Burl reviews Sexcula! (1974)

Wink wink, nudge nudge, ha ha, say no more, it’s Burl! Yes, I’m here to review a rather daring picture for you today, a motion picture decidedly for adult audiences and not for the tots! Yes, it’s Sexcula, a horror-pornoo picture that was made in Vancouver all the way back in the hairy, scary days of 1974!

Ha ha, do you like grimy, ill-lit shots of hairy, heaving buttocks as they thrust and grind and gyrate in a castle laboratory set? Then Sexcula is the picture for you! The story begins as a young lady and her fullback-sized date journey to a busted-up house she apparently has inherited from an old granny or something! There she discovers granny’s diary, and then the couple repair to a field for a pic-nic lunch and a reading of the diary! Oh, and for reasons of her own, the young lady takes off all her clothes!

The bulk of the picture is diary flashbacks! It seems the granny was named Fellatingstein, and she of course was a Modern Prometheus in the vein of our good friend Udo Kier in Flesh for Frankenstein! Her creation, Frank, is a fey individual who can do anything but the act he was specifically created for! No, he has no interest in sex at all! So Fellatingstein must call in her good friend the Countess Sexcula, recognized across Eastern Europe as an expert in such matters!

Sexcula and Fellatingstein embark on a program of sexual encouragement! This involves fondling; co-ed bathing; a carriage ride with a prostitute wearing a Rose-from-Golden Girls wig; and finally a scientific gambit involving the fluids of love purloined from men engaged in the act! And somehow a wedding officiated by an elderly Mennonite which devolves into what I might call a sort of slumber party – and rest assured, the elderly Mennonite preacher gets involved, and if you have ever wondered what an elderly Mennonite preacher looks like in dishabille, you will find out here – becomes a part of it all!

Ha ha, some of the narrative twists and turns here are a little confusing! Perplexing too is the question of exactly whom this picture is meant to, ha ha, turn on! Maybe nobody, maybe everybody! Maybe it was just meant to be weird, and in that it certainly succeeded! Thankfully ol’ Burl likes his movies weird!

I’m not a great consumer of movies in the pornoographic genre, though I have nothing against them either! Still, based on what I have seen – Pretty Peaches, Little Girls Blue, pictures like that, thanks Dave’s mom! – Sexcula is strangely chaste for a pornoo! Perhaps it’s exactly what you would expect from a pornoo movie made by a bunch of youngsters who’d never done anything of the kind before and couldn’t fully commit themselves! That’s kind of what I like about it - that and the weirdness! I also liked the lab set, and that the fellow playing the gorilla pulled off some very simian moves, nearly worthy of Charles Gemora! Ha ha, it should be mentioned too that there's a hefty, mealy-faced hunchback right out of an Andy Milligan movie, or maybe Cannibal Girls, and at one point I believe the gorilla rapes him! It’s hard to tell for sure - some of the scenes are a little murky!

But there are some nice looking scenes too, and if the men all seem rather, ha ha, inadequate for pornoo stars (could be my limited experience showing here), the ladies are game enough! There are a few funny comedy moments too, though despite its horror trappings, only the hunchback is scary, and then only when he’s naked! I give Sexcula two and a half cases of bumne, and a hefty part of that is for merely existing at all! Ha ha!