The Ribald Tales Of Robin Hood (1969)

Yeah, I know that The Ribald Tales Of Robin Hood is a pretty bad title for a sexploitation movie. Its okay because the movie is pretty bad as well. This one also went under the title of The Erotic Adventures Of Robin Hood which of course is the better and more exploitative title.

It takes a certain kind of pervert to think stuff like this up. I personally would never in a million years think to take the classic tale of Robin Hood and bring it in a hyper sexed direction.

The Ribald Tales or The Erotic Adventures, what ever you want to call it is jam packed with naked women and sex scenes. Of course Robin and His Lusty Men leave their spandex on through all of the sexcapades but hey, fans of 60's sexploitation movies should be used to this sort of thing by now. No, the problem here is not within the spandex. It is really all in the slow pacing and the boredom of the sex scenes. I personally feel that this one had a lot of potential but just slacked off with hack-job film makers who did not care what the final product looks like.

In the films defense it is far better then the seeming endless supply of fuck-tapes that come out in the porno world today and the countless modern XXX parodies that are even more amateurish and certainly lacking in creativity.

This movie actually offers up some pretty funny moments. One in particular is a far shot of a priest praying. It looks as if he is really fat but as the camera pulls in closer and closer we soon realize that there is a Bawdy Wench underneath the priests robe. The movie also scores points for its sheer bad taste. Everybody in this movie is pretty rape happy, including our hero Robin Hood. In one scene Robin Hood threatens to rape his lover because he believes that she betrayed him. Then he smacks her around a bit. Aside from all the crazy rape stuff going on we also have an exceptionally trashy scene that shows a woman tied up and tortured in the dungeon of Robin Hood's arch enemy Prince John. The woman is forced to preform oral sex on a sick and depraved lesbian.

The only problem is that these vile aspects were better on paper then on actual film. I can't help but wonder how this movie would have turned out if a more interesting director was in control, like Jesus Franco. This might have even turned out to have been a well praised cult classic but instead it is a schlocky mess and pretty painful to make it all the way through without drooling on yourself. I suppose it doesn't help that the Something Weird Video vhs that I picked up is severely drained of color and suffers from audio problems.

This one was a giant waste of time and I can only hope that The Erotic Adventures Of Zoro is a better watch.