild young life takes more kooky turns than a Habitrail but when it begins (its told in flashbacks) Greta is powerful enough to use her housemates as slaves. And the half-naked slave-girl roommates give us the first 3-D segment! Wahoo!
Right?
Maybe it’s because the color has so faded (the film is mostly pink) but the 3-D effect doesn’t work too well unless you hold the glasses as though you were a Picasso figure, with one eye on the left and the other on the moon. It works sometimes, though, and when you take the glasses off, though, it just looks like you have the kind double vision that results from mixing vodka and champagne. On is better.
So it was a bit of a mess, but a thoroughly charming mess, bolstered by about 75 patrons of the arts MST3K-ing the piss out of it, and doing it cleverly enough to make Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert look like Beavis and Butthead.
They can hardly help it. Greta (Leena Skoog) has become a stripper, working in a club outside of which some cockney barker shouts, “They are quite naked and they move on stage!” often enough that I later heard it in my sleep. She’s hooked up with a guy who’s a dead ringer for Peter Noone from Herman’s Hermits and while they’re together we get more 3-D effect, this time with Greta thrusting a glass of wine out at the camera (this kind of thing happens a lot) to where it becomes reminiscent of SCTV’s Dr. Tongue’s 3-D House of Stewardesses.
It’s charmingly innocent stuff - there’s a shady club owner, a badly bungled spy game, a ton of nightlife, swelling 70’s romantic soundtrack music (sung by someone called Huckleberry Fynn) and ultimately, for the most part, several happy endings. No, the regular kind.
“The Four Dimensions of Greta” was one of the best movie-going experiences I’ve ever had and while the goofs and the gimmick had much to do with that, an inestimable part of it was the audience. Not all movies could unite a crowd with such pants-wetting hilarity but group movie watching, especially with a crowd so primed, is an experience that techno-evolution has rarefied and so made that much better. It would be impossible to have experienced it this way in 1972 when the movie was released and such things were, if not common, not quite so thrilling.
See? Good things come to those who wait. Sometimes they just take 37 years.
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