Macumba Sexual (1983)

Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

The Spanish real estate agent Alice Brooks (Candy Coaster, a.k.a. Lina Romay) and her French lover (Robert Foster) that is a writer travel on vacation to the Canary Islands. Alice has erotic and very realistic SM dreams with the mysterious black woman and her two slaves.Out of the blue, her boss calls her and tells that Princess Obongo (Ajita Wilson) from Gran Canaria wants to buy a real state in Atlantic City and he asks Alice to sell the property. Alice realizes that Princess Obongo is the woman of her dreams and she is seduced by the lustful woman. But she realizes soon that it was actually a dream, and she questions to her lover whether she had had a premonition. "Macumba Sexual" is another boring exploitation by Jess Franco. The plot is dull, as usual in Franco's films, and the camera exaggerates with the closes of Lina Romay's pubic hair. The transsexual Ajita Wilson performs a weird dominatrix and this movie is only recommended for fans of Jess Franco. My vote is four.Title (Brazil): "Macumba Sexual"

Macumba Sexual (1981) ** (out of 4) Golden Era flick from Jess Franco about a voodoo princess (Ajita Wilson) who returns from the dead to haunt a woman (Lina Romay) with sexual hallucinations. This is more erotic than horror but it's something we'd only get from Franco. The film starts off well in its dreamlike nature but by the thirty minute mark things get dried up. I'm not much of a fan of Wilson, who also appeared in a couple other Franco films but Romay is up to her usual goods. Franco himself provides a few laughs in his brief cameo. As expected, there's tons of nudity, sex and lesbian scenes but these all come off rather boring. Some beautiful locations and a terrific music score keep this from becoming really bad.

This movie was made about the time Jess Franco dove headfirst into hardcore porn after they legalized it in his native Spain (although he'd certainly been involved in it before in more liberal countries). It would take a bigger masochist than me to watch too many of Franco's hardcore efforts, but I think it's pretty safe to say the ONLY thing they had going for them was his leading actress/wife, Lina Romay. Romay is not only by far the best actress to ever grace a porn movie, but she was also incredibly uninhibited even by hardcore porn standards. (In one movie I saw she uses her tongue to clean up a mess a guy had left on another actress' backside, and then later she performs oral sex on a tied-up guy with a voraciousness somewhere between Linda Lovelace and the shark from "Jaws"--you could tell the actor was both really turned-on and completely terrified).This movie is not really hardcore porn, nor is it even one of Franco's extremely graphic softcore ficks (which I like to call "Lina Romay and friends go to the gynecologist"). What it actually seems to be is an unsimulated, but non-graphic porno movie--which may strike some as a waste of time, but it certainly is different at least. The cinematography is excellent--it was filmed on Reunion, I think, or one of the Canary Islands. At times Franco seems to be strangely aping fellow Euro-hacks like Jean Rollin (with his shots of crumbling architecture)or Walerian Borozyx (with his lingering close-ups of native fetish objects), but there is nary an out-of-focus zoom shot to be seen. The plot involves a woman (Romay)and her husband who are going to meet a local tribal chieftain, "Princess Obongo" (Ajita Wilson), regarding some kind of real estate deal. The plot quickly becomes inconsequential, however, as the protagonist becomes enmeshed in a series of foreboding, erotic fever dreams about this strange woman that she is unable to awake from. This recurring dream plot is a horrid cliché of course, but whereas other filmmakers only tack it on the end when they have run out of ideas (or want to explain away what has happened earlier, a la a bad TV soap opera), Franco uses it very effectively to transform the whole movie into a genuinely disturbing mixture of dream and reality with characters caught in an erotic, surreal undertow.Still the whole thing wouldn't work without the compelling presence of Lina Romay. She really carries the whole movie. (I don't want to overstate her performance, but if they gave an award for "best performance by an actress who spends 90 percent of the movie butt-naked and the rest in an ill-fitting bikini or impossibly tight short-shorts". . .) African-American, (alleged)transexual Ajita Wilson may or not add to the eroticism too much depending on your taste, but she is sure is scary, and she stalks around with two very creepy, naked "dog people" she keeps on a leash. This may not be anybody's favorite Franco film, but it certainly is watchable at least, which is much more than can be said of most of his 80's films.

The mysterious Princess Obongo(Ajita Wilson)of the Canary Islands, who may or may not be dead, and her erotic(..and perhaps evil)effects on a vacationing couple. Alice(Lina Romay)is a real estate agent and her lover(Antonio Mayans),a writer, are overcome by the passionate dreams featuring Obongo and the film follows their submission to her lustful will. What are Obongo's motives? More importantly, who is she and what does she symbolize/represent? What is her purpose and/or objective for Alice and her lover?While the film is essentially another VERY stylized and evocative porno, Franco uses imagery of voodoo, African statues & tribal objects, along with the stunning locations of the South of the Canary Islands and dream-like sequences between Obongo(mostly relishing her acts towards her quarry)and her prey, to create an otherworldly experience. I don't think one ever truly feels the film is grounded in reality, and I do feel that's what Franco was going for. The film is really about Franco's love affair with the Canary islands and Romay's naked flesh..the director's camera embraces both. I do think the setting, and voodoo imagery layered within, are crucial for the atmosphere produced in this film. I didn't particularly find any of the characters attractive, so the other strengths worked more for me that the multiple sex sequences. Ajita Wilson is quite a presence on screen, if the others in the film do little to assist her. Romay looks rather ridiculous in that wig, but she is basically in the film to move and twist her naked body in a bed, or being seduced by Wilson and her hideous, dog collared entourage.