Immoral Women from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

Uncle Scoopy Promo Three Immoral Women DVD + Bonus

Immoral Women is kind of a follow-up to Walerian Borowczyk's more famous Immoral Tales, in which the director presented five short stories with strong erotic elements. This time there are three erotic stories and their common element is not really the heroines' immorality, as the English title implies, but rather their ability to triumph over the men who would dominate them. All three segments would probably be properly characterized as very dark comedies.

The erotic juxtaposition of humans and animals, often full-fledged bestiality, is a recurring theme in Walerian Borowczyk's work. In his most famous film, The Beast, a woman is raped by an undefined beast which seems to be somewhere between a biological gorilla and a mythological werewolf, and the film begins with a graphic portrayal of a stallion mounting a filly. The Immoral Women trilogy has two stories which feature Borowczyk's curious obsession with human/animal interaction. One takes place in contemporary Paris, the other in some undefined period in the 18th or 19th century.

The modern-day story is fairly routine and not particularly erotic. A rich woman is kidnapped and held for ransom. Her husband does not seem to feel any real urgency about getting her back, and the kidnapper decides to rape her while they wait for the husband to act. Her faithful dog, a large and vicious protector, finally tracks her down and manages to dispose of both the slimy husband and the pitiless kidnapper. The film ends with an embrace between the naked damsel in distress and her canine rescuer.  This story is tame and conventional by Borowczyk's standards and doesn't even include much nudity.

The animal-themed period piece is by far the most erotic and interesting of the three segments. Gaelle Legrand plays a teenager who seems to be acting younger than her age. Although her physical development is complete, she spends her days cuddling her pet rabbit Pinky, even using the bunny for various erotic practices. Her parents feel that she needs to be broken of her obsession with the rabbit, so they cruelly cook it for the family dinner, telling her that she is eating lamb when she is actually eating poor old Pinky. That seems fitting and symmetrical, since Pinky had been ... um ... eating her in a previous scene. When the insensitive parents finally confess Pinky's fate to their daughter, she does what I think any of us would do in her situation. She sneaks out of the house naked and has sex with the local butcher, thus giving the director a chance to juxtapose human sex with more living and dead animals. The brutal butcher takes her virginity on the straw of his animal pen, their experience augmented by the bleating of the sheep awaiting slaughter. The rutting couple is also surrounded by stripped carcasses. Eventually, Gaelle tricks the witless butcher into killing himself, then uses his knives to slit the throats of her sleeping parents. She leaves behind enough evidence to make it seem that the butcher had killed her parents before hanging himself in shame. The story concludes with her in an orphanage, relating her tale to an eager bedtime audience of her peers.

The third tale, the only one without any implicit or explicit bestiality, tales place in Renaissance Italy and is a much more familiar type of ribald story about a beautiful peasant woman who uses sex to manipulate a prosperous artist and a wealthy art patron until they are both dead and she is back in her village with chests full of their riches to share with her true love. This segment is the most blatantly comical of the three and often edges over into true farce, with wacky falls through trap doors, slapstick pokes in the eyeballs, and poison cakes swapped for real ones. As in the contemporary tale, there is not much female nudity, although plenty of naked males air out their penises while cavorting around Raphael's studio. The narrative of this segment is not edited very smoothly, but the segment is made watchable by a combination of humor, the exceptional facial beauty of Marina Pierro, and some surprisingly excellent production values for a film without a major studio budget. I found it fun to watch.

Lovers of Eurotica will find this anthology well worth watching for two reasons:

First, the disc is a loving restoration of a film which has never been made available before in any acceptable version on any home medium. There has never been a DVD at all, and the video tapes were of inferior quality. This version has been fully restored from a negative, and is totally uncut and uncensored, thus representing a quantum leap from any version ever previously available to the public.

Second, the middle segment, featuring Gaelle Legrand and Pinky, is one of the classics of transgressive cinema, and ranks among Borowczyk's best achievements. This segment is so good that it makes up for any disappointment one might experience with the others. The darkly humorous plot is clever, if totally demented. The parents are comically cruel. The sick humor works fairly well. (I have to love the sadistic humor in the shot of Pinky's carcass hanging in the manor's window, with the fluffy skin hanging down below the stripped meat.) The photography is both artistic and technically competent.  The imagery is richly imagined. Gaelle's masturbation with the bunny is a classic erotic scene, strangely beautiful and slowly erotic, yet comical at the same time. The sex scene with the butcher is quite wild and spirited. In addition, Gaelle has a spectacular body and is completely naked for much of the segment's running time.

DVD INFO

If you are interested, the Rare DVD site is running a 2-for-1 sale on this DVD pre-order.

Click here or on the graphic below for details.

Uncle Scoopy Promo Three Immoral Women DVD + Bonus

 

NUDITY REPORT

  • Gaelle Legrand shows everything many times, including some close-ups of her crotch.

  • Marina Pierro shows her breasts and bum briefly from time to time, and her pubic area through a diaphanous gown

  • Pascale Christophe does show her breasts and bum and the top of her pubes, but only for a brief flash compared to the Legrand exposure.

The Critics Vote ...

  • No major reviews online

 

The People Vote ...

  • IMDB summary. IMDb voters score it 6.2/10, which is about as high as softcore sex films ever go. The original Immoral Tales is only 6.0, and even Annaud's L'Amant is not much ahead at 6.6.
The meaning of the IMDb score: 7.5 usually indicates a level of excellence equivalent to about three and a half stars from the critics. 6.0 usually indicates lukewarm watchability, comparable to approximately two and a half stars from the critics. The fives are generally not worthwhile unless they are really your kind of material, equivalent to about a two star rating from the critics, or a C- from our system. Films rated below five are generally awful even if you like that kind of film - this score is roughly equivalent to one and a half stars from the critics or a D on our scale. (Possibly even less, depending on just how far below five the rating is.

Our own guideline:

  • A means the movie is so good it will appeal to you even if you hate the genre.
  • B means the movie is not good enough to win you over if you hate the genre, but is good enough to do so if you have an open mind about this type of film. Any film rated B- or better is recommended for just about anyone. In order to rate at least a B-, a film should be both a critical and commercial success. Exceptions: (1) We will occasionally rate a film B- with good popular acceptance and bad reviews, if we believe the critics have severely underrated a film. (2) We may also assign a B- or better to a well-reviewed film which did not do well at the box office if we feel that the fault lay in the marketing of the film, and that the film might have been a hit if people had known about it. (Like, for example, The Waterdance.)
  • C+ means it has no crossover appeal, but will be considered excellent by people who enjoy this kind of movie. If this is your kind of movie, a C+ and an A are indistinguishable to you.
  • C means it is competent, but uninspired genre fare. People who like this kind of movie will think it satisfactory. Others probably will not.
  • C- indicates that it we found it to be a poor movie, but genre addicts find it watchable. Any film rated C- or better is recommended for fans of that type of film, but films with this rating should be approached with caution by mainstream audiences, who may find them incompetent or repulsive or both. If this is NOT your kind of movie, a C- and an E are indistinguishable to you.
  • D means you'll hate it even if you like the genre. We don't score films below C- that often, because we like movies and we think that most of them have at least a solid niche audience. Now that you know that, you should have serious reservations about any movie below C-. Films rated below C- generally have both bad reviews and poor popular acceptance.
  • E means that you'll hate it even if you love the genre.
  • F means that the film is not only unappealing across-the-board, but technically inept as well.

 

Based on this description, the segment with Gaelle Legrand and Pinky the rabbit is a solid C+, a truly demented and masterfully photographed Eurotica classic filled with sex and nudity. The Renaissance segment is fun to watch and rates a solid C. The contemporary segment is not as good as the others, a weak C- at best, maybe worse.

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