I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.
... View MoreIt's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.
... View MoreIt’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.
... View MoreThe movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.
... View MoreThe Spanish real estate agent Alice Brooks (Candy Coaster, a.k.a. Lina Romay) and her French lover (Robert Foster) that is a writer travel on vacation to the Canary Islands. Alice has erotic and very realistic SM dreams with the mysterious black woman and her two slaves.Out of the blue, her boss calls her and tells that Princess Obongo (Ajita Wilson) from Gran Canaria wants to buy a real state in Atlantic City and he asks Alice to sell the property. Alice realizes that Princess Obongo is the woman of her dreams and she is seduced by the lustful woman. But she realizes soon that it was actually a dream, and she questions to her lover whether she had had a premonition. "Macumba Sexual" is another boring exploitation by Jess Franco. The plot is dull, as usual in Franco's films, and the camera exaggerates with the closes of Lina Romay's pubic hair. The transsexual Ajita Wilson performs a weird dominatrix and this movie is only recommended for fans of Jess Franco. My vote is four.Title (Brazil): "Macumba Sexual"
... View MoreJesus Franco's wife and muse Lina Romay plays the wife of Antonio Mayans who is plagued by a series of sado-sexual nightmares about transsexual dominatrix named Princess Obongo.Romay's life becomes more and more sexually depraved.Extremely sleazy and very dreamlike horror movie with tons of graphic nudity and sex.Jesus Franco's cameo as a mentally challenged suitor is particularly memorable.The film was shot on volcanic Gran Canaria.The desert setting is unusually striking and beautiful.I am not a great fan of Jesus Franco's sleazy excess,but "Macumba Sexual" is certainly watchable.If you liked "Vampyros Lesbos" or "Sadomania" you can't go wrong with this stylish piece of utter smut.7 out of 10.
... View MoreThis movie was made about the time Jess Franco dove headfirst into hardcore porn after they legalized it in his native Spain (although he'd certainly been involved in it before in more liberal countries). It would take a bigger masochist than me to watch too many of Franco's hardcore efforts, but I think it's pretty safe to say the ONLY thing they had going for them was his leading actress/wife, Lina Romay. Romay is not only by far the best actress to ever grace a porn movie, but she was also incredibly uninhibited even by hardcore porn standards. (In one movie I saw she uses her tongue to clean up a mess a guy had left on another actress' backside, and then later she performs oral sex on a tied-up guy with a voraciousness somewhere between Linda Lovelace and the shark from "Jaws"--you could tell the actor was both really turned-on and completely terrified).This movie is not really hardcore porn, nor is it even one of Franco's extremely graphic softcore ficks (which I like to call "Lina Romay and friends go to the gynecologist"). What it actually seems to be is an unsimulated, but non-graphic porno movie--which may strike some as a waste of time, but it certainly is different at least. The cinematography is excellent--it was filmed on Reunion, I think, or one of the Canary Islands. At times Franco seems to be strangely aping fellow Euro-hacks like Jean Rollin (with his shots of crumbling architecture)or Walerian Borozyx (with his lingering close-ups of native fetish objects), but there is nary an out-of-focus zoom shot to be seen. The plot involves a woman (Romay)and her husband who are going to meet a local tribal chieftain, "Princess Obongo" (Ajita Wilson), regarding some kind of real estate deal. The plot quickly becomes inconsequential, however, as the protagonist becomes enmeshed in a series of foreboding, erotic fever dreams about this strange woman that she is unable to awake from. This recurring dream plot is a horrid cliché of course, but whereas other filmmakers only tack it on the end when they have run out of ideas (or want to explain away what has happened earlier, a la a bad TV soap opera), Franco uses it very effectively to transform the whole movie into a genuinely disturbing mixture of dream and reality with characters caught in an erotic, surreal undertow.Still the whole thing wouldn't work without the compelling presence of Lina Romay. She really carries the whole movie. (I don't want to overstate her performance, but if they gave an award for "best performance by an actress who spends 90 percent of the movie butt-naked and the rest in an ill-fitting bikini or impossibly tight short-shorts". . .) African-American, (alleged)transexual Ajita Wilson may or not add to the eroticism too much depending on your taste, but she is sure is scary, and she stalks around with two very creepy, naked "dog people" she keeps on a leash. This may not be anybody's favorite Franco film, but it certainly is watchable at least, which is much more than can be said of most of his 80's films.
... View MoreUfff... "Macumba sexual" is the 17th movie of Jess Franco I've seen in a week, and, after all, one of the best. I like his cinema, but I'm not a Franco great fan. I still don't know if he is a genius or only a director who made some good and occasionally very good stuff but also some terrible movies. I only know, and I'm sure of it, that Franco proposes a very personal vision of cinema, almost authorial, bizarre and often very interesting. The best titles of his incredible filmography are probably those shot in the 60s (Miss Muerte, Paroxismus, Necronomicon); more time and more money, I think, and the will of a young director to make himself known. Then the number of movies increases at a dizzy speed; the quality is not always good: a lot of zoom, bad camera movement, bad editing, bad acting; some works are even boring (the worst defect for an exploitation movie). In the 80s Franco makes perhaps his worst work. He return in Spain and he shoots with no budget and with few actors. But, if some titles like "Oasis of the zombies" or "The man hunter" are terrible, there is also something good, as, for example, Macumba sexual. The story is very simple, like and more than other Franco movie. There are some sex scene but this is not really a sexy film. One merit: the atmosphere, made by the beautiful images and by the hypnotic music; directing is OK, almost recherché; the use of the locations is great; and great is Lina Romay too. Well, a very good film, made with taste. Sure a masterpiece for all Franco fan. A good movie for the others.
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