LES DELIRE DES SENS (1977)
aka The Naked Lovers, La fille a la fourrure, Porno Zombies
Article 4617 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 8-30-2014
Directed by Claude Pierson
Featuring Ursula White, Alain Saury, Didier Aubriot
Country: France
What it is: Exercise film, foreign style

A man, just married to his second wife, sees his dead wife watching him through a window. It turns out her body has been possessed by an alien from the planet Eros who has come to Earth to learn about love and enhanced breathing exercises.

I’m thankful for small favors. I review my movies under the title that appears on the screen of the print I saw, and since I’m in embarrassment mode here again (see my review of THE ORGY MACHINE if you want to know what I mean), I’m just grateful that I didn’t review it with the title I found it under (PORNO ZOMBIES, a title which I find singularly unerotic). On the down side, the fact that I reviewed it under one of its foreign titles also clues you into the fact that my copy was neither dubbed into nor subtitled in English. Nevertheless, I find it rather interesting to compare this foreign movie to the American-made TOM (an acronym I like better than the full title). Whereas that movie refused to take its silly premise seriously, this one seems to be taking itself very seriously indeed; if it’s intended to be comic in any way, it doesn’t show. Perhaps it has some sort of political subtext, though since I can’t understand the dialogue (of which there is some here), I certainly can’t interpret it. At least the exercise sequences here (you know that’s a euphemism, right?) seem to have been shot for this movie rather than lifted from elsewhere, and the actors seem to be actually making the sounds I hear on the soundtrack, which wasn’t the case in TOM, where it sounded like the sounds were thrown in randomly. As for the space aliens in the plot, don’t look for a spaceship or anything like that; the only clue you can get that they are space aliens is that they talk haltingly in an alien way. The most striking scene here has five couples in the forest engaging in synchronized enhanced breathing exercises, and even this isn’t as impressive as it sounds. Though I can’t really fully judge the movie without understanding the dialogue, I’m not sure that this movie is appreciably better than TOM, though I will say it is somewhat less embarrassing.