The Jess Franco Marathon, 7 of 8

“Sexy Sisters” **1/2

As much as I might be embarrassed to admit this, I have to say that the lengthy sex and abundant nudity was actually starting to get boring. There is a story in here somewhere, but like Love Camp, Barbed Wire Dolls and Blue Rita, the emphasis is on the explicit sex – only without the kitschy art dec of Blue Rita, the camp of Love Camp, or the charming fallibilities of filmmaking in general from Barbed Wire Dolls, and without Lina Romay. So what’s left for Sexy Sisters? Not much that we haven’t seen before…

That is, however, until Sexy Sisters finds its own groove more than halfway through. That’s when an actual story starts to pop up (pardon the pun – or don’t), and we see a little low-brow double-cross in the works. The story is about three sisters, two of them trying to screw over the third by forcefully twisting her sanity (by turning her into a hallucinating nymphomaniac, of course) and hence making her ineligible to receive a huge inheritance when she turns twenty-one. As her caretaker, the oldest sister would then receive the inheritance, with which she intends to use for herself and her doctor/lover. There are actually a slew of characters involved in this plot, and a few of them have their own double-crosses going on, and it’s at this point in the film where things actually start to get interesting, and Sexy Sisters begins to play out like one of those old sixties drive-in cheapo paranoid thrillers (think William Castle on heavy aphrodisiacs). It takes Franco only twenty minutes to tell the story of this convoluted heist; the rest is left to flesh and sex. Much, much sex. But it’s obvious that the intention of the whole thing is good fun – interesting then, that the back of the DVD keep-case warns us of “shocking scenes of horror”, and if they meant the hilarious scene where a gigolo has a heart attack while fucking the nymphomaniac sister, then there’s not much to brace for. Otherwise, I can (and will) assume that the warning was a misprint, probably copied over from one of the other Anchor Bay DVD covers.

I’ll make a new admission, embarrassingly or not this time (and I suppose that one’s up for speculation), that in the end Sexy Sisters had me charmed.

All puns intended.

-V.