Hanna D The Girl from Vondel Park (1984)

This is a strange movie.  I hadn’t heard of this movie at all when I first got it in the mail from Severin, but from the DVD cover I had assumed it was going to be a sleazy little sexploitation movie.  But I was surprised with what I saw when I finally sat down to watch the movie. 

The movie opens up with a very beautiful girl getting on a train.  Her name is Hanna and right from the start we realize that she is a “working” girl who does her business on the train.  We get some pretty sleazy stuff right off the bat, including seeing Hanna’s “assets” right away.  And really this movie leaves nothing to the imagination.  SO with this start I figured that the rest of the way out would be one extended soft-core scene after another.  Btu the movie surprised me and headed off into Hanna’s screwed up life.  Her mother is an alcoholic, her mom’s boyfriend likes to “visit” Hanna at night (though she does tease him a bit), and everyone that Hanna meets tries to take advantage of her.  Eventually her pimp, who works her relentlessly on the streets, strings her out on Heroin.  It is only when the one nice guy that she has met finally tracks her down that she is saved. 

I’m very torn on this movie.  I had very low expectations for Hanna D because of what I thought it was.  But when it turned into more of a tale about a young girl being taken advantage of and brought much more substance to the story I was pleasantly surprised.  But don’t take that as an indication that I liked the story.  First of all while the material is very gritty and depressing you have gratuitous sex scenes tossed in to titillate the audience.  I’m not talking about the kind of ugly stuff that makes you sympathize with the Hanna character’s plight.  Many of these just feel like excuses to get the lead actress naked.  If this were just a simple sexploitation flick then that would be okay, but again it is trying to be something else.  Or at least at times it seems it wants to be.  I also really wasn’t pleased with the flow of the story.  The editing here is very choppy and the scenes don’t always seem to flow together well.  One glaring example of this is where the pimp and his goons grab Hanna and her would be savior.  You get the idea that he was “taken” care of by the goons because they say so.  But after a long montage of Hanna being whored out he eventually shows back up out of the blue to detox and save her.  Then after doing that he goes after the pimp.  What the hell happened to him and why does he have no fear of the guys who roughed him up? 

See now I know that maybe I’m being too picky.  But Hanna D spends a great deal of it’s runtime trying to show a realistic look at the seedy side of the drug and sex culture.  You get to see just about every way you can shoot up heroin.  Not only that but you see how to smuggle it into jail as well.  With a movie that goes for that kind of realistic and very unpleasant view of these people the random sex romp and terrible editing just aren’t going to fly with me.  By the way did I mention that the editor was (at least according to the credits) Bruno Mattei.  Though to be fair I’ve yet to see any of his filmographies acknowledge it.  So I suppose it could be a different guy.  You never know with those wacky Italians.  Which makes some sense here because the movie is never really sure of what it wants to be.  See how I did that transition, pretty nice eh?  Anyway at times the movie is trying to be very serious, then it takes liberties with the story and jumps around like a movie that is just trying to show some skin.  All in all I found Hanna D to be a confusing mess that had some cool moments, but overstays it’s welcome.  Oh and the ending is just dumb.  I can’t really recommend this one.

1 out of 4

reviewed by John Shatzer

© Copyright 2010 John Shatzer