How To Seduce a Virgin

Despite his films being uniformly sleazy and shitty, I’m a big Jess Franco apologist. Dude made somewhere in the neighbourhood of 20 films with queer female lead characters. That’s significantly more than any other director I know. But while I like him and his films in theory, watching How To Seduce a Virgin or really, any of Jess Franco’s movies makes me remember that I only like his output hypothetically and rarely in actual practice.

One of the other things I like about Franco’s work is how much of it is genre films. Lesser still than films about WLW leads are films in genres like sci-fi, action or fantasy with WLW leads. So while all of Franco’s films are exercises in softcore porn, at least it’s softcore porn about spies or vampires or whatever. Tragically, this doesn’t hold true for How To Seduce a Virgin. Sure, there’s a touch of that as the lead character is a serial killer, but that’s hardly the focus. Instead, this movie is just Jess Franco just overtly putting all his kinks in one movie.

The film opens with lead character Martine getting released from psychiatric care. She was in there for killing and castrating a dude and generally being over sexual. Despite the doctor saying she’s recovered, as soon as she’s out, she returns to her old ways. In her manor house, we meet Martine’s husband Charles and their servant, Adele, a mute and presumably mentally challenged girl. We also see the manor’s basement where Martine has paralyzed, embalmed and posed previous sex partners. Martine and her husband become fixated on their young neighbour named Cecile. When Cecile’s parents go out of town, Martine invites the girl to stay with them. After this happens, it’s really just a bunch of sex. Allegedly, Cecile is a virgin and Martine and Charles are obsessed with the idea of being her first and introducing her to a hedonistic lifestyle.

Make no mistake, How To Seduce a Virgin is pretty straight. It’s mostly Martine and Charles doing stuff with an additional female party instead of a female replacing Charles. There’s enough action between just women for it to qualify for this site but there’s definitely a whole lot of male character getting in the way of potential lesbian action.

How To Seduce a Virgin falls into the trap of shaming its female character’s sexuality while simultaneously getting off on it. The film depicts the worst aspect of Martine not as her penchant for murder, but her sexually liberal ways. If anything, the murder is just a natural progression of her sexual openness. Additionally, Martine and Charles call Cecile a slut and a whore as they watch her masturbate. All in all, it’s a film that loves watching women be sexual but doesn’t actually respect them for being so.

Also, a lot of the sex here is not the most consensual. The third act is largely a night of sex games involving Cecile. However, before this begins, Cecile has become very drunk or they’ve possibly drugged her. In the morning she admits her memories of that night were hazy. So I don’t love that. And then there’s Adele. I’m pretty sure Adele is meant to be some form of mentally challenged. She certainly acts childlike and unaware. But damn if Charles and Martine don’t involve them in all of their sex games. I don’t get it. Why even include this character? Is a sex scene really made that much hotter because a mentally simple servant is rubbing Martine’s ass while her and Charles have sex? It’s bad.

Ignoring the moral issues, I don’t think this movie is particularly successful at being sexy. Admittedly, the 70s had a way different metric for being successfully sexy which was just having sex scenes in movies. But I’m reviewing this in 2020 so I can have some standards. The music in How To Seduce a Virgin is constantly and overtly unsexy. It’s discordant and occasionally zany; far from mood music. Also, in lengthier sex scenes, the camera just seems to get bored. Two characters will be going at it and the camera wanders away to focus on a character’s hair or the paintings on the walls. There’s even a shot in which two characters having sex is partially obscured by a mannequin’s arm. Wow, it’s really too bad there was no way they could have shot this without an immobile, movable object getting in the way.

Despite my objections, I imagine that How To Seduce a Virgin turned out exactly how Jess Franco wanted it to. I get that he’s not here to make art, he’s here to put things he finds sexy onscreen. On that note, this is the second film of his I’ve seen (the first being Vampyros Lesbos) that involves extended sexy dance sequences involving mannequins. So now I’m wondering if that’s a thing for him too. Regardless of whether or not Franco was happy with the final product, I’m definitely not giving this a good review. The sexual politics in this 50 year old softcore porn are just not up to snuff. That makes it an uncomfortable sit not helped by the zany music and unfocused camerawork.

Overall rating: 2.9/10

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