Doris Wishman bought a Greek movie called Fever, cut most of the footage out, added some new scenes, and called it Passion Fever. There’s no passion and no fever to be found anywhere. It’s only fifty-one minutes long. You’ll wish it was shorter.
Yarkos (Panos Kateris) is a young man who is happy to be out of his parents’ house. He spends his free time speeding around Greece and looking for chicks. (“The only thing that makes life worth living is women!”) Predictably, his womanizing ways catch up to him, leading to tragedy.
In typical Doris fashion, the opening titles are arranged over black and white photos from the film. The music that plays over this sequence is a zippy little Greek instrumental. I don’t know if the music was present in the original version, or if Doris hired someone to make it sound Greek. Whatever the case, it’s another fun title sequence.
It goes without saying that it’s going to be poorly dubbed, but the fact that it’s a foreign film probably gave Wishman license to just lean into the shoddy dubbing. We’ve all seen terribly dubbed foreign skin flicks before, right? They don’t try to match the lips, so why should Doris?
And with that, I am quickly running out of nice things to say about Passion Fever. This is a trainwreck in just about every regard. The editing is so jarring it’s enough to give you whiplash. First, Yarkos is at a parade, then he’s on the street getting some gal’s number, then he’s sitting on a park bench talking to a friend… all in the space of like a minute. Stretches like this make you feel like Doris threw the footage in a Veg-O-Matic and whatever got spit out was held together with Elmer’s Glue.
To give Doris the benefit of the doubt, it is possible that some of the snippets that are missing might have been stolen from some greedy projectionist at a seedy grindhouse for his own collection. Even then, that doesn’t excuse the slipshod whirlwind back and forth in some scenes.
The funniest bits are the Wishman-lensed sex inserts. The way she not-so cleverly tries to crop out people’s faces and heads is a riot. What’s worse is that it is painfully apparent that the footage doesn’t match at all. Like, not even close. As in, the guy in the Wishman scenes is wearing glasses and Yarkos clearly is not. Boy, oh boy.
I haven’t seen the original version of Fever, so I can’t say if it’s better than Wishman’s version, but I know it can’t be much worse. The set-up is sound enough. A dude driving around trying to get laid. It’s hard to screw that up. Somehow, Doris managed to do just that.
AKA: Fever.
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