Reviews & Ratings for
Macumba sexual More at IMDbPro »

10 out of 11 people found the following review useful:
Lina Romay in her hottest of hot pants, 9 December 2006

Author: christopher-underwood from Greenwich - London

There is some confusion as to the correct title, running time and date of this film. On the DVD Jess himself mentions that the film should be 'Macumba' and yet IMDb has a separate listing for this title. Anyway we have what we have and thankfully it's a goodie. If not quite as delirious as was intended it certainly has a life its own and whilst there is barely any plot or even dialogue it takes us with it, back and forth. The fantastic, open-legged performance from Lina Romay in her hottest of hot pants, helps enormously. So too does the majestic/devilish turn from Ajita Wilson. The Canary Isles settings are wonderful and with the film being so well shot it looks fantastic all the time with some real stand out scenes such as Ajita's appearance on the beach, striding along with what looks like a couple of hounds and turns out to be a couple of naked slaves on leashes! There are a lot of sex scenes but thanks to an obvious chemistry between the two leading ladies these are lively and often most erotic. Jess seems aware here that the same sex set- up again and again for a prolonged period does not equal erotic and he allows himself to play with his zoom lens at some surprising moments. There is one particular bed scene where shafts of sunlight fall across the nakedness and he picks this out momentarily causing the flesh to go out of focus. It is little bits and bobs like this throughout the film that give it if not a surreal quality then certainly a unsettling edge, despite all the sun and sex. Excellent.

8 out of 8 people found the following review useful:
Macumba Sexual, 24 November 2007

Author: Scarecrow-88 from United States

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

The mysterious Princess Obongo(Ajita Wilson)of the Canary Islands, who may or may not be dead, and her erotic(..and perhaps evil)effects on a vacationing couple. Alice(Lina Romay)is a real estate agent and her lover(Antonio Mayans),a writer, are overcome by the passionate dreams featuring Obongo and the film follows their submission to her lustful will. What are Obongo's motives? More importantly, who is she and what does she symbolize/represent? What is her purpose and/or objective for Alice and her lover?

While the film is essentially another VERY stylized and evocative porno, Franco uses imagery of voodoo, African statues & tribal objects, along with the stunning locations of the South of the Canary Islands and dream-like sequences between Obongo(mostly relishing her acts towards her quarry)and her prey, to create an otherworldly experience. I don't think one ever truly feels the film is grounded in reality, and I do feel that's what Franco was going for. The film is really about Franco's love affair with the Canary islands and Romay's naked flesh..the director's camera embraces both. I do think the setting, and voodoo imagery layered within, are crucial for the atmosphere produced in this film. I didn't particularly find any of the characters attractive, so the other strengths worked more for me that the multiple sex sequences. Ajita Wilson is quite a presence on screen, if the others in the film do little to assist her. Romay looks rather ridiculous in that wig, but she is basically in the film to move and twist her naked body in a bed, or being seduced by Wilson and her hideous, dog collared entourage.

9 out of 12 people found the following review useful:
A pretty decent (i.e. watchable) 80's Franco film, 30 January 2008
Author: lazarillo from Denver, Colorado and Santiago, Chile

This movie was made about the time Jess Franco dove headfirst into hardcore porn after they legalized it in his native Spain (although he'd certainly been involved in it before in more liberal countries). It would take a bigger masochist than me to watch too many of Franco's hardcore efforts, but I think it's pretty safe to say the ONLY thing they had going for them was his leading actress/wife, Lina Romay. Romay is not only by far the best actress to ever grace a porn movie, but she was also incredibly uninhibited even by hardcore porn standards. (In one movie I saw she uses her tongue to clean up a mess a guy had left on another actress' backside, and then later she performs oral sex on a tied-up guy with a voraciousness somewhere between Linda Lovelace and the shark from "Jaws"--you could tell the actor was both really turned-on and completely terrified).

This movie is not really hardcore porn, nor is it even one of Franco's extremely graphic softcore ficks (which I like to call "Lina Romay and friends go to the gynecologist"). What it actually seems to be is an unsimulated, but non-graphic porno movie--which may strike some as a waste of time, but it certainly is different at least. The cinematography is excellent--it was filmed on Reunion, I think, or one of the Canary Islands. At times Franco seems to be strangely aping fellow Euro-hacks like Jean Rollin (with his shots of crumbling architecture)or Walerian Borozyx (with his lingering close-ups of native fetish objects), but there is nary an out-of-focus zoom shot to be seen. The plot involves a woman (Romay)and her husband who are going to meet a local tribal chieftain, "Princess Obongo" (Ajita Wilson), regarding some kind of real estate deal. The plot quickly becomes inconsequential, however, as the protagonist becomes enmeshed in a series of foreboding, erotic fever dreams about this strange woman that she is unable to awake from. This recurring dream plot is a horrid cliché of course, but whereas other filmmakers only tack it on the end when they have run out of ideas (or want to explain away what has happened earlier, a la a bad TV soap opera), Franco uses it very effectively to transform the whole movie into a genuinely disturbing mixture of dream and reality with characters caught in an erotic, surreal undertow.

Still the whole thing wouldn't work without the compelling presence of Lina Romay. She really carries the whole movie. (I don't want to overstate her performance, but if they gave an award for "best performance by an actress who spends 90 percent of the movie butt-naked and the rest in an ill-fitting bikini or impossibly tight short-shorts". . .) African-American, (alleged)transexual Ajita Wilson may or not add to the eroticism too much depending on your taste, but she is sure is scary, and she stalks around with two very creepy, naked "dog people" she keeps on a leash. This may not be anybody's favorite Franco film, but it certainly is watchable at least, which is much more than can be said of most of his 80's films.

4 out of 5 people found the following review useful:
Mirror of evil, 2 August 2008
Author: sheenafilm from Hamburg, Germany

A young couple meets princess Tara on an island (filmed on Gran Canaria) after she previously appeared in their dreams already, accompanied by a bird-like demonic creature. The princess says she ruled in the name of the god Macumba for 300 years already. This is obviously a quasi-remake of "El Signo del Vampiro" where the heiress of Dracula provided a similar personification of obsession beyond death. "Macumba", 11 years later, even goes a step further in stylistic obsession and must be counted among Jess Franco's best movies, even though Ajita Wilson is no match for Soledad Miranda. Franco quotes Kubrick's "The Shining" here when the name of the princess is typed again and again on the machine, and seems to refer to Herzog's "Nosferatu" when the timeless ship sails without wind (and we never see the faces of a crew, either). Besides making an unbelievable lot of movies, Franco certainly watches even more which explains how he can reinvent his own style over the decades, never running out of ideas.

"She is the mirror of evil and of death", the hotel manager says once about the princess, and the word "mirror" is the key here. No matter how normal the young couple appears to be, they have a dark side in them which is mirrored (and set free) by Tara. Tara never enters the city - everyone who want to meet her must travel through the desert on the back of a camel! The voyage is a ritual of cleansing, purifying, though in the opposite sense of purgatory, because it opens the traveler's mind up for evil. Certainly a movie about sin, not virtue.

11 out of 19 people found the following review useful:
Very good 80s Franco movie, 15 June 2006

Author: Cetra from Trieste, Italy

Ufff... "Macumba sexual" is the 17th movie of Jess Franco I've seen in a week, and, after all, one of the best. I like his cinema, but I'm not a Franco great fan. I still don't know if he is a genius or only a director who made some good and occasionally very good stuff but also some terrible movies. I only know, and I'm sure of it, that Franco proposes a very personal vision of cinema, almost authorial, bizarre and often very interesting. The best titles of his incredible filmography are probably those shot in the 60s (Miss Muerte, Paroxismus, Necronomicon); more time and more money, I think, and the will of a young director to make himself known. Then the number of movies increases at a dizzy speed; the quality is not always good: a lot of zoom, bad camera movement, bad editing, bad acting; some works are even boring (the worst defect for an exploitation movie). In the 80s Franco makes perhaps his worst work. He return in Spain and he shoots with no budget and with few actors. But, if some titles like "Oasis of the zombies" or "The man hunter" are terrible, there is also something good, as, for example, Macumba sexual. The story is very simple, like and more than other Franco movie. There are some sex scene but this is not really a sexy film. One merit: the atmosphere, made by the beautiful images and by the hypnotic music; directing is OK, almost recherché; the use of the locations is great; and great is Lina Romay too. Well, a very good film, made with taste. Sure a masterpiece for all Franco fan. A good movie for the others.

1 out of 1 people found the following review useful:
Pretty decent dreamlike Franco., 11 January 2011

Author: HumanoidOfFlesh from Chyby, Poland

Jesus Franco's wife and muse Lina Romay plays the wife of Antonio Mayans who is plagued by a series of sado-sexual nightmares about transsexual dominatrix named Princess Obongo.Romay's life becomes more and more sexually depraved.Extremely sleazy and very dreamlike horror movie with tons of graphic nudity and sex.Jesus Franco's cameo as a mentally challenged suitor is particularly memorable.The film was shot on volcanic Gran Canaria.The desert setting is unusually striking and beautiful.I am not a great fan of Jesus Franco's sleazy excess,but "Macumba Sexual" is certainly watchable.If you liked "Vampyros Lesbos" or "Sadomania" you can't go wrong with this stylish piece of utter smut.7 out of 10.

2 out of 4 people found the following review useful:
Decent Franco, 29 February 2008
Author: Michael_Elliott from Louisville, KY

Macumba Sexual (1981)

** (out of 4)

Golden Era flick from Jess Franco about a voodoo princess (Ajita Wilson) who returns from the dead to haunt a woman (Lina Romay) with sexual hallucinations. This is more erotic than horror but it's something we'd only get from Franco. The film starts off well in its dreamlike nature but by the thirty minute mark things get dried up. I'm not much of a fan of Wilson, who also appeared in a couple other Franco films but Romay is up to her usual goods. Franco himself provides a few laughs in his brief cameo. As expected, there's tons of nudity, sex and lesbian scenes but these all come off rather boring. Some beautiful locations and a terrific music score keep this from becoming really bad.

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