Beautiful blonde Vicky (Ingrid Steegers) wanders along to the park and is instantly enamoured with a groovy rock band fronted by amusingly effete lead singer Stewart (Stewart West). She and her vivacious friend Vivian (Vivian Weiss) head home with the band for a fun night of sex and drugs, after which Stewart promises he will take Vicky along on tour. But the next morning Stewart disappears along with his band. Hopelessly smitten, Vicky accompanies Vivian on a hedonistic hippie adventure, funding their travels by smuggling drugs across Europe. Along the way they shag a bunch of rock musicians, take a naked camping trip, get abducted by Hell's Angels, encounter a sinister Satanic cult, and dabble in lesbian sex. Gradually, Vicky blossoms from naïve music fan into a sexually confident groupie, but you know there is a moral lying in wait somewhere.
Whilst many young people in the late Sixties were turning on, tuning in and dropping out there were more than a few both young and old for whom the closest thing to sex, drugs and rock and roll were movies like Ich ein Groupie, a Swiss production released overseas as Higher and Higher, a title drawn from the theme song performed by little known rock group Birth Control. Ensconced at their local fleapit the more conservative thrill-seeker could safely tut-tut at the hedonistic antics onscreen whilst inwardly savouring all the naked naughtiness now allotted by the permissive new age. While some exploitation filmmakers, such as Roger Corman, were slightly sympathetic to the counter-cultural cause others like the Swiss born Erwin C. Dietrich pegged the double-standards of their target audience, disdain mixed with envy, and profited enormously. A failed actor turned mega-successful trash movie mogul, Dietrich began production on Ich ein Groupie with Corman on board as co-producer and though the latter pulled out sold the movie in Europe as a Roger Corman film. Which makes this among the few instances where someone exploited Roger Corman rather than the other way around!
Part semi-documentary travelogue, part comedic fantasy with a gory moralistic sting-in-the-tail that sticks out like a sore thumb though nonetheless packs a punch, Dietrich's frivolous freak-out draws motifs from other more substantial counter-cultural epics released around this time. You have the quasi-feminist sexual politics and sex as revolution angle from I Am Curious Yellow (1967) wedded to the semi-verité drug smuggling antics of Barbet Schroeder's altogether more sober More (1970), though the abrupt detours into dippy, often surreal comedy are more reminiscent of the later West German-made Schoolgirl Report movies to which Dietrich contributed a handful of imitators that also starred Ingrid Steegers. It is leisurely and episodic but conjures a vivid sense of time and place. Dietrich was never among the more inspired sexploitation filmmakers but his direction is wittier and more energetic here than usual. Some sources claim American grindhouse legend Jack Hill was hired to shoot additional scenes and supervise post-production, which explains the punchier editing in the sex scenes. The plot is goofy as heck yet undeniably lively while star Ingrid Steegers is a fetching and perky presence, disrobing frequently and, let's be honest, spectacularly. A regular in Seventies Euro-sexploitation, the voluptuous blonde went mainstream in the Eighties and remains active in film and television to this day.
Steegers' winsome heroine has a genuine character arc. Her sexual exploits transform her from naïve romantic to an increasingly confident, assertive and charismatic siren in black leather. She seduces then casually, if non-maliciously, abandons lovers much as Stewart abandoned her. However, Ich ein Groupie stops short of echoing I Am Curious Yellow's assertion that growing more sexually confident makes a woman more assertive in other aspects of life. The trip to Berlin spins the film in a ridiculous direction with the hilarious nonsensical black mass with Vicky tied naked to an altar before a gradual descent into drug-addled misery and madness with an hallucinatory horror film ending. Early on Stewart confesses to Vicky that the lyrics in his songs have no meaning. "Words aren't significant. It is the sound that's important." Taking its thematic cue from that loaded statement, the film cynically implies that all this talk of peace, love and a new social order boils down to an excuse for long haired layabouts to get high and get laid. However, the jaded tone suits the disillusionment of the late Sixties and early Seventies, post-Manson, post-Altamont. The music remains as big a draw as the sex scenes provided you have a taste for obscure Euro rock styled after bands like Traffic and Cream. Such sequences are worth watching for Vivian's frenzied dancing alone and of course the moment at a concert stage where Vicky gets so turned on by the beat she fellates the drummer.
