Shining Sex (1976) User Reviews

Decent Franco

[Michael_Elliott · 29 April 2008]

Shining Sex (1977)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Science-fiction fun from the Spanish director has a stripper (Lina Romay) taken home by two aliens (Evelyne Scott, Monica Swinn) who seduce her and then rub some type of lotion onto her private areas. This lotion turns the stripper into a brain dead slave who can kill anyone she sleeps with once they put their thing into her private areas. This is certainly one of Franco's strangest films but sadly it's doesn't go as wild as the story itself. The film runs 80-minutes and the actually killing doesn't start until the final twenty-minutes, which is a shame because the story could have led to some great fun in that ol' so sleazy Jess Franco way. There's still some great stuff here including a twenty-minute silent segment where Romay gets seduced and turned into the killing machine. The lesbian sex scene here is quite erotic and Franco does a great job with the cinematography, although the zoom function goes a tad bit overboard. Romay is very good in her role and I personally think she never looked better than this period here. She's naked throughout the entire movie so this here is another major plus. I had to watch the film in French without any English subs so I'm not sure what all I missed in the dialogue but the film is very easy to follow without the subs. Franco himself turns in a fun performance as a doctor who knows what the aliens are doing. Franco would remake this in 1986 as Sida, la peste del siglo XX but a copy of this film has never turned up. In the remake, instead of an alien virus causing the deaths it's AIDS that is being spread around to kill. God knows what one should expect from that subject matter considering the type of films Franco was doing around this time but one only hopes it will show up.

A typically atypical Franco sci-fi show.

[parry_na · 7/10 · 1 August 2020]

You wouldn't expect a Jess Franco Eurocine film called 'Shining Sex' to be a chaste affair - you might well feel cheated if it was. Within moments, Lina Romay, who features prominently in every sense of the word, treats a surprisingly well-to-do audience to a sexual striptease, as the camera swoops in in unforgiving close-ups on every mole, every goose bump. She's also a very cheerful prostitute, and her exhibitionism still turned up to 11, goes off with a mysterious couple for a threesome.

The throes of anguish/ecstasy that fill the next few scenes begin to get tiresome, when the first tendrils of a storyline begin to reach out; at last things become interesting. The couple, Alpha and Andros (Evelyne Scott and Raymond Hardy) are far more mysterious than they initially seem, and Cynthia's (Romay) writhing takes on a different meaning.

It's reassuring to see some familiar faces - the always excellent Monica Swinn as Madame Pécame and Olivier Mathot as Elmos Kallman - although Swinn's character is suitably weird and distant and *far* from reassuring. Franco himself also features as good old Dr. Seward, whose voice is dubbed by someone reaching for his inner Peter Lorre!

Romay is consistently wonderful in this. The transformation from her giggly, extroverted stripper, to seemingly emotionless pawn in the game being played, seems effortless and is highly convincing. Likewise, the shifting from sleazy 70s sex show to something quite different is very powerful - although there is always time for some graphically intimate shots of coupling. It's typically atypical in a Jess Franco film that features gratuitous amounts of female nudity and exploitation, that the female Alpha is fully in charge and Andros is very much her subordinate. An interesting wander into sci-fi territory for Uncle J. My score is 7 out of 10.

Franco gets nuts

[BandSAboutMovies · 7/10 · 19 February 2022]

Lina Romay was once married to actor Ramon Ardid, who had introduced her to Jess Franco, who was using him as a still photographer on his movies, and having his wife increasingly appear in the role Soledad Miranda once had, that of the central focus of his camera, mind and crotch's obsession.

After the death of Miranda, Franco was still grieving. Sure, he was married to Nicole Guettard - and would be until 1980 - who worked as a script consultant on his movies and even was in a few of them, the team of Franco and Romay would slowly grow from professional to something more after her marriage to Ardid broke up in 1975 and ended in divorce in 1978, even though Ardid continued working with Franco until 1980.

Franco and Romay would form a team for four decades of work, living together from 1980 until her death and finally getting married in 2008. She'd appear in more of his movies than anyone else and even as she ages, Franco never ceases to find her beauty and explore it, sometimes with zoom lenses that feel gynecological. But who are we to put our hangups on their love? How rare is it to find someone that you share like-minded feelings about art and sex and stay with that person nearly forever?

This time around, Lina is Las Vegas showgirl Cynthia, whose routine has impressed Alpha (Evelyne Scott) and her slave Andros (Guettard). Of course, this leads her into their bed, except for all the epithets that you can throw at Jess Franco, he's no mere pornographer.

That's because Alpha is from far beyond our pitiful planet and the lovemaking closes with Cynthia being covered with a sparkly lotion that forces her to do the bidding of Alpha and Andros, which goes from carnal acts to killing those that know too much about them, which includes Dr. Elmos Kallman (Olivier Mathot), Dr. Seware (Franco) and spiritualist Madame Pécame (Monica Swinn).

I can't even imagine that this movie was once intended to play movie screens, places that would become altars for the worship of what Franco found most holy, Lina Romay's sex displayed big, bold and covered in glitter up there on the silver screen, plot and normalcy be damned.

Franco's obsession - beyond Romay - is always women who have the power to kill through physical, vampiric or sexual means. Empowered by this alien substance, Lina/Cynthia has become biblical verse writ large - "I am come a light into the world, that whosoever believeth on me should not abide in darkness" as well as the words of the Bhagavad Gita, as recited by Oppenheimer, as he watched the death cloud he has created take physical form - "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Sex can kill and it can take a talkative young woman freely giving of her body and transform it into the literal angel of death, using the lifegiving power between her thighs to snuff out anyone that must be destroyed.

The nuclear frisson of the lust and love and obsession and eventual lifelong partnership of Franco and Romay would knock both of their marriages apart and probably wasn't easy for anyone in either of their families, but when you discover that kind of love that the Bible only ascribes to the Lord - "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst into the sky that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One." - woe be to anyone who was in their way.

Unlike some cultists, Franco wanted the entire world to worship with him, to partake from what he saw as perfection. Shining Sex indeed.

There 'aint no sight finer than, Lina Romay's silky star-spangled vagina!

[Weirdling_Wolf · 8/10 · 14 May 2023]

A voluptuous, faintly sinister pan-dimensional being, Alpha (Evelyn Scott) and her randy, taciturn, sunspex-sporting sex slave coerce luridly libidinous nightclub artiste, Cynthia (Lina Romay) into a wild, surrealistic, kaleidoscopically kooky, hyper-sexualized conspiracy! Mercurial muck maestro, Jesus Franco's arty, esoteric, glamorously glistering 80s Euro-smut remains a daringly explicit, stridently sensual, provocatively strange experience. Absurd, garish, and weirdly compelling, only those who are profoundly immoral could ever find fault with luxuriously luscious, Lina Romay's immaculately 'Shining Sex'. While episodic, and not especially refined, this arguably features one of, Lina Romay's most mesmerisingly uninhibited performances, her entrancingly provocative, Cynthia proves to be a scintillatingly sexual protagonist, and frequent Franco collaborator, Daniel White provides another exemplary score.