HOT SUMMER (PG) Here's a genuine, jaw-dropping curiosity for card-carrying members of the seen-it-all crowd.
Hailing from some previously unimaginable twilight zone where pop culture, political propaganda and bad movies intersect, Hot Summer (Heisser Sommer) is an unintentionally hilarious, anything-but-swingin' socialist musical made in East Germany in 1967. The plot is as inane as any Frankie and Annette beach party bash, but the mindset is a thousand times stranger. Two gangs of bright-eyed, ruddy-cheeked Communist youth — one male, the other female — engage in a friendly competition while hitchhiking their way down to the Balkans for a summer vacation. The boys tease the girls by putting mice in their beds. The girls lecture the boys about their lack of maturity, even though they realize a few of the guys are pretty dreamy. Every so often, everybody gets up and sings a song about how darned hot it is, while engaging in some of the most cheerfully inept dancing you will ever see. The choreography doesn't help.
All of this fluff is framed in the context of a hardcore communist ideology that rigorously promotes order, discipline and the collective good of the proletariat masses at the expense of individuality. The kids in Hot Summer play wacky gags on one another, but no one really breaks any rules; they're all as focused, as personality-less and as bizarrely asexual as a bunch of blonde androids or the alien pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. These kids aren't all right, really, try as they might to demonstrate teen joie de vivre without any of the pesky, lingering aftertaste of capitalist decadence.
Anyone who was lucky enough to catch the 1997 documentary East Side Story has already been tantalized by clips of Hot Summer and other Eastern Block musicals. For all of you who've seen the doc and have been longing to see some of these films in their full uncut glory, the wait is finally over. The rest of you are in for a treat too. First Run Features' excellent new DVD of Hot Summer shows the movie to be an even more surreal experience than anyone could have anticipated, while capturing the film's candy-colored blandness in a crisp, colorful widescreen picture with easy-to-read English subtitles. A nice assortment of extras help flesh out the movie's backstory, the best of which is a featurette on East German cinema that'll have you salivating to get a look at even more of the very strange and wonderful stuff. 
This article appears in Apr 9-15, 2003.