The Riding School

Having been quite impressed with his comedy-thriller ARVSYNDEN, I probably overrated the talents of Swedish porn auteur Michael Beck. The light-hearted XXX-er "The Riding School" is more like standard stuff, a worthwhile time-waster.

Corny premise has a Swedish hayseed family operating a stud farm, suffering the misfortune of one of their best horses kicking the bucket. After this, the other animals don't want to mate, so something has to be done to save the farm.

They enlist a comical veterinarian/researcher who has a special potency drug he can inject to put matters right. They also hit upon the idea of opening a private riding school, to teach young maidens (from far away -all the local people learned how to ride in childhood) the equestrian art.

This is all an excuse for bucolic, rural sex antics. I was hoping for the earthy Joe Sarno approach, classically demonstrated in his Swedish movies Kärleksön and Fäbodjäntan, but Beck fails to capture the amateurish naturalism that Sarno mustered. Instead we have fairly mechanical sex scenes, with plenty of mixed-combo action delivered by the goonish Black member of his stock company, Samson Biceps.

The girls are beautiful, while the matriarch of the farm, Märtha Karlsson, does not get down in any sex scenes, perhaps a plus. One cute comic touch is a horse watching seemingly intently nearby, as one of several human troilism scenes unfolds in the stable. No hints of bestiality are present here.

Beck has already cranked out four sequels in this series, so obviously his fans dig it, but I found it routine.