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Released by: Severin Films
Released on: November 25th, 2022.
Director: Jess Franco
Cast: Lina Romay, Antonio Mayans, Tony Skios
Year: 1981
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Sex Is Crazy – Movie Review:
A decidedly strange film directed by the one and only Jess Franco in 1981, Sex Is Crazy opens with a seriously strange scene where Foncesca (Lina Romay in a bad wig and credited as Candy Coster) is taken aboard a spaceship and impregnated by some silver aliens. She gives birth not in a matter of nine months, but nine seconds. People sporting dollar store Halloween masks watch from the audience. We soon see Franco himself behind a film camera and realize that this isn’t actually ‘real.’
From here, a few odd subplots weave in and out of the movie. Foncesca and her beau, Baxter (Antonio Mayans credited as Robert Foster) are enjoying life on the Spanish coast and having lots of sex. Then there's what seems to be a dream sequence where Foncesca is drugged by a guy named Flanagan (Tony Skios), grabs a pistol and goes all femme fatale for a minute or two, which doesn't really serve the plot at all but which is nice to look at. Lina winds up tied to a chair with some guys poking her nethers with a knife and fork.
They're spotted by a woman (Lynn Endersson) and her man, who just so happens to be Flanagan again, and soon have group sex together. This leads to the four of them all getting married to one another but when the guys bust the girls having a lesbian romp, things start to fall apart. Never mind the fact that the guys have recently been lusting after other women. While all of this is going on, a woman who it 'The Producer's Girlfriend' named Rosalinda (Laara Garcia) is showing off her naked body and mugging for the camera.
Before it's all finishes up, the fourth wall will not so much get broken as demolished and things will come full circle.
At times reminiscent of Bob And Carol And Ted And Alice but with way more sex, nudity and silver painted aliens in it, this is essentially a strange assortment of not really connected vignettes rather than a proper narrative. Sex Is Crazy (El sexo está loco) would seem to be Franco’s attempt at satirizing the type of sex films he was known to himself directed plenty of. There is some effective comedy in the movie, and it’s proof that Lina Romay could handle comedic moments pretty effectively when given the chance, but it’s also just as graphic and loaded with sex and nudity as you’d expect, which makes it a fairly odd satire. A prolonged scene in which Lina, sporting a blue sequined bustier and black stockings, lies in bed drinking water from a bottle only for none of the water to make it into her mouth but instead dribble down her neck onto her breasts and then somehow under her bustier to travel between her legs goes on to long to make sense, but is a visual treat regardless.
Lina’s body is, not surprisingly, the focal point of much of the movie and Franco, as is typical of his work with her, shoots her very effectively. There’s a fair bit of nice scenery here as well, the camera spends some time showing that off, but it’s clearly not as interesting to the director as the vaginal region of his muse. If this is mostly Lina’s show, and it is, the rest of the cast are pretty decent. Mayans, a recurring presence in Franco movies from this period, seems to be in on the joke and having a good time, he and Skios are rather amusing in their scenes together. Lynn Endersson has scary teeth but her enthusiasm for sex would seem to compensate for this well enough, while Laara Garcia, who looks a bit like Hyapatia Lee, does a nice job of rolling around naked for the camera.
Sex Is Crazy – Blu-ray Review:
Severin's AVC encoded 1080p high definition reissue of Sexi s Crazy, which is framed at 1.66.1 widescreen and taken from a brand new 2K scan of the original 35mm negative, is quite nice, taking up 26Gbs of space on the 50GB disc. There’s nice level of detail here and good depth as well. Colors are handled really nicely and the image is very clean, free of all but the tiniest instances of print damage while still retaining some natural film grain. Some minor compression artifacts pop up in a few spots but the image is free of noise reduction and edge enhancement problems.
The 24-bit DTS-HD 2.0 Mono audio, presented in Spanish with optional English subtitles, sounds just fine. Levels are balanced well enough and there isn’t much in the way of hiss or distortion to complain about. The film’s score gets some added depth from the lossless treatment, and clarity is, overall, quite good.
There is a trio of interesting featurettes here, starting with Jess Is Crazy, an interview with Jess Franco expert Dr. Álex Mendíbil. This piece run twenty-two minutes and it talks about the importance of this era to Franco's career, how it was a period of transition for the director as he was moving back to Spain after spending time in other countries and how he was trying to really establish himself in his homeland at this point. Mendíbil then goes on to talk about the loosening of censorship restrictions in Spain at the time, how Franco made either goofy comedies during this period or darker and more pensive pictures. Mendíbil then goes on to talk about the use of humor in Sex Is Crazy, the personal aspects of the film for Franco, how the draft for a film called Labyrinth turned into Sex Is Crazy, thoughts on the characters that populate the movie, thoughts on the cast in the film, how the movie is a veiled criticism of sex films and how the movie looks for ugly elements as it plays out.
Up next is Franco/Godard, an interview with Stephen Thrower, the Author of Flowers Of Perversion: The Delirious Cinema Of Jesús Franco. This lengthy, forty-nine minute piece talks about how after the end of Franco's relationship with Dietrich left him without a producer which led to his working with Golden Films. In between these two arrangements, things were quite piecemeal, and Thrower details the films that were made in this period, including a rejiggered version of Exorcism. As the talk continues, we learn about the details of Sex Is Crazy, including the use of recycled music in the picture, the film's production history and shooting schedule and the mysteries behind that, the experimental nature of the movie, the satirical aspects of the movie, the 'film within a film' aspects of the movie and where the fourth wall is broken within both the movie and the movie being made in the movie! Thrower also goes over the contributions of the different cast and crew members with special attention paid, of course, to Lina Romay, the drastic shifts in tone that occur throughout the movie and quite a bit more. This is an excellent examination of the movie with a lot of valuable insight and food for thought going over not only the history of the movie but its existential elements as well.
Last but not least is In The Land Of Franco Part 7, a twenty-five minute piece that, like the earlier entries in this series, explores the different locations that were used for the making of Downtown, Die Sklavinenen and Doriana Gray and then later Woman Behind Bars. Thrower hosts the featurette and talks about the different movies that were made at each location with Monica Swinn alongside him chiming in, providing some memories about working on the different films Franco shot here and what it was like to work with both Franco and Lina Romay. As the piece plays out, we get a look at how the locations look today compared to how they looked in the different movies. This is interesting in and of itself but getting Swinn's involvement here makes it a really fascinating piece for Franco fans.
Sex Is Crazy - The Final Word:
Sex Is Crazy doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense, but it likely wasn’t supposed to. It’s an amusing film that goes in a whole lot of different directions at the same time, never really realizing any of its many ideas but somehow entertaining us along the way. The big draw here will be a whole lot of naked Lina footage, the movie offers that up in healthy doses. Severin’s Blu-ray editions looks and sounds very nice and the extras are quite interesting, with Thrower’s piece in particular doing a good job of at least trying to make sense out of all of this.
Click on the images below, or right click and open in a new window, for full sized Sex Is Crazy Blu-ray screen caps!
