-XXX is Celluloid Dimension’s naughty new column, exploring the wildest spectacles ever to heat up a screen-
Directed by Jess Franco
Written by Jess Franco
Starring:
- Lina Romay as Foncesca
- Lynn Endersson
- Antonio Mayans as Baxter
- Antonio Rebollo
Release Date: December 31, 1981
Rating: 
With Sex Is Crazy, Jess Franco finally dives headfirst into the mud and comes up a full-fledged, no-frills, artless porn-peddler. And in a career stuffed with freak-show cinema, this might just be his most incomprehensible beast. What Truffaut turned into a heartfelt valentine to moviemaking in La Nuit américaine, Franco mutates into a sweaty, smirking, porno-meta joyride—a celebration of his own dirty mythology on film. It’s part anything-goes orgy satire, part low-rent sci-fi smut, and all ridiculous chaos as we watch a movie crew shoot the most chameleonic sex flick imaginable, featuring horny aliens, saucy ladies, sleazy cheaters, and random satanic chanting thrown in for spice. The whole thing is a head-spinning, sex-soaked hallucination that never builds to a real climax—just wave after wave of groan-worthy orgasms slapped together with insulting recklessness.
I truly have no sense of what Jess Franco seeks to reveal with this meta-conscious tangle of pallid erotica. If it’s meant as self-critique, channeling it through Lina Romay’s genitalia seems an especially misguided path toward illumination. Yet, as ever in Franco’s lust-driven cinema, Romay’s unabashed presence—her sly, serpentine smirk, her feverish melodramatic bite, her incandescent corporeality—claims the entire orgiastic panorama. And this is neither ironic nor hyperbolic: her performance is the lone erogenous pulse that renders the film perversely amusing and irreverent within its murky labyrinth of meta-narrative avant-gardism. I’m quite certain this stands as the weakest of Franco’s erotic exploitation endeavors; I’ve always preferred his grotesque, depraved horror-porn excursions to the films where he abandons delirium for mere pornography, and Sex Is Crazy undeniably belongs to that barren camp.
