Thanks to director Luigi Scattini (Witchcraft ’70), it’s mondo movie time, sex kitten-style, as Jayne Mansfield (The Girl Can’t Help It) shimmies into Italy and serves up a projector’s worth of animal sacrifices and nude natives in her Capri Hilton hotel room. Fresh from conducting a study on man’s base emotion of lust around the world, “Dr. Jayne” has loads of documentary footage she can’t wait to unspool for her anthropology-professor audience of one (Carlo Kechler, The Ghost).
Among the footage captured by Jayne during her travels to the likes of China, Indonesia and the Philippines:
• a pig being slaughtered, screaming included;
• cockfighting roosters, complete with leg knives;
• an African beauty performing a topless hoochie-choochie dance, which “tends to excite the poor drummer, who is obliged to go on pounding his bongos”;
• a cheating wife being pelted with eggs; and
• another woman tested for adultery by a “supernatural python.” No worries, ladies — it only sinks its fangs into the whorish ones.
As Jayne and the professor review the footage, two superhorny bellhops (Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia, the very poor man’s Martin & Lewis) peek through the vent and keyhole and go through their crazy pratfall antics. Because she obliviously encourages it by appearing before them in various states of undress, from a baby-blue bath towel to tight black undies, they fantasize about Jayne as a belly dancer and a Hawaiian hula girl (while one of the guys dons — shudder — a leopard-print Speedo). Back in real life, to prove her point that men are essentially animals, she strips for the guys while the prof secretly watches from the closet. The more annoying of the two hotel ‘hops runs around like a orangutan by the time Ms. Mansfield has unhooked her bra, but like I can really talk. I do, however, claim to be more refined than the professor, since he transforms into a snarling werewolf.
With Primitive Love, the harmless sex comedy finally had merged with the noxious mondo genre. By the time of the picture, Mansfield’s career downshifted into his final, tragic phase, but the girl still looked fabulously hot, cellulite and all. More of the sex bomb would help quicken the pace of this goofy mash-up of a movie, not to mention my heart. One pretty much has to love her in order to even tolerate this. —Rod Lott