Aguanta Etesao

Better known under the bootleg English title KEEP UP THE LUST, E.T., AGUENTA TESAO (QUANTO MAIS SEXO MELHOR) is a truly mind-boggling boca do lixo film from Brazil. After finally being able to track down a copy with subtitles, I can report it's even stranger than I expected.

Recalling cheapjack '60s sexploitation quickies from the US, there's no sync sound, just a narrator relating the non-story of Nice, a young woman who's come on vacation to the beach with her horny friends. Single, unlike the other three women, Nice mostly sits around on her towel rubbing herself in a sexual frenzy while her friends copulate in tents or out in the open. Falling asleep in the sun, Nice dreams that a cheap knockoff of Spielberg's E.T. is watching her from a nearby tree. Wandering off to a waterfall in the forest, she first spies on a couple of copulating horses, then runs into the alien itself, who drives her into a fit of lust and alternately transforms back and forth into a man. Nice eventually brings her girlfriends to meet the alien, leaving their male partners to masturbate to porn videos in one of the tents. After this Nice wakes up, sad to discover it was all a dream... or was it?

Okay, so there's not much plot to speak of. That's par for the course with porn, from America North or South, but AGUENTA TESAO is absolutely frenetic in the way it stirs it in - appropriate enough, I guess, for a title whose parenthetical means "The More Sex the Better." From moment one the film is cross-cutting schizophrenically between the various rutting couples, and it never bothers to slow down or establish much of a rhythm. When Nice sneaks off to her tent to watch some porn on videocassette (in a nice bit of dream logic, it's never made clear what is powering the TV or VCR), the film again arbitrarily cuts through scores upon scores of couples at an orgy, with ejaculations popping in here, there and everywhere. For anyone used to the particular rhythms of scene-based American pornography, it's a jarring transition, and not particularly erotic, as no rhythm is ever able to build. Even when Nice sneaks off with the alien, the creature keeps switching back and forth between extraterrestrial and human form, with each probably a total boner-killer for whatever audience exists for the other.

Yet even that wouldn't be so bad if the film weren't also so remarkably perverse. In addition to the aforementioned horse scene, thrown in completely out of nowhere (perhaps some kind of dream-logic motivation for the alien coitus to follow?), the E.T. sex is absolutely harrowing. Again, someone took the ball and ran way too literally with this idea, as, unlike the *other* famous E.T. porno from a decade later, Germany's THE EXTRATERRESTRIAN, AGUENTA TESAO doesn't just clip a hole in the suit for genital access, but actually goes so far as to design a bizarre (and frighteningly detailed) prosthetic alien penis that seems pretty clearly modeled on that of an actual animal (perhaps the aforementioned horse). Shown only in tight closeup, I don't *think* it's true bestiality footage, but it's surely closer than most viewers will be comfortable with.

Undoubtedly something to throw on only if you wish to shock your friends (or drive them out of the house), AGUENTA TESAO is, like its otherworldly protagonist, truly out of this world. I have no idea why it was made, or for whom, but I love that it exists. For a rip-off, it's truly one-of-a-kind.