Le déclic

The name Alain Siritzsky should be familiar to many people. This is the producer who took the very European and somewhat classy (or at least, pseudo-classy) French "Emmanuelle" series with Sylvia Kristel and by the 1990's turned it into godawful late-night TV filler starring American b-movie bimbos like Monique Gabrielle, Krista Allen, and Tiger Woods sex-buddy Holly Sampson. This movie, "The Click" is basically an 80's European film "Americanized" by Siritzsky, although it looks like even the original European version was filmed partly in New Orleans. I don't know that it was ever any good, but it sure is a strange misbegotten mongrel of a movie in its present form.

The movie is about a scientist who invents a machine that turns any woman in its radius into a crazed nymphomaniac. An 80's American film would have turned this ridiculous plot device into a stupid but innocuous sex comedy, but the European version seems to do something much weirder. The scientist decides to get revenge on his previous employer who fired him by using it on the guy's young, beautiful wife (Florence Guerin). But first he has test it, of course, on a bunch of completely innocent women in various random scenes that were most likely inserted for the American version. But even the obviously European scenes with Florence Guerin could give you whiplash with their sudden changes in tone. It goes from a revenge thriller to a love story and from borderline misogynist to pseudo-feminist. In a typical scene the protagonist uses the device to cause the wife to have degrading sex with a tough-looking customer in the filthy bathroom of a movie house, but when the man is rude to the wife afterwards, the scientist steps in and gallantly beats up this hulking brute (who's about twice his size).

You might want to watch this if you just want to see something off-the-wall, politically incorrect, and just plain jaw-dropping, but it really has only two things going for it. One is Florence Guerin, who was one of the most beautiful actresses in 80's low-rent Euro film industry. She doesn't seem to be nearly as talented as the Euro-exploitations actresses who preceded her like Edwige Fenech or Barbara Bouchet, but who can tell since she appeared almost exclusively in bad movies like this. She's always very memorable though (much like the Italian actress Jessica Moore, who also appeared in a lot of 80's-era Euro swill). The American scenes of this movie also feature a very early appearance by low-budget American actress Maria Ford, who did a lot of stripper movies for Roger Corman ("Stripped to Kill 2", "Stripteaser", "The Showgirl Murders") before getting ill-advised breast implants and becoming a softcore porn star. She has the best role in the added US footage as a young bride-to-be who jealously crashes her husband's bachelor party at a strip club and ends up doing a full striptease for everyone at the club after the scientists "tests" his device on her.

Still, I don't know if a couple of hot girls and the very, um, unique weirdness of this movie really justify actually watching it.