Love Nest (1975) User Reviews (3)

indeed they do...

[imdb_id · 7/10 · 14 December 2003]

nice old xxx-flick with seventies look, "natural" actors and short raunchy sex scenes. has some very goodlooking girls which are not embarassing actors. the male staff is not as impressive. plot is about a hotel with a special kind of service to please their customers. this doesn´t exclude ohter activities like handling a female thief, a jealous wife or the horny father who worries about his little girl starting to work as a zimmermädchen.

"Room-girls Do It Willingly" AKA "Bee-Sting Into The Love-Nest" (?!?)

[Karl Self · 7/10 · 19 October 2008]

This one may not have much of a plot, but, characteristically for director Hans Billian, it sure has a lot of action, with one very softcore scene chasing the other. After a minimal setup ("Cat Burglar!" -- "Don't hand me over to the police, let's get it on!" -- "Owright!"), the actors get out of their kit faster than Superman when he gets his signal, followed by an explicit but hectic and rather mechanic sex scene. The girls are pretty and willing, the men generally revolting, the dialogue is inane, and everyone is so hyperactive and super-jolly as if they were tripping on amphetamines -- it's typical for a German porn movie of that era that the atmosphere is agitated and forcedly silly, rather than sultry or seedy.

The plot goes like this: a schoolgirl has eloped from her parents and checks in at the hotel "Liebesnest" ("Love-Nest") with her boyfriend to do the dirty. When the inept Lothario dumps her without paying the bill, she signs on as a chambermaid to get paid and laid through the hotel's special roomservice. When her dad finds out about her job description, the hotel staff set him up with another chambermaid and blackmail him to allow his daughter to pursue her professional aspirations. Eventually she finds a beau and resigns her position, but not before having come up with a suitable replacement to fill her vacancy. In between there are plenty of subplots, such as an female cat burglar (who contents herself with small change, apparently) and a surreal masturbation scene with two taxi drivers, who are surprisingly comfortable around each other.

I kind of liked the trashy visual style of the movie, the dowdy interiors, the garish colours, the single-floodlight-lighting, the silly mail-order-catalogue costumes. The entire movie takes place in the same run-down building and over approximately 24 hours, which will please the adherents of the Aristotelian unities of space, time and action.

Hans Billian may not have been an artiste, but he sure was an artisan who could get the most out of a thin budget. He always saw to it that that the punters got their ticket money's worth.

Das Jerk-Hotel Zum Tossen Und Wanken

[Wolfgang_Rodenbach · 8/10 · 2 December 2009]

This little Hans Billian classic can be found all over the internet under different titles and in two different cuts. It's Billian's Blade Runner if you will. Having first discovered it under the title it is listed here on the IMDb: "Zimmermädchen Machen Es Gern", it turns out there is also a soft-core version known as "Im Gasthaus Zur Scharfen Hirschen". The hardcore version is usually titled "Bienenstich Im Liebesnest" (and is the same as the one labeled "Zimmermädchen"). For this comment I thought it would be interesting to watch both versions side by side and note the differences.

Right of the bat, both versions feature slightly different takes of the opening scene, and this is kept up throughout the entire running time. Also the voices have been dubbed by different actors in both cuts. This means the dialog is slightly different as is the music. Naturally the hard version is more explicit in every way. This is first noticeable when a half naked girl is carried into the hotel by two men (she had jumped out of a window). In 'Bienenstich' she spreads her legs wide open while in 'Gasthaus' she keeps them closed. In the 'cleaner' version there is hardly a male member in sight, in the dirtier cut they are full frontal front and center and usually being fondled by one of the women.

And yet both cuts come in at roundabout the same running time: 1.20.54 soft and 1.23.05 hard. This is because the actual intercourse scenes in the hard version are all quite short and what there is mostly consists of a lot of wanking. I hadn't noticed before how much foreplay and how little coupling there is in the picture until I watched both at the same time. But don't worry, despite an overabundance of ejaculation shots, there is still enough actual sex left in the picture to brand it XXX.

Obviously there is time for more character development in the non-explicit version. For instance we get to see main character Hannelore (Christine Szenetra) presents herself as a new employee to hotel manager Engelmann. Also of note is that the romance between experienced Zimmermädchen Marianne (Karin Lorson) and Jürgen (Carl-Heinz Kühn) is better developed. Strangely enough, these particular lovers still don't have sex with each other in either version of the film. And while The soft version has more scenes with the policeman investigating the female cat-burglar, the third and least important maid, Elisabeth (Elke Krauß) gets more screen time in the hard version. One of the men whom she 'lends a hand' to in the shower only appears in that version.

But the biggest difference between Liebesnest and Hirschen is that two of the supporting actresses swapped parts between hard and soft. Apparently one of them refused to go all the way. You see, an unidentified brunette plays the non explicit part of Sonja in the hard version and Zimmermädchen-to-be Gisela in the soft while alleged former child star Biggi Stenzhorn plays a soft Sonja and an explicit Gisela. As blond Biggi has a noticeably shorter haircut in the soft version, it could be deduced that "Gasthaus" was shot first. On the other hand, it could be the other way around if she simply had her hair cut in between. Interestingly, a production still shows Biggi posing in full maid outfit, which she never wears in the picture. Could this mean there is yet another variation of the film floating around somewhere?

I can well imagine the soft version being broadcast late at night on a German cable channel. Think of the joy the impressionable teenage viewers would experience on finding out the actors filmed each scene twice and went much further in the alternate version. It's like finding a sex tape shot on the set of your favorite blockbuster hidden away as an easter egg on the DVD.

8 out of 10