Shining Sex

You wouldn't expect a Jess Franco Eurocine film called 'Shining Sex' to be a chaste affair - you might well feel cheated if it was. Within moments, Lina Romay, who features prominently in every sense of the word, treats a surprisingly well-to-do audience to a sexual striptease, as the camera swoops in in unforgiving close-ups on every mole, every goose bump. She's also a very cheerful prostitute, and her exhibitionism still turned up to 11, goes off with a mysterious couple for a threesome. The throes of anguish/ecstasy that fill the next few scenes begin to get tiresome, when the first tendrils of a storyline begin to reach out; at last things become interesting. The couple, Alpha and Andros (Evelyne Scott and Raymond Hardy) are far more mysterious than they initially seem, and Cynthia's (Romay) writhing takes on a different meaning. It's reassuring to see some familiar faces - the always excellent Monica Swinn as Madame Pécame and Olivier Mathot as Elmos Kallman - although Swinn's character is suitably weird and distant and *far* from reassuring. Franco himself also features as good old Dr. Seward, whose voice is dubbed by someone reaching for his inner Peter Lorre! Romay is consistently wonderful in this. The transformation from her giggly, extroverted *, to seemingly emotionless pawn in the game being played, seems effortless and is highly convincing. Likewise, the shifting from sleazy 70s sex show to something quite different is very powerful - although there is always time for some graphically intimate shots of coupling. It's typically atypical in a Jess Franco film that features gratuitous amounts of female nudity and exploitation, that the female Alpha is fully in charge and Andros is very much her subordinate. An interesting wander into sci-fi territory for Uncle J. My score is 7 out of 10.

Shining Sex (1977) ** 1/2 (out of 4) Science-fiction fun from the Spanish director has a * (Lina Romay) taken home by two aliens (Evelyne Scott, Monica Swinn) who seduce her and then rub some type of lotion onto her private areas. This lotion turns the * into a brain dead slave who can kill anyone she sleeps with once they put their thing into her private areas. This is certainly one of Franco's strangest films but sadly it's doesn't go as wild as the story itself. The film runs 80-minutes and the actually killing doesn't start until the final twenty-minutes, which is a shame because the story could have led to some great fun in that ol' so sleazy Jess Franco way. There's still some great stuff here including a twenty-minute silent segment where Romay gets seduced and turned into the killing machine. The lesbian sex scene here is quite erotic and Franco does a great job with the cinematography, although the zoom function goes a tad bit overboard. Romay is very good in her role and I personally think she never looked better than this period here. She's naked throughout the entire movie so this here is another major plus. I had to watch the film in French without any English subs so I'm not sure what all I missed in the dialogue but the film is very easy to follow without the subs. Franco himself turns in a fun performance as a doctor who knows what the aliens are doing. Franco would remake this in 1986 as Sida, la peste del siglo XX but a copy of this film has never turned up. In the remake, instead of an alien virus causing the deaths it's AIDS that is being spread around to kill. God knows what one should expect from that subject matter considering the type of films Franco was doing around this time but one only hopes it will show up.