La visita del vicio

Lorna is a young painter living by herself in the countryside. A couple friend on their way to London leave Triana (a shy black-eyed gypsy girl) with her. Triana has terrible nightmares in which a naked man on a horse pursues her. And these nightmares show to be grounded on reality when the horseman materializes in real life. Triana and Lorna become more and more attached to each other... and the horseman breaks into their lives. Triana feels repulsion for him and Lorna feels curiosity. A fortune teller had told Triana that a horseman would appear in her life and that when she gave in to him, a tragedy would occur. Bizarre love triangle!

The story is stylishly told. Creative cameras show the countryside, the house and the high grasses surrounding it, the dream sequences, the wind moving the clothes on the clothes line, the river, the small animals hopping around, and to crown it all, beautiful erotic scenes. All this is punctuated by a beautiful soundtrack of Spanish guitars.

Classic Spanish pictures of naked women, a flamenco dance that will be a prelude for things to come, a gypsy party.... "La visita del vicio" (The coming of sin), like the countryside and people it portrays, is dreamy, erotic and atmospheric.

Unless you like dreamy softcore erotica and get a kick out of watching naked guys ride bareback on horses, THE COMING OF SIN has very little to recommend it to fans of Euro Horror like myself. I sought this out based on director Jose Ramon Larraz' reputation from other films of his like DEVIATION, THE HOUSE THAT VANISHED, VAMPYRES and the wildly over-rated BLACK CANDLES. I'll even admit to guiltily enjoying some of his later shockers like BITS & PIECES and the teen oriented SAVAGE LUST. While they are an inconsistent lot, the films do have two elements in common, specifically an air of artful creativity and some sort of a payoff.

THE COMING OF SIN is by contrast a long trip for an extremely short day at the beach. A fetching young gypsy girl with a penchant for sleeping in the nude comes to live with a ravishing aristocratic blond painter who very quickly helps her dark guest come to grips with her bisexuality, which is par for the course for these sort of things. Tension is added in the form of Chico, a Duran Duran lookalike who spends the majority of the film riding around completely naked on a horse. Like the girl he is also a gypsy and lives in a hut he made down by the river where he spends his time lying around waiting for women to wander by. Seems like kind of boring living to me but whatever, that's Spain for you.

Chico eventually joins the ladies at the house after some nonsense involving trampled flowers, lost necklaces, breech loading shotguns, 19th century figure painting, and the film's iconic dream image of the gypsy girl crouching inside a life-sized horse model. You sort of have to see it to understand what I mean but the running theme in the film is that none of the sumptuous imagery and erotic tension ever really pays off aside for some softcore fumblings. The movie's alternate English title VIOLATION OF THE BITCH has to do with the scene where Chico proves his love to the lady of the house by apparently buggering her while the family is over for a dinner party. Gee whiz!

All of it leads up to a climax of violence that happens for no particular reason at all, other than perhaps Larraz' wish to try and pull the rug out from underneath the trenchcoaters who would be flocking to the grindhouse to see the movie. The problem is that the movie -- while as sleazy as they come -- isn't really sick or demented enough to warrant some of it's reputation, and reading over some of the other comments here I wonder if perhaps the version I saw on a PAL format DVD may have been missing some scenes.

If anything this is sort of a Euro Sleaze couples movie, chock full of both female and male nudity, all of it very tastefully and artfully photographed. And hence the problem with it on a thematic level for those used to Larraz' more well-known work: It's a bit too tasteful and aside from the bizarre dream sequence involving the horse never really grabs the imagination. Which may have been the point -- to make a watchable little softcore that doesn't really push the envelope too much. The film was made at the end of the Franco era in Spain when overt sexuality was a no-no on the generalissimo's cinema screen and might have simply been an attempt to make a cheap little sex thriller with a cast of about eight people, and on that level it isn't bad.

The bottom line is that if you want to watch Euro Trash softcore without much in the way of plot you should give this one a try, as the film is endowed with the steamy soft focus look of a Penthouse spread. But if you are drawn to Larraz' horror work you'll be scratching your head and watching the runtime clock tick off waiting for something to happen. Unfortunately, not much does.

4/10

Larraz is one of those directors who succeed in making a picture with virtually no money (e.g. Jesus Franco). By using some unorthodox images like a naked man on a horse, and by doing some smart editing, he manages to give this film a creepy feeling that shows you don't need millions to make a decent picture.

This does not mean this is a good movie, although it had some strong scenes, including the infamous horse-with-woman-inside scene, it has a weak ending, a couple of standard middle-of-the-road sexscenes and the acting is (as always in eurotrash cinema) rather amateuristic.

I'd recommend this to anyone who has seen every Franco 70s movie available and wants to see something similar. However, Larraz made a much better picture with Vampyres which stands much higher on my all-time top eurotrash list.

Contrary to popular belief, the world of 70's exploitation and trash cinema can be quite the mysterious and contradictory place. Take this rarely seen and obscure piece of Spanish awkwardness, for example! This movie is weird and confusing even BEFORE you decide to watch it. If you look it up on this marvelous website, you stumble upon the page of a seemingly stylish, artistic and somewhat psychedelic film entitled "The Coming of Sin", which showcases a cover image with a golden and transparent horse standing in a meadow. In case you know yet nothing about the film, you're tempted to think this will be an artsy and tasteful exploitation feature. However, the VHS exemplar that ended up in my dirty little hands is proudly entitled "Violation of the Bitch" with the provocative tagline "She Asked for it …" written in equally giant letters and showing the drawing of a busty woman kneeling down in front of a pair of female legs and begging for her life. Now, what type of film do you expect to see in this case? That's right, pure rancid sleaze and gratuitous violence!

The actual finished product is somewhat of a mixture between wannabe artistic and wannabe shocking. "Violation of the Bitch/The Coming of Sin" is plentiful of nudity (both male and female) but severely lacking a decent storyline and action sequences. A wealthy but lonely and sexually frustrated female takes a shy but voluptuous gypsy girl into her mansion for some company and random lesbian entertainment. The girl suffers from a recurring nightmare about a naked man on a horse stalking her. The dream actually becomes reality when one morning there's a naked horseman at their door. The gypsy girl naturally reacts reluctant, but the insatiable artist is fascinated by the appearance and a bizarrely uncomfortable triangular relationship develops itself. In spite of the reasonably short running time (little under 80 minutes), "Violation of the Bitch" is a tedious film with an unpleasantly large amount of padding footage. All the potentially intriguing plot elements (the gypsy girl's history, the horseman's background…) are ignored in favor of long and meaningless sequences containing two female lead characters staring at each other naked or posing for nude portraits. The climax is totally implausible since it contradicts with everything the script attempted to make us believe earlier on, but hey, at least the VHS cover art wasn't a lie. José Ramón Larraz has always been one of my favorite Euro-exploitation directors (the man was single-handedly responsible for "Vampyres", "Black Candles" and "Symptoms") but this is unquestionably one of his lesser efforts. Unless you're a tolerant and extremely open-minded fan of odd exploitation sleaze, avoid!

I honestly don't know what I've just watched. Recommended for José Ramón Larraz completists only - anyone expecting the slow-burning exploitation/eroticism of his 1974 film 'Vampyres' will doubtless be disappointed with this.

A mildly sexual relationship develops between two young women, Triana and Lorna - and Triana is 'plagued' by dreams of a naked man on horseback. When he appears in actuality ... not a lot happens, all in a washed-out series of images (artistic choice or a sign of its age? Not sure). Shame, because it's an intriguing premise.

Possibly this film is notorious mostly for the image of a naked woman inside a wooden horse, which is being approached by another horse. It's enough to make the eyes water - but not much else remains in the memory. If you're persevering in the hope of a good ending ... I wouldn't bother. My score is 3 out of 10.