Sex Is Crazy

Cahiers Du Sex

Sex is crazy
Aka El sexo está loco
Directed by Jess Franco
Spain 1981
Severin Films USA Blu Ray 

So once again I find myself, as many of Severin Films’ target audience might proclaim… ‘in the land of Franco’. Jess Franco, to be a little more precise.

Now as some of my readers may remember, I do find Franco a bit hit and miss. When he’s good, he’s great. When he’s not he’s… churning out something much less than great and, while the latter verdict could be said for this particular movie, Sex Is Crazy, it also lives up to the caveat that, whether a Franco film is good or bad, it’s still always at least interesting… and this is certainly that.

This particular Classificada S film, it has to be said, since it was made in 1981, seems to be a bit of a throwback to earlier days. Just not to the earlier days of this particular director. Perhaps a more polite way of saying this is that it’s perhaps an experimental homage… and more on that a little later down the page.

The film stars Franco’s wife and muse Lina Romay who, like pretty much every other actor and actress in the film, appears in a state of undress for the majority of the running time. We start off with her having been abducted by naked, badly silver grease painted aliens… a bunch of whom (the male ones) subject her to alien impregnation. That is, they put their extra terrestrial penises inside her, within three seconds her stomach pumps up and within nine seconds she’s delivered a new baby. So maybe ten babies in and the whole thing is revealed as an elabourate stage show.

However, we then get into the behind the scenes drama where a conspiratorial plot seems to be about to come to fruition, before that is itself revealed as a movie being made. Which, then, like Russian nesting dolls, is also revealed as a movie being made, possibly and yeah… social norms are broken, such as two men and two women all marrying each other as a foursome, some direct fourth wall breaking and various other metatextual ploys, so to speak.

This makes for some bad simulated sex scenes (although it has to be said Romay herself is quite watchable and seductive in these moments… such as when it’s just her, the camera and her water bottle) and, a lot of it (not all) is fairly dull and pedestrian.

There don’t seem to be any specially built or dressed sets in the film… all internal and external locations but, of course, in the scenes where he’s not getting distracted by his zoom lens, Franco shoots these very well and there are some nice shots of exterior architectural detail captured in his lens.

However, the whole film felt, to me, like an homage to the early films of the French Nouvelle Vague movement… especially those films directed by Godard. A scene where a taxi driver is following a car and a later car scene felt like something you might find in À Bout De Souffle and, in addition, there are a lot of those typical distancing devices set up. I talked about the constant reveal structure earlier but we also have stuff like the narrator shouting out the constant, naked appearances of the producer’s girlfriend and also the use of music, which may stop or start suddenly, or sometimes just change style, within the middle of a scene, deliberately calling attention to itself in yet another attempt to disrupt the viewer from immersion into the film. It’s like the director was watching stuff like Godard’s Le Mépris and began taking notes for later use.

Unfortunately, for 1981, this feels like a very late homage to a style of cinema which had already played out a decade before this one… making it seem like a home movie where the actors… although most of the many male members on show are not actually erect, even in the simulated sex scenes… are having a better time making this stuff than any future audience might have. It reminded me a little, in spirit, of Jim Jarmusch’s movie The Dead Don’t Die (reviewed here), which employed similar tactics and also seemed to be doing this stuff way too late for any of the so called punchlines to fall anything but flat.

And that’s me about done, I think, on Jess Franco’s Sex Is Crazy. Not anywhere up there on my list of favourite Francos but, if you are into stuff like Shining Sex (reviewed here) you might be able to get something out of this one. It’s not a disaster but… yeah, it’s equally not great.