'Erika's Hot Summer' (1971) - Gary Graver.

After a suitably edifying sun-hazed Californian opening, if one might excuse the pun, we enjoy the perfectly pulchritudinous vision of our uninhibitedly beach cavorting, delightfully unadorned sun goddess Erika (Erika Gavin), and for one all too brief moment all appears well in the world! We then meet Steve (Walt Phillips) blond-haired Adonis photographer who eagerly 'shoots' his nubile model in a suitably intimate manner, whose ace skills with a camera are neatly matched by his protean dancing ability, since he is one cosmically far out, female form digging, groove frugging dude about town with an insatiably hungry eye for the ladies which frequently goes boundaries beyond mere artistic interest.

Ostensibly a corporeally revealing expose of these attractive, rigorously hip young things and their pleasingly permissive attitudes to arbitrary nudity and freely delivered love, these hyper-libidinous, lustrous-haired lovelies never had it so good, and the viewer gets to boggle bountifully at this singularly joyous, often repetitive, hot-panted hippie hootenanny with its hilariously ribald, amusingly earnest narration being a huge part of the film's soft-focused, modestly sleazy, amusingly dated charm.

The film's molten soft and agreeably yielding core is the frequent fleshly congress of priapic photographer Steve, not too subtly intercut with bucolic, beach side sequences of the blissfully buxom Erika and some altogether righteously mellow, pseudo-Donovan sounds as our randy photographer puts his tripod to extracurricular use as his wholly understandable obsession for preternaturally bouncy beauty Erika escalates along with his increased likelihood of contracting something rather nasty from the maniacal frequency of his multitudinous and somewhat casual intimate encounters with his flighty models!

 Any work of cinema can be greatly enhanced by the exquisite sight of the luxuriously lovely, love-giving Erika Gavin happily frolicking in a sun-slathered park, joyfully accompanied by a solitudinous acoustic guitar player. Right on! Gary Graver's unsophisticated nudie-cutie 'Erika's Hot Summer' while quite clearly a museum piece is also a weirdly fascinating affair, with Robert Hirth's delightfully sunny psychedelia proving a welcome tonic, adding an additionally groovy haze to these funky, fleshly happenings!

 

'Steve? I know how I feel, and I think I know how you feel about me, what we do today is important, we'll think about tomorrow when it becomes today!'

Amen, Erika!