You wouldn't - would you - expect a Jess Franco film called 'Night of Open Sex' to be a chaste affair. Only fifteen minutes in and we've seen a dialogue-free striptease (featuring Lina Romay) and a protracted, graphic sexual torture scene involving hair tongs exposed to female genitalia. Rather than ease the viewer into his perverse world of sex and violence, Franco drops us in at the deep end, his camera's zoom-lens falling over itself to take in all the nakedness on display. In a typically tonal car-crash, Al Crosby (Antonio Mayans/Robert Foster) is a rapist and Moira (Romay) is the perpetrator of the torture, and yet both are the 'heroes' of the story.
Bizarrely, this then goes on to tell a tale full of humour - but luckily (for me, at least - I've never been persuaded by Franco's stabs at frivolity), this is never a comedy. Due to the exuberant dubbing of orgasmic sexual cries and moaning, it might be best to watch this with the sound down.
I am watching Severin Films' beautifully restored and cleaned version of 'Night of Open Sex' and as always, they have done a stunning job with it. That said - and this is probably Franco's artistic choice - the sexually charged scenes have a richness of colour to them, whereas the more sombre and violent moments have almost all colour bled out of them, giving these scenes a washed-out appearance.
The plot? Well, you wouldn't expect coherence or pace, and you'd be right. Beneath the relentless carnality, there is a caper concerning impersonating a spy in order to locate a vast stash of gold. Keeping in mind the intricacies of the thin plot is a thankless job when Crosby and Moira spend most of the time rutting. At least Crosby's character is consistent with his last appearance two years earlier (in 'Pick-Up Girls') as a kind of coarser version of Franco's recurring Al Pereira character (also played by Mayans, most of the time).
With a shooting schedule of about one week and only the bare bones of plot or script, it might be fair to say Franco let his understandable obsession with Lina Romay take over any pretensions of making a comprehensible film. Back then, much of his output was only reckoned to be seen in the shadier cinemas in Spain. The fact that this has been meticulously spruced up for worldwide release on DVD and Blu Ray almost forty years later would bring a huge smile to his face, I am sure. My score is 5 out of 10.
