Secrets of Sex

This DVD is worth having for the two short films included on it that director Anthony Balch did with William Burroughs. As for the feature, well. . ."Bizarre" is yet another British anthology, but definitely one of the strangest ones you're ever likely to see. It's narrated by a mummy (the Egyptian kind, not the English). The common theme in vignettes the mummy introduces is supposedly the battle between the sexes. (Why the mummy is supposed to be an authority on this subject frankly eluded me). The vignettes do manage to combine horror, sex, and comedy pretty well. The first two include some straight-on female-on-male sexual cruelty and some female-on-male medical/science fiction-related cruelty. Despite a healthy dose of black humor, they are both pretty disturbing. Then there is strange, very British skit (set during the WWII air raids for some reason) where a man catches a sexy female burglar in his house, so he showers with her, rolls around on his bed with her while shoving the phone down the back of her panties(kind of anticipating the strange fetishes of Jesus Franco films), before finally doing to her what any red-blooded Englishman would do to a sexy female burglar in a silly British sex comedy. Of course, she eventually gets the upper hand.

In the last two vignettes it is the males who prevail. One of them called "Lindy Leigh" is a comical spy parody apparently based on a comic strip in Mayfair magazine (the British version of Playboy). The title character, Lindy Leigh, is a female spy who is so stupid that she makes Playboy's "Little Annie Fannie" look like James Bond. She crawls around in her panties a lot and ends up locked in a safe with a bunch of other topless bimbos. The last vignette completely beggars description, so I'm not even going to try. Then the movie ends back where it started with dancing, some tame sexual groping, and a lot of naked people handling automatic weapons and, very literally, rolling around in the hay (by the way, I don't know Balch's personal sexual orientation, but I think this movie would probably appeal to bisexuals a lot as the men are just as naked and often almost as attractive as the women). During the scant running time of this movie I was occasionally aroused, even more occasionally amused, pretty frequently horrified, but mostly just perplexed. Really though this thing has to be experienced first-hand to be believed.

A strange little film that's a bit like a softcore sex version of "The Twilight Zone". A mummy hosts a series of odd horrorish stories involving sex ... a woman photographing a series of pictures of medieval torture devices really tortures her male model; a female burglar has sex with the man of the house and robs him anyway; and so on. It's somewhere between a brainy sex film and a fairly lame horror anthology. Director Anthony Balch had previously worked with William S. Burroughs, which isn't all that far off from the tone of this one.

Since I'm on a roll with the anthology movies right now, i'm going to post about what is probably the weirdest British anthology film out there and definitely one of the oddest things I have ever seen in my life.

This movie has a lurid title that you might feel slightly embarrassed about renting from the video store (or maybe not eh?). It's called Secrets of Sex, but it also goes under the less provocative and more mysterious title "Bizarre", which describes the movie's style and character really well without saying a thing about it.

So, this is basically an anthology depicting stories revolving around the theme of "The battle of the Sexes". This was a really popular theme in the 60s and 70s, given that feminism was on the rise and a lot of men especially were left scratching their heads and wondering what the hell was going on. The results were a lot of movies and TV shows and books based on this concept, most of which seem pretty outdated today. But I can say without a shadow of the doubt that I've never seen anything quite like this. Nothing I can really say is going to prepare you for it and I'm not going to sit here trying to describe the stories, because jeez...

Essentially, Valentine Dyall (The haunted, City of the Dead, the famous Man in Black on radio, and the Black Guardian in Doctor Who!) plays an ancient mummy, an egyptian king who once trapped his lady and her lover and sent them to the bottom of the ocean, or something. He has been resurrected because he has spent thousands of years observing the interaction of human beings, and is delighted to find that in all this time, not much has really changed. Lovers are still trapping each other in all the devious and twisted ways that they can. So, this is the framing device. Before the stories begin there are parades of all kinds of weird stuff of the type you might see in an italian mondo movie, but a lot funnier. There is some repetitive stuff in here but it's not bad and actually lulls you into a nice little trance. I should say that taking drugs with this movie is almost mandatory.

once the stories proper begin, we are treated to a crazy, unbelievable mix of horror and comedy vignettes. There's everything here from body horror to spy spoof to unbelievable fake rubber dinosaurs. it's both arty and trashy at the same time, and yes, I can probably say without my usual hesitation that this is, in some respects, a really bad movie, but it's also incredibly entertaining on almost every level. My jaw was on the floor almost throughout and I could not stop laughing. I feel, too, that most of the laughs are absolutely intentional. Rather surprisingly, some of this comes out seeming a lot cleverer than you might think at first glance. it's also even-handed, with some of the stories featuring the women coming out "on top", while others depict a solid victory for the men-folk. I thought the last story showed the film running out of steam a bit as it ends pretty abruptly, almost like the film crew were on the clock. I don't recognise any of these performers other than valentine Dyall, by the way, and I don't think any of the cast really stand out. Some of the stories do, however. The horror tale about a woman giving birth to a genetically stunted son just to get revenge on the husband she hates is genuinely disconcerting.

This is something for the real freaks, for people who revel in the tasteless and have a weird love of things they can't quite explain. It's simultaneously uproariously funny and awkward as hell and I think the guy who created it was actually really smart to do it in this way. Watch late at night, preferrably with some amenable company and the addition of your psychotropic substances of choice.

A mummy narrates vignettes about men, women, and the sex between them. Huh? At the beginning, the mummy randomly asks the viewer, "Imagine having sex with this girl. Imagine having sex with this boy" about 37 times, while flashing pictures of half naked mod youths. Later, said mods boys pelt mod girls with...vegetables? If you ignore (or fast forward) through the mummy's rambling, the shorts aren't bad in their own right. I found a few of them rather funny. My personal favorite is one where the sexually-confused man tries to convince a girl to have sex with him while his pet lizard sits on the bed. This is one, well, bizarre movie.

The eternal sexual struggle of men and women told in several vignettes, anthology style. That doesn't sound too "Bizarre" as the name suggests but keep in mind it's narrated by a mummy. The mummy helps tell the oldest tale of the sex struggle through the ages and spins tales with interesting twists and angles. Tres Bizarre, no? This anthology is a bit light on horror but the film is still quite interesting. The film is a lot smarter than one would think at first glance possibly due to a smartly written or acting that is actually well above average. "Bizarre" will titillate and tickle your funny bone and maybe even make you think a bit too.