Burl reviews Sex With the Stars! (1980)

Bucka-bucka-wow, it’s Burl, here to review a movie all about, you guessed it, sex! That’s right, ha ha, but it’s not a porno flick, not quite! It’s called Sex With the Stars, and it sort of exists in a weird, dingy netherworld between such wink-wink-nudge-nudge British sex comedies as Adventures of a Plumber’s Mate, and the last, dwindling days of shot-on-film hardcore!

What I’m saying is there’s a lot of nudity and simulated sex, and very little plot! It takes place in London, and begins in the offices of a magazine publisher, a brash, coitus-obsessed American named Mr. Terson! Mr. Terson is played by an actor called, ha ha, Thick Wilson! The magazine’s astrology columnist is a meek young milquetoast named Peter Bates, and he’s nervously waiting for an audience with Mr. Terson (played, don’t forget, by Thick Wilson, ha ha!) to see if he’ll still have a job!

Thick Wilson, er, Mr. Terson, advises him that he needs to make the astrology column more sexy, but it turns out that poor bespectacled Peter knows nothing about the act of love! Ha ha, he’s never given it a try! Mr. Terson tells him, well, if you want to keep your job, you’d best make love to ladies of every zodiacal sign so you can provide all the saucy details in your column! And, Mr. Terson continues, you must deliver the results in a fortnight!

Well, the next hour of the movie is the nervous, stammering Peter experiencing a series of highly unlikely assignations, which he falls in to practically by accident! Ha ha, the running gag is how tired the fellow gets, and how overheated Thick Wilson, in the role of Mr. Terson, becomes when he reads Peter’s copy! And the plot complication involves Mr. Terson’s secretary, who was his first conquest, becoming jealous and resentful of his sudden zealousness for sexual congress!

Ha ha, at one point he decides he has become a sex maniac and resolves to drown himself in a lake! But, ha ha, on the way there he saves a young lady who has fallen in the water, and, upon discovering she’s a Pisces, the next thing you know he’s practically raping her as she slowly regains consciousness! Ha ha, what a hilarious sex comedy!

There’s also a part where, apropos of nothing, everyone picks up their bouzoukis and starts dancing the Greek hazatzka! It’s a little like the accordion entr’acte in Holy Motors, ha ha, although not quite as delightful! The perplexing and nonsensical script to this movie was written by none other than frequent Hammer Films scribe Tudor Gates, who wrote the entire Karnstein Trilogy, The Vampire Lovers, Lust For A Vampire and Twins of Evil! He also co-wrote Barbarella and Mario Bava’s fantastic Danger: Diabolik! But, ha ha, there’s less nonsense in all these pictures combined than we find in Sex With the Stars!

The movie features a tremendous number of naked ladies, a lot of bad acting, dishwater cinematography from Peter “Schizo” Jessop, slow-motion sex scenes and a theme song that will melt your brain! Occasionally, as when the characters go disco dancing, the movie recalls that Euro-sex classic Summer Night Fever, but it never succeeds in making you HAPPY in quite the way that picture did! I give Sex With the Stars one and a half dancing Thick Wilsons!