Ich - Ein Groupie
The Movie:
Directed and produced by Erwin C. Dietrich, 1970’s Ich – Ein Groupie (also known as Higher And Higher) stars the beautiful Ingrid Steeger as a young woman named Vicky who meets a rock musician named Rolf (Rolf Eden) at a gig in London. She falls for him and soon enough, they’re an item… sort of. She and her friend Vivian (Vivian Weiss) wind up following the band to Germany and then to Amsterdam and before you know it, Vicky’s partying it up and living like there’s no tomorrow. Before you know, she’s a woman of the world, indulging in drug parties and plenty of sex but soon things take a turn for the worse. After a run in with a biker gang she winds up getting involved with… Satanists and it all sort of goes downhill for Vicky from there.
This one plays out more or less exactly like you’d expect it to and much of the film is obviously built around showcasing Ingrid Steeger in various states of undress but it’s a pretty entertaining picture that takes a few unexpected turns along the way. The film serves as an interesting time capsule of the hippie/counter culture scene of early seventies Europe so we get some kooky music courtesy of bands like Birth Control and Murphy Blend and we get all manner of rad mod and beatnik style fashions right from the get go.
On top of this, we get an aura of seediness running through much of the movie. The rampant sex you’d expect is here and Steeger’s far from the only attractive Euro-babe to drop her pants from the camera but in addition to that we get some reasonably graphic scenes of drug use (complete with an LSD trip scene). This is furthered by the scenes with the Hell’s Angels which culminates in a motorcycle ride through what looks like live traffic on a real highway with some living, breathing and very naked ladies holding onto those bikers for dear life as they zip on down the road. It’s goofy, and somehow remarkable. The Satanism angle in the latter part of the movie is an unexpected twist and completely out of place but given that society had an infatuation with the occult in the late sixties and early seventies, it is in many ways a product of its time.
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