Like Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci is most famous as a horror director. But also like Mario Bava (with "Four Times That Night"), Fulci has made here one of the better continental sex comedies I've seen. While most sex comedies contain broad and idiotic humor (think of the American "Porkies" or the long-running British "Benny Hill Show")this film contains well-aimed satire that cleverly skewers corrupt Italian politicians, power-mad clergy, the panting news media, and even the apathetic Italian public that suffers all these fools gladly. And while most sex comedies shy away from anything remotely controversial (as sex and nudity are often controversial enough)this movie courts it by viciously attacking its targets with hilarious but frightening caricatures like Lionel Stander's corrupt and evil archbishop who likes to "canonize" his enemies by murdering them and using their likeness on cheesy plaster saints.
The main story is about, Giovanni Puppi (Gianfranco Buzzanca), a senator and potential presidential candidate who up until the present has been a discreetly-closeted homosexual (and thus a perfect candidate for the Vatican), but suddenly develops an irresistible urge to pinch women's butts. After he is caught on film groping a female dignitary, one of his cronies (a Catholic priest)sends him to a German nunnery/clinic for a cure. Unfortunately, as the monetary is staffed with the likes of Laura Antonelli and Agostina Belli, the "cure" ends up turning him from a repressed heterosexual into, well, a typical philandering Italian politician, much to the chagrin of his Vatican sponsors.
This movie is surprisingly long on plot, if a little short on sex and nudity. Agostina Belli keeps her clothes on for once, and Anita Strindberg (as a diplomat's wife Puppi drags into the bushes at a garden party)is two large coins and some American dollars short of a nude scene. Laura Antonelli doesn't disappoint though as a guilty but lust-crazed nun who demands Puppis whip the sin out of her but only gets more aroused when he does. The best scenes though are several surreal fantasy sequences (similar to those in Fulci's previous film, the giallo "A Lizard in Women's Skin")where Puppi makes his away along a long line of bare-assed nuns or finds himself in a Boschian world where voluptuous women's butts protrude from giant flowers. There is some good comedy too--Giovanni Buzzanca is great, especially when he falls into one of his bottom-pinching spells, and there is a hilarious scene involving a Scotsman in a kilt bent over a broken-down car. This is may be sacrilege, but this movie is probably better than MOST of Fulci's horror films. Highly recommended.
