Lida MacGillivery (Bo Derek) is a free-spirited girl graduating from a British boarding school. She travels around the world to have adventures with her chauffeur Cotton (George Kennedy) and friend Catalina. She tries to lose her virginity to a young Sheik but he falls asleep. In Spain, she falls for bullfighter Angel despite a jealous gypsy. She befriends Paloma (Olivia d'Abo). Angel is injured by a bull and can't perform sexually.If the goal is to see Bo Derek naked, this achieves that goal. However, almost everything in this is laughable. The story is overwrought stupidity that is only worthy of the worst pulp romance novels. The acting is even worst. Bo Derek is unbelievable as a young virginal girl. This may work as softcore porn but I think John Derek is actually serious.

Nudity and soft-core porn can be a bit of a trial when it comes to a movie like 'Bolero'. One watches a movie like this for the same reason they saw 'Showgirls'. Even Bo Peepers have trouble slogging through this vapid monstrosity in which Bo Derek takes off her clothes and wanders through one lame sex scene after another but the scenes that come in between are like watching grass grow.Bo plays Lida a woman discovering her sexual awakening. Take a look at her does she look like a woman who has yet to discover her sexuality? She runs around the world in search of the perfect lover, which include fumblings with a Spanish Bullfighter and an Arab Shiek. This isn't a movie it's a Playboy Video.Look, you watch a movie like this for the T&A but you can't find anything here that you didn't find in 'Tarzan the Ape Man' which is a movie that is equally as languid but contains just as much skin. 'Ten' at least offered a story. It was a very funny comedy that used Bo to the advantage that the essence of her character didn't require her to do very much. This movie was taylor made for video so you can scan it for the 'good parts'.

The justification for making this movie, I'm convinced, was John Derek's need to show off just how hot the woman he came home to was, while cashing in on her international fame. In today's world, they simply would have put a sex tape on the internet. To be fair, Bo was pretty hot and more interesting on screen than say, Kim Kardashian or Paris Hilton. Nonetheless, this movie fails spectacularly as cinema, but has something of a legacy as having pushed then-acceptable boundaries of celebrity exhibitionism. The initial theatrical release of the picture was held up while the MPAA rating board squabbled with the studio (MGM) over cuts. Eventually it was released in an 'unrated' version which looked pretty racy at the time, although it would be routine now on Cinemax late at night. The set decoration is quite sumptuous in a Playboy pictorial sort of way and that's where the money got spent. The script is an embarrassment, full of throwaway nonsense about 1920's libertinism, as the Valentino-obsessed main character goes looking (very slowly) for first a Sheikh and then a matador to fulfil her romantic needs. That's the whole story and pretty thin it is even for a sex film. Not the worst movie ever, but pretty bad overall and excruciating to sit through unless you're a Bo fan. I was.

One of the dullest things I have ever seen - it has haunted me for years.The story such as it is, has Bo looking for sexual ecstasy with she insists is spelled with an X - at the end of movie as she and the Bolero of the title are making whoopie - the room begins to fill up with steam - and then they are making love on a cloud, where behind them is (I am not making this up) a neon sign spelling out the word ecstasy flashing on and off. I remember thinking as the neon sign flashed "this is it, this is the stupidest thing I have ever seen." To this day none of the other horrible films I have seen have come up to that one transcendent moment of the uber dumb that was that scene.