Quel gran pezzo della Ubalda tutta nuda e tutta calda

Edwige Fenech is popularly known as the "Queen of Giallo," and watching her in the seven wonderful gialli DVDs available here in the U.S. (well, six really, plus one crime drama--1973's "Secrets of a Call Girl") was the high point of my film viewing in 2006. What a happy day for me, then, when I heard that the fine folks at No Shame had recently released two more Edwige titles. Ms. Fenech is also, astonishingly, the so-called "Queen of Italian Sex Comedies," and "Ubalda, All Naked and Warm" (1972) amply demonstrates why. She is both wickedly funny and (need it even be said?) amazingly beautiful in this film, and turns what is in essence a silly medieval sex farce into something truly special. The story here centers around a doofus knight named Olimpio (picture a melding of Jerry Lewis and Roberto Benigni!) who returns to his village (the aptly named Watch-the-Hole) after six months of war and is reunited with his hotty blonde wife, who's been fooling around despite being "locked" in a chastity belt. Olimpio is soon smitten by the similarly encumbered wife of his enemy, the miller, played by our Edwige. Both men devise all sorts of amusing schemes to get the other's wife out of her "iron panties," and much of the antics that ensue, despite the silliness, are pretty funny. But that Edwige...OMG! Whether running seminaked (and warm) through a sunlit field, stripping for an aged doctor or rolling around with any number of cuckolders, this spectacular Eurobabe does not disappoint. At one point in the film she is referred to as "perfection of perfections," and not too many men, I have a feeling, would care to disagree. The fine-looking DVD that I just watched also features many Edwige extras; I could watch the three-minute one entitled "Edwige's Groovy Sexadelic Reel" every day for the rest of my life. She's just that scrumptious.