Sexo Louco

A play on words (check-mate, sex-mad, get it?), the title Sessomatto is quite accurate since most of the sketches in the movie are about sex gone berserk. I'm writing this in 2002, some 28 years after seeing the movie, so memory may fail me, but, even though this was supposed to be a vehicle for Giancarlo Giannini, I remember it mostly for the radiant beauty of Laura Antonelli. Some of the sketches definitely had some socially redeeming value and are harbingers of Dino Risi's future masterpieces (Profumo di donna, Primo Amore and, particularly, I Nuovi Mostri).

One of the innumerable portmanteau films produced in Italy since the 1950s; many had been helmed by multiple directors and featured the most popular film stars of the time. Some other examples, however, were made by one director as a vehicle for a particular star's versatility (for instance, Nino Manfredi in Lina Wertmuller's LET'S TALK ABOUT MEN [1965]). This one, in fact, follows the latter trend and featured Giancarlo Giannini and Laura Antonelli in all (but one, in her case) nine segments. However, with the 70s, a lot of vulgarity had seeped into Italian comedy and, with a title like that, the film under review here certainly falls into this category - despite the respectable fare with which both Risi and Giannini were typically associated!

Anyway, quality varies a lot from one episode to the other: perhaps the best were Nos. 2 (concerning an overcrowded poor family, with the stars bursting into spontaneous insults every now and again), 3 (in which Giannini, married to the luscious Antonelli, actually prefers to offer sexual favors to old ladies!), 4 (Giannini is a playboy who's unstoppable in a mobile environment - trains, boats - but actually impotent in bed...so his wife proposes to use the elevator of their hotel, with tragic results!) and 8 (the longest segment and the one in which Antonelli doesn't appear, where a man goes to meet his brother - whom he hasn't seen in years - and falls for a transvestite hooker played by Alberto Lionello, with a surprising denouement). The other episodes aren't too bad, either (one, where Antonelli plays a nun[!], is spoken in gibberish and seems to have been inspired by A CLOCKWORK ORANGE [1971]) - but the repetition and, eventually, the film's considerable length becomes tiresome. Still, Armando Trovajoli's score (including its suggestive title track) is notable.

There are eight episodes in this sex comedy. The episodes are so short that they lack development, meaning, progression and are pretty boring. Although this is a "sex" comedy, and the subject is sex, the movie is practically PG-13. The subjects of the episodes are pretty repellent, with titles like "Sex in Shantytown". The actor Giancarlo Giannini plays each of the lead roles in the episodes, and his performances are really the only reason to watch this film.

Some short episodes unrelated to each other that tell relationships of love and sex with a thousand different facets, sometimes goliardic, sometimes sad.

This movie is probably one of the worst I've ever seen. It is made up of short sketches that turns around sex and some perversion but they were badly executed. In the first place there were three main actors who are the leads of every sketch but I didn't buy their performance even a little bit. Then the audio and image quality was very low, even for a '70s movie. But the worst problem is that this film should be a comedy but I almost never laugh for a joke inside of it because the comedic writing and timing were really bad. Instead I laugh a lot for the ugliness of this film. Once you see this one, it will easily become a legend, something that you'll never forget, a new standard for horrible movies. At least I didn't find the willingness to make a film to take seriously but it isn't also something merely intended to be trash. In conclusion I suggest this movie to everyone who wants to laugh on how not to make movies.