Frank Henenlotter’s Sexy Shockers (September 1 – 7) We all know Frank Hennenlotter as the director of the Basket Case films, Bad Biology, Brain Damage, and Frankenhooker, but he’s also a cinematic curator of the crass! An academic of the pathetic! A steward of sleaze! A sexton of the sexual and the Sexy Shocker series is his curio cabinet of crudity. Skin and sin are mixed together in these homegrown oddities, South American rediscoveries, and Eurohorror almost-classics. Your mind may recoil with erotic revulsion at the sights contained within these films, so choose wisely!

All hail León Klimovsky, who directed this absolutely deranged movie and co-wrote it with Solly Wolodarsky. “The brain of a man… the body of a woman… the sexual horror story of our time!” That isn’t all of it. Man, this starts wild and gets even stranger.

An engineer named Ernesto (Manuel de Blas) is out on the town with his friend and some ladies when he gets injured in a car accident. He wakes up in a hospital room where former Nazi doctor Adolfo Berger (Narciso Ibáñez Menta) takes his brain and places it into the body of Leda (Alexandra Bastedo, The Blood Spattered Bride), a gorgeous woman. The doctor wants to keep him/her prisoner in a hospital room so that he can prove that he’s the first person to perfect this surgery.

What’s wild about this movie is that while Leda gets to live out some of the fantasies of Ernesto — yes, there is a lesbian scene, there’s also a scene where he whips Adolfo’s wife and nurse Lydia (Gemma Cuervo) and she likes it — but the truth is that this sets itself up as sleaze and then, just as you’re savoring the sin, it reminds you of the male gaze, how women are mistreated in the world a half century after this movie and that most people are no closer to understanding gender change now.

Ernesto also wakes up to a world where his wife Mary (Maria Silva) has already moved on to marry his best friend weeks after he has disappeared. There are also moments that when Leda is being pushed around by men, we see her as her male self. It’s a really intriguing way to frame what’s happening inside her, even if she’s a murderous maniac at times who sets a hospital on fire to kill the doctor who put her in this state.

Actually, I have lost track of the pronouns and apologize.

In Italy, this was known as Super Sexy Vamp, a title doesn’t really match what we are watching. That said, Leda quickly learns how to become a femme fatale. She engages in an insurance scam that Mary was planning and even picks up her former dead body, which has to be weird and yet she wants money and that worry never even is discussed. She’s already spent most of the movie learning that she can have the same qualifications as a woman that she did as a man and only find work as a secretary or in manual labor. If she can use the body she’s been given to get ahead, she has no issue.

Then, because this was 1974, this has to end with a downbeat ending. Or maybe evil in any sex needs to be punished. Or sometimes shock endings just are demanded.

You can watch this on YouTube.