Macumba sexual

This movie was made about the time Jess Franco dove headfirst into hardcore porn after they legalized it in his native Spain (although he'd certainly been involved in it before in more liberal countries). It would take a bigger masochist than me to watch too many of Franco's hardcore efforts, but I think it's pretty safe to say the ONLY thing they had going for them was his leading actress/wife, Lina Romay. Romay is not only by far the best actress to ever grace a porn movie, but she was also incredibly uninhibited even by hardcore porn standards. (In one movie I saw she uses her tongue to clean up a mess a guy had left on another actress' backside, and then later she performs oral sex on a tied-up guy with a voraciousness somewhere between Linda Lovelace and the shark from "Jaws"--you could tell the actor was both really turned-on and completely terrified).

This movie is not really hardcore porn, nor is it even one of Franco's extremely graphic softcore ficks (which I like to call "Lina Romay and friends go to the gynecologist"). What it actually seems to be is an unsimulated, but non-graphic porno movie--which may strike some as a waste of time, but it certainly is different at least. The cinematography is excellent--it was filmed on Reunion, I think, or one of the Canary Islands. At times Franco seems to be strangely aping fellow Euro-hacks like Jean Rollin (with his shots of crumbling architecture)or Walerian Borozyx (with his lingering close-ups of native fetish objects), but there is nary an out-of-focus zoom shot to be seen. The plot involves a woman (Romay)and her husband who are going to meet a local tribal chieftain, "Princess Obongo" (Ajita Wilson), regarding some kind of real estate deal. The plot quickly becomes inconsequential, however, as the protagonist becomes enmeshed in a series of foreboding, erotic fever dreams about this strange woman that she is unable to awake from. This recurring dream plot is a horrid cliché of course, but whereas other filmmakers only tack it on the end when they have run out of ideas (or want to explain away what has happened earlier, a la a bad TV soap opera), Franco uses it very effectively to transform the whole movie into a genuinely disturbing mixture of dream and reality with characters caught in an erotic, surreal undertow.

Still the whole thing wouldn't work without the compelling presence of Lina Romay. She really carries the whole movie. (I don't want to overstate her performance, but if they gave an award for "best performance by an actress who spends 90 percent of the movie butt-naked and the rest in an ill-fitting bikini or impossibly tight short-shorts". . .) African-American, (alleged)transexual Ajita Wilson may or not add to the eroticism too much depending on your taste, but she is sure is scary, and she stalks around with two very creepy, naked "dog people" she keeps on a leash. This may not be anybody's favorite Franco film, but it certainly is watchable at least, which is much more than can be said of most of his 80's films.

A young couple meets princess Tara on an island (filmed on Gran Canaria) after she previously appeared in their dreams already, accompanied by a bird-like demonic creature. The princess says she ruled in the name of the god Macumba for 300 years already. This is obviously a quasi-remake of "El Signo del Vampiro" where the heiress of Dracula provided a similar personification of obsession beyond death. "Macumba", 11 years later, even goes a step further in stylistic obsession and must be counted among Jess Franco's best movies, even though Ajita Wilson is no match for Soledad Miranda. Franco quotes Kubrick's "The Shining" here when the name of the princess is typed again and again on the machine, and seems to refer to Herzog's "Nosferatu" when the timeless ship sails without wind (and we never see the faces of a crew, either). Besides making an unbelievable lot of movies, Franco certainly watches even more which explains how he can reinvent his own style over the decades, never running out of ideas.

"She is the mirror of evil and of death", the hotel manager says once about the princess, and the word "mirror" is the key here. No matter how normal the young couple appears to be, they have a dark side in them which is mirrored (and set free) by Tara. Tara never enters the city - everyone who want to meet her must travel through the desert on the back of a camel! The voyage is a ritual of cleansing, purifying, though in the opposite sense of purgatory, because it opens the traveler's mind up for evil. Certainly a movie about sin, not virtue.

Jesus Franco's wife and muse Lina Romay plays the wife of Antonio Mayans who is plagued by a series of sado-sexual nightmares about transsexual dominatrix named Princess Obongo.Romay's life becomes more and more sexually depraved.Extremely sleazy and very dreamlike horror movie with tons of graphic nudity and sex.Jesus Franco's cameo as a mentally challenged suitor is particularly memorable.The film was shot on volcanic Gran Canaria.The desert setting is unusually striking and beautiful.I am not a great fan of Jesus Franco's sleazy excess,but "Macumba Sexual" is certainly watchable.If you liked "Vampyros Lesbos" or "Sadomania" you can't go wrong with this stylish piece of utter smut.7 out of 10.

Ajita Wilson is back yet again in yet another Franco-file this time as Princess Obongo, the "Goddess of Unspeakable Lust", to use her dark powers and transgender-re-assigned fake asymmetrical breasts to ensnare a hapless woman, yet another favorite of Franco's; Lina Romay, so that she can imbue them with evil and conquer the world, and do so while being nude.

Thats about as much of the story as I can unearth from this Franco-creepy nugget-O-nonsense.

I'm not sure which version the other reviewers saw, but this one is somewhere between NC-17 and Single-X porn, certainly not R.

Once again we found ourselves in J. Franco's world where there are no other people around and apparently not many clothes either= wall-to-wall full-frontal, lots of sex scenes, many close-ups of genitalia, oral sex, and masturbation. In Franco's world its normal for a woman to be spread-eagle while she causally chatting it up with a strange man, but hey, that's the looniness I have come to expect from him.

Romay is either full frontal, in hot pants that reveals her butt cheeks, or wears a dress that her breasts keep falling out of.

Yet with all of this pointless nudity, for me, the thing that grabbed my attention was the musical underscore and sound design. Most of the music is an analog string machine synthesizer someone had filtered everything below 1Khz, so it sounded like bees buzzing. I guess it's the man who plays Roman's husband, who for some reason has a cave-echo effect on his voice when he's inside or outside on a balcony; I couldn't figure that one out at all.

So if you are into Franco, transexual nudity, and Romay in a terrible blonde wig, then this creep fare is for you.

The Spanish real estate agent Alice Brooks (Candy Coaster, a.k.a. Lina Romay) and her French lover (Robert Foster) that is a writer travel on vacation to the Canary Islands. Alice has erotic and very realistic SM dreams with the mysterious black woman and her two slaves.

Out of the blue, her boss calls her and tells that Princess Obongo (Ajita Wilson) from Gran Canaria wants to buy a real state in Atlantic City and he asks Alice to sell the property. Alice realizes that Princess Obongo is the woman of her dreams and she is seduced by the lustful woman. But she realizes soon that it was actually a dream, and she questions to her lover whether she had had a premonition.

"Macumba Sexual" is another boring exploitation by Jess Franco. The plot is dull, as usual in Franco's films, and the camera exaggerates with the closes of Lina Romay's pubic hair. The transsexual Ajita Wilson performs a weird dominatrix and this movie is only recommended for fans of Jess Franco. My vote is four.

Title (Brazil): "Macumba Sexual"