Argentina hottie Isabel Sarli fires up Fuego as Laura, a bored, well-to-do horndog with lotsa eye shadow and enormous breasts. All she likes to do is get it on, with pretty much anyone who’s breathing and within reach. For some reason, this prompts feeling of undying love in Carlos (writer/director/producer Armando Bo, who also romanced Sarli in real life). Soon after meeting her, he proposes marriage; she responds by rubbing snow all over her chest. Cute, but is that a yes or a no?

At first, Carlos is pretty quick to forgive Laura of her indiscretions, like when he trots around town in a fur coat and go-go boots, pulling her breasts out of her bra to show random men on the street, eventually coercing a greasy stranger to do her in the woods. What bothers Carlos most is that she also lets their ugly lesbian housekeeper have a go, kissing Laura’s naked body after a swim, toweling her off following a shower and ticking her employer’s reclining bosom with a feather.

Laura can’t explain it, other than crying, “I’m being consumed by the sexual fire inside! I need men! I need men!” The doctor, however, says her unquenchable thirst for lovin’ is a pathological condition. And as he gives her a gynecological exam, she writhes, moans and begs, “Don’t stop now!”

As if you need to be told by now, Fuego is a hoot, made all the more hollerable by its catchy Latin theme song, which blares every time Laura gets her groove on, which is at least a dozen. Although clearly past her prime, Sarli is hot in that voluptuous but odd, racked-up-the-mileage sorta way. She also plays with her boobs more than a teenage boy who magically woke up one morning with a pair.

The tragic and paranormal ending is pretty ludicrous, more at home in a Spanish soap opera than a lurid number like this. And yet, it’s all so Sarlicious, I can’t complain. —Rod Lott

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From 1971 to 1988, the Japanese studio Nikkatsu famously cranked out more than a thousand sexploitation films so a horny populace could, y’know, crank ’em out. The riotous Nikkatsu Roman Porno Trailer Collection offers the “coming” attractions for 38 of them, giving you a taste of not only an hour’s worth of Nikkatsu’s arty, yet over-the-top output, but of how insanely fucked-up the country’s culture can be. How else to explain such ludicrously lurid titles as I Love It From Behind!, Painful Bliss! A Surprise Twist, Nurse Diary: Mischievous Fingers and Nympho Diver: G-String Festival?

Most of the trailers look similar to the others, with men violating women in acts of (I assume) simulated sex, but under the Japanese censors’ fairly stringent rules of verboten visuals, i.e. genitals and penetration. Therefore, everything else is amped up to fill the gap, so to speak, from dialogue (“How do you rape? Try it on me? Let’s see you try! Fill me with your pistil!” per Female Teacher Hunting) and scenarios (orgasmic Olympic hopefuls of Female Gymnastics Instructor: Jump and Straddle) to those say-it-all/do-it-all titles (Nurses’ Dormitory: Assy Fingers, anyone?) and their taglines to match.

Ah, yes, the taglines. Consider:
• “A house of pleasure wreathed in the fragrance of semen.” (Sex Hunter)
• “The woman’s flame awaits the man’s sap with her moistened lips trembling.” (Zoom Up: Beaver Book Girl)
• “Sexy women should make love while they’re still hot!” (She Cat)
• “Tear it apart! Punch them hard!” (Sex Hunter: Wet Target)
• “Give it all to fuck ‘n’ roll!” (Oh! Women: Dirty Songs)
• “Between the legs of island girls can be found awabi clams, akagai clams, sea urchins, and sea slugs … even the first catch of the season goes into that moist place.” (Pearl Divers: Tight Shellfish)

If I already didn’t eat seafood, that last one would do it.

The so-called “romantic pornography” of “Roman Pornos” run the genre gamut, offering serious melodrama (Affair in the Early Afternoon: Kyoto Tapestry), horror (Zoom In: Rape Apartments), superhero comedy (Sex Fiend), historical costume pageantry (Confidential Report: Prostitute Torture Hell), crime thrillers (Race Across the Drenched Wasteland), movie spoofs (New Company Girls: 9 to 5) and the how-to instructional (Rape Me! Sexual Assault in a Hotel Room) … well, instructional if you need to know how to make an impromptu beer-bottle douche. Soccer moms, before you get all holier than thou, be sure to stick a bookmark in your copy of Fifty Shades of Grey first, please. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Synapse Films.

Stay as a guest at the luxurious, sprawling, Spanish island home of Count and Countess Zaroff (Perverse must be a nickname) and you’ll be afforded the finest, most generous cuts of meat for dinner. The Countess (Alice Arno, Justine de Sade) hunts it; the Count (Howard Vernon, The Awful Dr. Orlof) cooks it. Never mind that this “wild game” is human — just enjoy the protein intake and the circle of life in action.

See, in Jess Franco’s Countess Perverse, the couple lure nubile young things to their private isle for dining, wining and wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am-ing. But at dawn, the guest du jour becomes the hunted. She’s let loose at dawn with a 10-minute head start; if she can survive ’til 9 p.m. without being pierced by the Countess’ arrows, she’s set free.

And if not, “you become a tender and succulent roast for our table.” Trouble is, this Most Dangerous Game update occupies only the last 25 minutes of the plodding picture; what lies before is explicit sex — the really boring kind. I lost count of how many couplings and threesomes took place, but many are girl-on-girl, which makes it laughable that one of the film’s alternate theatrical titles was The Munchers.

Speaking of, Franco muse Lina Romay displays a thatch large enough to double as a throw rug. As Silvia, she’s the latest prey to the predator Countess, and both participate in this sport full-frontal. At least the seaside scenery is gorgeous — and this time, I’m really not referring to the ladies. —Rod Lott

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What happens when you mix escapees from the State Asylum for the Criminally Insane
with the worst-behaving students at the Oxford Corrective Institute for Young Women? The super-sleazy Delinquent Schoolgirls, in which they show up their “chauvinist pig” principal by not wearing their bras to exercise class; in which one fears having her vagina torn apart by a large partner; and in which an elderly herpetology professor (Ralph Campbell, Superchick) hypnotizes a student (Jane Steele) to have his way with her — watch out for snakes, dear!

Acting not entirely unlike The Three Stooges, the crazies — leader Clooney (Michael Pataki, Easy Rider), African-American Big Dick (Bob Minor, Escape from New York) and flaming homosexual Bruce (Stephen Stucker, Airplane!) — first invade the home of nympho housewife Ellie (Julie Gant), whose husband (George “Buck” Flower, They Live) can’t satisfy her needs: “Sex, sex, sex, that’s all you ever talk about: sex,” he says, telling her to stop watching her her “soap oprys.” Big Dick shows her what she’s been missing as Bruce plays the piano and Bruce does a Daffy Duck impression. Screams Ellie mid-rape, “This is positively indecent!”

You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. The guys then infiltrate the school during a holiday, where the bad girls have not been allowed to go home. Wacky music plays as the comically large-breasted ladies are molested against their will in the kitchen. Big Dick does so much squeezing, I wonder if Minor contracted carpal tunnel. The next scene, the rapists and their victims are all enjoying a meal together. Later, there’s a slap fight at gunpoint. Good times.

It took three men to write something as misogynist as this, giving Big Dick a refractory period that must hover around two minutes. His appetite for laying pipe inspires most of his dialogue:
• “Hey you guys know somethin’? Well, I’m gonna tell you anyway: I want some pussy!”
• “I never made it with a chick in a trance before.”
• “Aw, man, I don’t want wheels — I want some nookie!”
• “Fantastic! Grapefruit city!”
• “Look at all that young, tender, gorgeous snatch!”

Admittedly, Delinquent Schoolgirls — aka Carnal Madness — is bursting at the seams with beautiful, buoyant babes, including pin-up legend Roberta Pedon, Sharon Kelly (Russ Meyer’s Supervixens) and Brenda Miller, so it’s tough not to appreciate it on an eye-candy level. Just note that doing so may make you feel like, to quote Bruce, a “demented crouton!” —Rod Lott

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As far as I know, Secrets of Sex is the only film I know of — softcore or otherwise — to open with a quote from John Milton and be narrated by a mummy. (No wonder it’s alternately known as Bizarre.) Living 1,000 years wrapped in gauze is certain to give one quite the case of blue balls, so said mummy leads the viewer through several near-non-sequitur stories involving the ol’ slap-and-tickle.

An early sequence depicts the film’s female starlets in their underwear, being pelted with tomatoes, leading into the first tale, in which a woman photographs men in poses of medieval torture. Cutting into her lunch of steak has a voodoo-esque effect on the model she left strung up. Later, a man catches a comely cat burglar (Cathy Howard, School for Sex) pilfering his home, so naturally, he ends up rubbing lemon-cucumber soap all over her naked body in the shower. Moving to the bed, he stuffs a phone receiver down back of her panties so the other line can hear whatever it is one would hear from such awkward placement.

Perhaps the most amusing vignette is a spy spoof, in which one Col. X briefs his curvy Agent 28 (Maria Frost, School for Sex) to infiltrate a foreign embassy; seduction becomes a required part of the mission. Sandwiched within the segment is a spot-on parody of a silent comedy, a bedroom farce circa 1929. Elsewhere in Secrets, a man (Elliott Stein, one of the screenwriters) orders a hooker (Benny Hill girl Sue Bond) for some lizard-loving, and an elderly woman puts her past lovers’ souls — all 17 of them — into garden flowers.

The film ends with fireworks that score an orgy ever after. As if you couldn’t tell, Secrets of Sex is nonsensical, but nudity trumps lucidity in such a project, and this UK one actually possesses as much brains as beauty. The women are gorgeous and natural, and the proceedings told with so much humor that it reeks of being good-natured. Director Antony Balch (Horror Hospital) bathes it in such vibrant colors, it’s a practically a piece of Pop Art — with just as little meaning, but none of the pretension. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.