Story-wise, things get off to pretty mundane start here, as the father of a family living on a remote rural homestead becomes enraged when he overhears his daughter shagging the gardener. Dismissing his wife’s not unreasonable protestations that their daughter has the right to make her own decisions (and that the gardener’s not such a bad guy anyway), the father contrives to drive the gardener to an even more remote spot somewhere down the road, and murders him with an axe.
Thereafter, not for the last time, things get a little weird. The mother appears to take the daughter’s side in the ensuing familial conflict, and together they dig up the gardener’s body, re-burying his severed head in a potted plant, which the daughter then sits next to, looking distraught and rubbing her body with her dead beau’s blood. Subsequently, the daughter appears to become sick with grief, and dies.
SUDDENLY - ten years later! A sleazy estate agent sells a lease on the now empty homestead to a pair of virile young newlyweds. After they move in however, the wife og the couple begins hearing a creepy voice calling her name, emanating from a familiar plant pot in the living room (apparently the décor and contents of the house have remained unchanged over the preceding decade). As a result of this, the wife soon becomes sexually insatiable, exhausting her down-to-earth, wood-chopping husband and causing him to worry for her mental health, especially after she begins stripping off and masturbating at the plant pot-voice’s command.
Soon of course, the plant-voice’s demands become violent, and the wife’s uncle, called in by the husband to provide some help vis-a-vis her troubling behaviour, arrives to find his niece naked and blood splattered, waving the severed head of her husband around like a prize-winning pumpkin.
The next tenant the estate agent finds for the property is an emotionally troubled lesbian whose rich parents are paying for her to live in a rural retreat, apparently so she won’t embarrass them, and…. by this point, it’s pretty clear that ‘A Reencarnação do Sexo’s flimsy supernatural plotline is basically just going to function as a delivery mechanism for near-constant sex and violence. If you’re comfortable with that though, strap in, because it’s gonna be one hell of a ride.
The sex here is of the Jess Franco-style ‘hard soft’ variety, which is to say, it’s clearly simulated, but the cast really go for it nonetheless, leaving little to the imagination, even as director Luiz Castellini tends to favour heavily shadowed long-shots over Franco’s more, uh, intimate approach to capturing the action on camera.
Once it gets going, the film’s tone is shamelessly prurient and exploitative (one of the high/low points [delete as applicable] involves the lesbian character’s lover bloodily choking to death on a vibrator), but, from your jaded correspondent’s perspective at least, the frequent, highly sexualised violence is presented in a manner which never really becomes overly sadistic or difficult to sit through.
It helps of course that the film is pretty well made, with an imaginatively lurid colour palette of toxic purples and greens and all manner of OTT ‘horror’ effects (thunder and lightning, crash-zooms etc) helping to accentuate the fantastical nature of the proceedings, leaving us in no doubt that we’re watching a a crazy, pulpy soft-porn bloodbath, rather than something which aspires to be genuinely degrading or upsetting.
Also adding greatly to the film’s atmosphere meanwhile is the music, which seems to consist of a series of needle drops taken from every LP the filmmakers’ could dig up which sounded creepy or discordant. The opening credits proudly proclaim “music by Vangelis, Penderecki and Pierre Henry”(!), but, hilariously, variations on Les Baxter’s theme from The Dunwich Horror (1970) play during most of the sex scenes.
As the movie goes on, things become increasingly phantasmagorical, eventually descending into total, blood-curdling delirium, as the haunted plant grows toward ‘Audrey II’-like proportions, swinging its rubbery tendrils around in delight, whilst it also receives assistance from the white-clad ghost of the daughter from the film’s prologue, who happily assists with the slaughter; when she’s not standing outside the house as the thunder roars, swinging the huge axe which once killed her lover around like a golf club, that is.
Once a VW vanload of happy-go-lucky hippies take shelter in the seemingly empty house and swiftly find themselves descending into an involuntary blood orgy, well…. all bets for a return to relative sanity are well and truly off, even as cut-aways to “the city” begin to show us the sleazy estate agents guy, in cahoots with the shaky-handed, wheelchair-bound father from the prologue, receiving some hassle from assorted relatives and survivors of the preceding massacres, who understandably want to see this shit sorted out once and for all… but you don’t really need to know about that, do you?
What you do need to know is that ‘A Reencarnação do Sexo’ is staggeringly lurid, hypnotically repetitious and utterly bananas - clearly some kind of a landmark in worldwide-weird horror cinema, even as issues around music rights (aside from anything else) make it extremely unlikely that we’ll be seeing a legit re-release/restoration any time soon. If you’ve read this far without throwing your laptop aside in disgust though, consider it essential viewing. Seek and ye shall find.
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