Canal+
has long offered full service programming to a wide spectrum of customers,
including special scrambled overnight broadcasts. Those were exactly what you
think they are. As a result, the venerable media company had quite an extensive
archive of soft-core and not-so-soft-core naughty movies for filmmakers Nicolas
Charlet and Bruno Lavaine to plunder. The resulting hacked-together and
over-dubbed Frankenstein’s monster of a supercut takes the narrative shape of a
psychedelic science fiction film. The Earth is in trouble, but nobody is
complaining in Charlet & Lavaine’s In
Search of Ultra-Sex (trailer
here),
which screened during the 2016 Fantasia International Film Festival.
Part
of the fun of watching Carl Reiner’s Dead
Men Don’t Wear Plaid with friends comes from showing off your recognition
of the incorporated film clips. Here, you’re on your own. Fortunately, there
were more than enough bargain basement Star
Trek and Power Ranger knock-offs
to supply the skeleton of Charlet & Lavaine’s narrative. Some nefarious
force has stolen the Ultra-Sex, the mystical mojo holding Earth’s collective
libido in check. Now that its gone, there is actually a halfway credible cause
for all the hanky-panky breaking out in public places.
Naturally,
various teams of naughty starship crews, private detectives, and superheroes
take up the case of the missing celestial inhibitor. Yet, perhaps not so
ironically, the cheapest, goofiest looking footage comes not from the Skinimax
spoofs, but from the notoriously cheesy but “legit” Samurai Cop.
If
you are not prudish or a color correction professional, Ultra is an amusing exercise in cult movie eccentricity.
Mercifully, Charlet & Lavaine wrap things up in exactly one hour, because
this concept could easily become a case of “too much of a good thing.” Although
they arguably have a greater narrative through-line than the films they are sampling
(mostly from set-up and foreplay scenes rather than consummations), it is still
pretty loose. Of course, any meaningful attempt at characterization is
necessarily impossible. It is literally a gag reel.
Be
that as it may, it is pretty bizarre to see what some blue movie makers thought
viewers would find titillating and even more mind-blowing that Canal+
apparently aired them at one point (granted, in the early a.m., but
still). We’re definitely talking about the sexually explicit puppets here.
