Seducción gitana

The Digital Playground U.S. DVD I watched has poor credits on screen, but GYPSY SEDUCTION is apparently a collaboration of Luca Damiano and Joe D'Amato, two quite different Italian auteurs, but who have shared certain projects, notably Joe working 2nd unit on Luca's classic X HAMLET.

This one, very poorly (Mickey Mousing) dubbed into English, has a plot line, but strays from it enough to become nonsensical. The struggle for adult filmmakers to heed the audience's bottom-feeding desire for sex, sex and more sex clashes again with the impulse of any artist to tell a story. After this one ended, I had to admit that perhaps no story is better than a botched one, in the sexual genres.

Hakan Serbes (who is missing from the Digital Playground credits as are other key players for no obvious reason, almost as if they left a primary card out by mistake) plays a photographer, introduced shooting a couple of models in lingerie in a locker room setting. They have a threesome.

A more important model shows up in the form of Norwegian bombshell Tanya Hansen (billed as Barbara Summers). She's mistreated by her boorish manager Velasco, overplayed by Roberto Malone in his most Snidely Whiplash mode.

Her disappearance from a hotel, whose desk clerk is played in an extended role by Luca Damiano himself, becomes the central issue in later reels, but it's revealed that she's simply slipped away to be with Bernardo, and they secretly have a wedding in what appear to be the gypsy regalia of the title. The film has nothing to do with gypsies per se, one of its many failings.

Instead we have some poor and amateurish bits of flamenco dancing, about the only nod to the Spanish setting. My favorite scene involves Bernardo at his stable at first beating on a Glenn Close-esque former lover Juanita (see: FATAL ATTRACTION) and then humping her after she gets him hot when ordered to make love to his stable hand Ramon.

This scene leads to Juanita dabbling in (low-budget, with smoke effect) black magic to briefly incapacitate several cast members. I thought this would have something to do with Hansen's sudden disappearance from her hotel room, but like most of GYPSY's plot line it is mere red herring.

Perhaps the dumbest plot twist concerns Olivia Del Rio (also uncredited by Digital Playground) playing (with glasses on to show she's brainy) a civil servant sent to investigate Hansen's disappearance, who at the drop of a hat stops being antagonistic to Malone's character and suddenly has sex with him. In porn, the transitions from starting line to hot & heavy sex between two players are often as abrupt as a Formula 1 race getting underway, but this particular switch was truly terrible.

Digital Playground also released a Damiano film with the same cast, apparently filmed back to back with GYPSY, titled European SCHOOL GIRLS, which I'm hoping to catch soon.