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The Eroticist
[Severin]
1972; color
Directed by Lucio Fulci
Starring: Lando Buzzanca, Laura Antonelli, Lionel Stander & Renzo Palmer
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When you think of Lucio Fulci, "sex comedy" is not usually the first thing that comes to mind. Nonetheless that's pretty much exactly what we have here - an uneven, wry, occasionally dark, occasionally slapstick, sex comedy with overtones about the Catholic Church controlling Italian politics and even the mob. Fulci made The Eroticist in 1972, just before filming what would become (to audiences in his home country) his most controversial film, Don't Torture The Duckling. (Whose release resulted in a two-year blacklisting which, in turn, held up the release of The Eroticist until 1975.) Anyway… on with the show… What starts off as an unintentionally caught-on-tape ass grabbing of a female foreign diplomat by a candidate for the Italian presidency almost turns into a national scandal and results in more than a couple deaths; all in a humorous way of course. After a priest friend of the ass-grabbing candidate finds out about the video he confronts the candidate who, apparently, has some sort of subconscious ass-groping problem and had no idea he was doing it. In fact, at first he denies he has a problem but, after a hilarious elevator scene (set up and shot like a typical Italian horror / murder sequence only with ass grabbing instead of death as the result) he, on the advice of the priest, goes on a "spiritual retreat" to a monastery / convent. Unfortunately, the cure he's given through the overseeing monk's psychoanalysis works a bit too well. When he tells the monk he feels cured after having a dream where he groped all 21 nuns at the convent, the monk (who is mildly shocked and aroused by the dream) agrees and sends him on his way. Soon enough, all of the nuns begin to confess they each had sex with the candidate while he was sleepwalking. No, they didn't resist or try to wake him because they'd previously been told by the monk that waking him might shock him too much. (There's lots of other stuff in the film about priests wanting to have sex, and every member of the clergy in the film also happens to curse like a sailor.) After a series of improbable, yet frequently amusing incidents, most of which result if the Mafia's "canonizing" of various new saints under the direction of the church (i.e., getting rid of anyone who might get in the way of their plans by killing them, coating them in wax, dressing them up like a religious figure, painting over their eyes and shipping the human statue to a church in a remote province), the candidate wins the presidency. But, is he cured? We'll never know, as this was the last film of it's type Fulci did. Not his best but certainly not his worst, The Eroticist is probably best left for completists only.
—the Kommandant
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