Sex Is Crazy (1981) Directed by Jess Franco
It is exactly at this stage, with Sex is Crazy, that the schlockmeister Jess Franco transitions into a dull, earthy, artless pornographer. Among the many other bizarre entries in Franco’s prolific filmography, this is arguably his most unintelligible endeavor of the bizarre. What for François Truffaut was an intimate love letter to cinema in his La Nuit américaine, for Jess Franco was his Sex is Crazy. An orgasmic celebration of porno mythology in cinema, and a smug, masturbatory meta-reflection of his salacious style. Part polyamorous satire, part sci-fi porn and all-out farcical in its multifaceted views of human sexuality, Jess Franco’s outlandish film is about a movie within a movie involving a film production shooting an absurd chameleonic sex flick, starring horny aliens, cheeky women, philandering men and redundant satanic chanting. It’s an excruciating sexual hallucinogenic mess that doesn’t reach any climax (no pun intended), just grueling orgasms filmed and edited with insulting carelessness.
I really have no idea what the hell Jess Franco is trying to proclaim with this meta conscious product of insipid erotica. Is he being self-critical? Whatever the case, I’m pretty sure that doing it through Lina Romay’s genitalia is not the best strategy or the most ideal venue for seeking enlightened answers. As is customary in Jess Franco’s prurient cinema, Lina Romay’s immodesty – her mischievous smirk, her racy melodramatic vehemence and her scintillating presence – steals the whole orgiastic show, and I don’t mean this ironically or demagogically, I’m convinced that her performance is the only erogenous spot that turns this film into something comical and irreverent in its unfathomable meta-narrative avant-gardism. I’m more than sure that this is the worst I’ve seen of Franco’s exploitation erotica; I’m one of those who prefer more his grotesque, depraved horror porn period than his movies that are just lousy porn, Sex is Crazy is precisely the latter.