I liked this as much as young Rutger Hauer enjoyed the sex scene at the beginning. He looked like a mongoloid having an epileptic fit while a pair of big sloppy tits slapped him in the face. Super poorly dubbed, I swear his mouth wasn’t even moving while lines like “did I cum yet” were pouring out of it. Everything was really poorly dubbed.

Rutger plays an all around big piece of shit that everyone deems “too freaky.” He spends his time boozing and doing speed. Robbing prostitutes for both their money and their services and going on rural joyrides in some other dudes car that ultimately leads to a bizarre gunpoint pseudo assault. And so many other weird scenarios.

There’s a scene where a girls voiceover degraded him while close ups of a pinball machine are happening.

The film really is just a montage of young Rutger Hauer running around and doing terrible things to people. He’s really unlikable. It’s kind of hard to follow. Possibly because the dub seems to be loosely based on what’s going on. But it just sort of shuffles around and seems to be more about having Rutger be ridiculous than anything.

Towards the middle it gets kind of heavy and turns into a story about Rutger coming home from being away with the navy(I think) and finding out that his wife is a “junkie whore” who has disappeared. He hunts her down.

It would be a lie to say that the film got “better” at this point. But it gained structure and got a lot more miserable. Rutger’s wife is a fox. Even when she’s shooting dope and watching him get beat up by bikers. Since Rutger spent the first third of the movie being such a dirtbag it’s hard to sympathize for him. But maybe that’s the point. I don’t know.

The movie isn’t very good. But. In its defense it’s really, really sleazy and if you’re looking for something ridiculous and dirty to watch, this is for you. The alternate title is “Hard To Remember” which, this probably will be. To be honest I read a few reviews before I decided to check this out and I’m assuming that in German this might be a lot better. Not trying very hard to find out.

Edit: Didn’t know this was by Mark Of The Devil’s director. Still not impressed.

from https://letterboxd.com/film/dandelions/

For the first hour, this is an intriguing beast. Hauer is a screwed-up ex-sailor, obsessed by a poster of a girl blowing on a dandelion, whom he feels represents the ideal woman. His attitude to the female race has been severely warped, since his wife became a junkie whore while he was away at sea. As a result, he now spends his time being generally unpleasant to any female who crosses his path – and many do, attracted by his handsome looks. He finally gets to meet the model for the poster, after a spurned woman hires her to “teach him a lesson” by spurning him in return, only for the duo really to fall in love.

Which, sadly, is where the film falls apart. This combination of hunk and misogynist is an ideal role for Hauer and he cheerfully gets his teeth into it. It’s easy to see why women fall for him and, after his history is explained, why he’s being so nasty. So when he meets the model, we are all set up for a solid and vicious conclusion. But we don’t get it. The pair’s relationship is portrayed with perfect regard for every 70’s cliche you can imagine – slow-motion, crap music, flared trousers, the works. While perhaps understandable given the date, this doesn’t make it any less naff. And the ending is one of the worst I’ve ever seen: it contrives to tie up the loose ends in perhaps 120 seconds, without managing to be satisfactory in any way. Maybe they ran out of time, energy, money or ideas; the end result is certainly nowhere near as good as it ought to have been, especially after the barn-storming opening.

from https://filmblitz.org/dandelions-1974/