Macumba Sexual, from 1981, is your standard slice of Euro-arthouse
exploitation, which is to say it’s elliptical, graphic and shocking, in
generally equal parts, but at the same time not nearly as rich in
conversation-sparking subtext as some of its more literate advocates might have
you believe.
stars Lina Romay as Alice Brooks, a young, attractive real estate agent, and
Robert Foster as her writer boyfriend Antonio. While he slaves away on his
novel,
by the same dream, involving a tall African-American woman and two servile
beasts on leashes, which set upon her upon the woman’s orders. Antonio jokingly
advises Alice that this is indication that she’s sexually frustrated, but Alice
gets a jolt when she’s pulled out of her vacation and told to fly to nearby
island to close a deal with the mysterious Princess Obongo (the allegedly
transsexual Ajita Wilson, of Sadomania).
It turns out Princess Obongo is the woman of her dreams, and a dangerous game
of erotic hallucination, submissiveness and power transference ensues.
O’Keefe would be proud), and there’s plenty of directorial affectation (echo
aural touches, too-tight close-ups, sudden push-zooms) to go along with the
lesbian writhing and bisexual orgies, which are captured in actual and graphic,
if not quite pornographic, detail. The film looks
gorgeous (it was shot by Juan Soler), and there’s a bit of wry delight and
ominous menace in Franco’s own cameo as a shadowy hotel proprietor (“I read a
story about someone named
he says. “Is that you?”), but the question remains: does Macumba Sexual really plumb any issues of psychological significance?
When Princess Obongo finally reveals herself as “an unspeakable dream,
everything forbidden and shameful,” it’s likely to produce as many eye rolls as
light bulbs of realization about the nature of animalistic sexuality.
televisions, looks great, and comes with English subtitles, naturally, to
complement the Spanish language Dolby digital 2.0 audio track. There’s also 22
minutes of interviews with Romay and Franco. The latter proves a quite
interesting figure, even in his accented English. He talks about the
Islands
assistant to Luis Garcia Berlanga, and Wilson being “born to make horror
films.” He also gives a lot of insight into his production philosophy, and how
he almost always made pictures back-to-back, employing the same crew and many
of the same cast members, effectively “doubling down” with the invested
production money. C (Movie) B (Disc)