Screw You, Exploding 1-Up Lady!
This is the Swedish VHS boxart for PINBALL SUMMER, aka PICK-UP SUMMER, aka FLIPPER GIRLS. Or, as the Swedes like to call it, GÄNGETS HÅRDA SOMMAR, which as near as I can tell means “Hard Gang Summer.”
As you might gather from the artwork, PINBALL SUMMER is an ultra-specific pinball-based teen sex comedy. When I reviewed the film three years ago, I had this to say:
What makes Pinball Summer different than other teen sex comedies is that even the clichéd teen sex comedy scenes all have at least a tangential connection to the world of pinball. You’d think it’d be hard to come up with 100 minutes of pinball-related activities, but director Mihalka somehow manages to do it. It’s pretty amazing actually. There’s pinball challenges to determine who pays for dinner, make-out sessions in a pinball factory, strip-pinball parties, alpha-male demonstrations of pinball prowess… there’s even pinball-related double entendres like “I wanna tilt you on the machine!”
Yeah, it’s a pretty enjoyable film.
We’re all about the learning here at Mondo, so here’s your Swedish lesson for the day. According to Google Translate, the phrase “FULL RULLE! BRUDAR * BILAR * BÅGAR * FLIPPER” means “FULL REEL! BABES * CARS * ROLL * PINBALL” in English.
Click here for a shot of the back of the box, which contains bonus excellent-sounding Swedish words like knutte-gänget (biker-gang), sammandrabbningar (clashes), flipperturner (pinball tournament), and flipperdrottningen (pinball queen).
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had the pinball summer theme song stuck in my head. I’ve thought about demanding that Lars pay for my therapy for having got it stuck there in the first place.