Macumba Sexual (Jess Franco, 1983)

Now Jess Franco was capable of making the greatest exploitation B movie of the world and also the worst. His films vary from masterpieces to plain shit that stay completely unwatchable. Macumba Sexual without being one of his worst movies is still a very boring and tediously made movie. Although there is that erotic feeling, that sense that we find in almost every Jess Franco movie and which is one of his biggest charms, Macumba Sexual doesn't seem to get anywhere, staying in images of eroticism that seem to be fading away as the film is so completely empty. A story that would somehow levitate the movie from complete boredom was needed. But Jess Franco preferred to shoot the movie without certain and specific plot an element that transforms the film to a labyrinth of nudity that simply ends nowhere. There are many moments in the film that you really wonder why does he show us that frame and what is the fucking meaning of all this and there is more than one occasion where the movie simply falls to its knees. Jess Franco knew that his biggest attribute, the thing that makes him the greatest B movie director in the world is his eroticism, but here he seems to be using that eroticism without a clear objective. Nudity for the sake of nudity transforms the movie to a stupid and completely pointless softcore crap that you are tired of watching from the fist ten minutes. But Jess Franco in his bad movies was suffering from that. From showing nude images that don't seem to lead the film nowhere. We all know that he is the greatest voyeur that cinema has ever seen, but sometimes he totally forgot that he was making a movie and not a Playboy collection of nude girls.

Macumba Sexual is one his movies that you forget quite easily. It's one of his films that have absolutely nothing to hold you. It is like an empty bucket left in a summer's day out in the sun to suffocate. For someone who hasn't seen any Jess Franco movies he might find it interesting. But for someone who has seen films like Female Vampire and Doriana Gray he clearly understands that this filmmaker is capable of doing real miracles with eroticism and not some tedious and totally stupid softcore movie. Macumba Sexual is one of Jess Franco's films where you can see the dead end of the filmmaker, you can see how he trapped himself inside a cocoon and was unable to move and to create something that would really touch the audience. For all that is worth Macumba Sexual might be a bad movie, but it is still a Jess Franco film meaning that you always find something interesting in his movies even if they are bad. And as Wong Kar-Wai said, you must watch many movies. Good and bad.