Macumba Sexual
Spain 1981. Director: Jess Franco
Cast: Lina Romay, Robert Foster, Ajita Wilson

Alice Brooks (Lina Romay wearing a blond wig and a few extra kilos since you last saw her) and her boyfriend (regular Robert Foster) arrives to a tropic paradise somewhere, presumably Gran Canaria where it was filmed. There they have the misfortune to catch the attention of Princess Tara Obongo, the Goddess of Lust (Ajita Wilson), who puts Alice under her spell and seduces her in her dreams.

If Jess Franco had made only one film in his career and that film was Macumba Sexual, then I would have to call him a genius. But not so. For every good film he makes a dozen of bad ones. But Macumba Sexual is definitely the work of a truly inspired filmmaker me thinks and the best film I've seen this side of the '60s bearing the Franco name. I mean, he even manages to make gangly transexual Ajita Wilson look hot and that's an impressive achievement, considering the bad prerequisites he had to work with. The scene where she (or he, nobody knows), together with two sex-slaves in a lead, goes out in the desert, digging up a penis-shaped amulet, is something special for sure. And, by the way, Lina Romay (using her pseudonym "Candy Coster") still looks great in a bikini, although she for most of the time forgets to put it on.

The film itself is equally stunning and weird. Greatly accompanied by Pablo Villa's weird music Franco goes for simplicity (but he always does that), filming almost constantly in direct light (or so it feels on the cropped vhs-tape) and with a generous use of extreme close-ups, giving the film a dream-like atmosphere where one is never sure what is a dream or what actually happens. That is often the case with Franco's movies, that one isn't sure what's happening, but in this case it's for the best. Also the seemingly endless desert is given a surreal but beautiful look and somehow Franco manages to tie all these small bits together into a startlingly delirious whole where even his usually irritating zoom work somehow makes perfect sense. Macumba Sexual is hypnotic, sometimes downright spooky and erotic euro-horror at its best and worth purchasing in any version in any language. A personal favorite. I think.

© The Inzomniac's Movie Madness Review.