– XXX is Celluloid Dimension’s latest weekly column featuring the hottest and naughtiest side of cinema. –
Directed by Sergio Martino
Written by Piero Regnoli and Sergio Martino
Starring:
- Debora Caprioglio as Marina Valdez
- Steve Bond as Mark Derrick
- Sharon Twomey as Irene
- Leonardo Treviglio as Hank
- Pedro Loeb as Steinberg
Rating: 
Sergio Martino’s fair to middling 90s material churns out Hitchcockian fundamentalism while heavily relying on EuroSleaze tropes. It’s an interplay of classicism and modernism, the kind that has been exploited before with much superior results in other works equally steeped in the voyeuristic inspirations of this sweaty melodrama masquerading as brooding pulp. Nevertheless, Martino smut is still good trashy Martino smut, sensuously directed to hit all the right notes of kinky entertainment.
Steve Bond plays a grief-stricken hitman with a tragic background hired by a drug lord in Buenos Aires, meanwhile he also becomes obsessed with his ravishing neighbor (played by Debora Caprioglio), whom he lusts after every time he catches a glimpse of her in one of her fiery sexy sessions. The inevitable happens, and they both end up stripping off their clothes faster than they can reveal their deepest secrets. These are prosaic characters, but profoundly engaging people, nonetheless. Italo Horror veteran Sergio Martino acknowledges that he’s not operating in the smartest or most productive scenario to err on the side of storytelling innovation, so he sticks to the basics. As long as you focus the camera on the flesh nothing can go wrong; surely that’s the mindset Martino adopted throughout the staging of what are easily the horniest sexual scenes Kinski’s ex-lover has ever had on screen.
Leaving aside Caprioglio’s conniving voluptuousness that hogs the entire fetishistic framework of the plot, what stands out most on the emotional and introspective plane of the characters is how the mood is more elegiac than just straight-up orgasmic bliss. The subtle wit of Martino’s neither good nor mediocre endeavor lies in its use of sleaze as a source of melancholy. It is the wistfulness factor that ultimately leads the facile storyline to serve as a deception device, a seduction gimmick – in the same manner that Caprioglio’s exuberance cajoles his romantic counterpart -, so as to be a grand picture of misleading predictions, and truly a movie of exhilarating twists and turnarounds and devastating shocks. A bit cynical, but I can’t imagine what other attitude Martino could have taken to have employed so much deceptive tactics just to arrive at the most pessimistic of all his cinematic outcomes. If anything, this was definitely something, ominous but something. Plus, the sight of a snake slithering across Caprioglio’s naked body is sheer tantalizing iconography, just as the emotional turmoil of a shirtless Steve Bond downing whiskey all the while seeming to behave like a weak man in the face of sinful temptations. Both are first redeemable and then irredeemable. It’s pretty much like a faux biblical tragedy minus the moral teaching payoff.
