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.
