Sex by Advertisement

Sex by Advertisement (1968)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Dr. Joanne Ridgefield (Georgina Spelvin) opens this film up by looking directly into the camera where she is going to educate the viewer on the various perverts that are out there and will to advertise for the type of sexual desires they want. From here we see an assortment of weird people doing weird sexual acts.

SEX BY ADVERTISEMENT is a rather interesting New York sexploitation picture but it's probably best remembered for being the debut of Joel M. Reed who of course would become a cult legend with his notorious BLOODSUCKING FREAKS. While this film here isn't nearly as gory or wild as that one, you can still watch SEX BY ADVERTISEMENT and see certain things that would appear in the later film.

Basically what you've got here is a fake doctor (Spelvin clearly reading from cue cards) talking in a professional manor about the various sexual acts that people enjoy. This includes nude body painting, a need for a "babysitter" and a large portion of the running time is devoted to women who are controled by their men just as if they were dogs.

The film offers up a lot of nudity as you'd expect and what I personally enjoyed the most were all the scenes showing the old New York City. There's a sequence in Central Park that was fun to see but of course the main reason people are going to watch this is for the naughty stuff. What I liked most about the sex footage is that Reed doesn't take it too serious and everything is delivered in a rather tongue-in-cheek way. This adds some entertainment value because some of the scenes are actually funny.

This film has a typical structure of films of this type in the 60s: a doctor lectures us on the abnormal sexual/fetish practices we are about to see to pad out the running time between sex scenes. One of the delights of watching sexploitation from the 60s is the background music. It's usually some jazz, go-go or psychedelic music but the sex scenes in this film play out in dead silence! The only sound in the whole movie are the lectures. I can't imagine this limp example of NYC gutter-trash exciting anybody except die-hard trash fiends.