Shining Sex (1977)
** 1/2 (out of 4)
Science-fiction fun from the Spanish director has a stripper (Lina Romay) taken home by two aliens (Evelyne Scott, Monica Swinn) who seduce her and then rub some type of lotion onto her private areas. This lotion turns the stripper into a brain dead slave who can kill anyone she sleeps with once they put their thing into her private areas. This is certainly one of Franco's strangest films but sadly it's doesn't go as wild as the story itself. The film runs 80-minutes and the actually killing doesn't start until the final twenty-minutes, which is a shame because the story could have led to some great fun in that ol' so sleazy Jess Franco way. There's still some great stuff here including a twenty-minute silent segment where Romay gets seduced and turned into the killing machine. The lesbian sex scene here is quite erotic and Franco does a great job with the cinematography, although the zoom function goes a tad bit overboard. Romay is very good in her role and I personally think she never looked better than this period here. She's naked throughout the entire movie so this here is another major plus. I had to watch the film in French without any English subs so I'm not sure what all I missed in the dialogue but the film is very easy to follow without the subs. Franco himself turns in a fun performance as a doctor who knows what the aliens are doing. Franco would remake this in 1986 as Sida, la peste del siglo XX but a copy of this film has never turned up. In the remake, instead of an alien virus causing the deaths it's AIDS that is being spread around to kill. God knows what one should expect from that subject matter considering the type of films Franco was doing around this time but one only hopes it will show up.
