Sex Shooter
Shining Sex
Italy/France/Belgium/Switzerland
1976 Directed by Jess Franco
Severin Blu Ray Zone A/B/C
Warning: Kind of spoilers... I guess. It’s basically just sex.
Okay then... this is probably going to end up being a really short review. Shining Sex is a movie by Jess Franco I’d not heard of before. I do like the director a lot but find his films hit and miss... usually they hover between absolute masterpiece classics such as Vampyros Lesbos (reviewed here), She Killed In Ecstacy (reviewed here) and Female Vampire (reviewed here) to... almost unwatchable stuff like Nightmares Come At Night (reviewed here) or his not so great Fu Manchu films (reviewed here and here). Now, the only reason I bought this beautiful Severin restoration of Shining Sex is because there is also a CD in here presenting the first part of a compilation of cuts from Jess Franco soundtracks (many of which I don’t have on other CD compilations) so, yeah, even if I never watched the film it was still a good buy for me.
However, I did watch the movie and... well... it really is just a sex movie to be honest. Nice to look at but it’s almost non-stop sex going between different locations and a surprisingly small amount of dialogue. It looks nice and if you want to see as much of Franco’s girlfriend (later wife) and second muse Lina Romany as it’s possible to capture on a camera which doesn’t actually enter a person’s body, then you’re in the right place. And she is fine in this.
The entire plot, as it is, will reveal everything here. Lina plays Cynthia, who works in a nightclub doing her special (not so special) strip show entitled Shining Sex. A strange couple pick her up after the act and she takes them back to her place to do sexy business. But it’s clear there is something strange up with them. The woman, Alpha (played by Evelyne Scott) is a bit unused to sex and a bit bitey. Her partner Andros (played by Raymond Hardy) doesn’t have much to offer in terms of sparkling conversation either. They sex up Cynthia and rub a special ointment on her which causes her body ecstacy but also turns her, unwittingly, into a killing machine (much like the lips of death kiss in one of Franco’s Fu Manchu movies). Alpha is really a being from another dimension and Andros her brain washed slave (in some readings he’s her robot... although his erect member seems less mechanical to be honest... I haven’t seen the French language edition of the film but it’s possible the term robot is used in the original sense of the word as ‘slave’?). They send Cynthia out, using telepathic control signals, to kill humans who are onto the fact that there are beings from another dimension in our reality... to sex them up and kill them with the poison her body has absorbed.
There’s also a bizarre sub plot with Jess Franco as Dr. Seward (presumably named after the one in Dracula) as he has a psychic connection with Alpha whenever Cynthia does sexing... or something... it’s all a bit loose. We see Cynthia sex a few people to death and then her body succumbs to the ravages of the ointment/virus thingy and she dies herself. The end... nothing more to see here folks.
It looks nice and there are many trade mark Jess Franco zooms if that’s your kind of thing... lots of zooms in and out of Romay’s hairless labia and other such fleshy visions are on offer here. And the decor in some of the interiors is pretty cool and made me think of some of his earlier films. Not too much else to say about this one though, to be honest. The last 20 minute sequence takes place in Africa (or somewhere like it) and it really doesn’t need to. I know Franco shot this with the same cast in the same ten days that he also shot a movie called Midnight Party so, perhaps that movie called for an African sequence (or, as likely, since it’s Franco we’re talking about, perhaps he was also shooting bits for this while he was making a third movie in the same period). It doesn’t add or detract fro the plot, such as it is... just gives us a refreshing change of landscape at some point.
Despite the lovely Lina and various actresses getting naked and frisky for the director, I found this... not a hard watch exactly but I did find myself almost dozing off in a couple of places. It’s more the extras to this wonderful Severin set which are the big draw. The score CD was always going to be the thing for me but there are some nice interviews on the second disc plus, again if this is your thing, almost a quarter of an hour of outtakes which didn’t make it into the movie... comprised totally of close ups of various vaginas as they are being licked or of cocks being similarly stimulated. Maybe this would make a good back drop, projected onto the wall at a party but, yeah, it’s all a bit samey, to be honest.
That being said, it’s not a terrible film from a technical level and I’m genuinely pleased I saw it. I will continue to seek out another Franco here and there (I still have his House Of Lost Women to watch, which I bought for the inclusion of the second volume of the CD soundtrack compilations) but I would say that, unless you are a Franco completest (and that’s probably not a bad thing to be... although challenging because of the amount of movies he made and their current availability) then I would say Shining Sex is probably something you could live without, to be honest.
Saturday, 21 June 2025
Shining Sex
Labels:
Evelyne Scott,
Jess Franco,
Lina Romay,
Raymond Hardy,
sci-fi,
sex,
Shining Sex
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