Langues cochonnes (1978)

The packaging for the 1978 grindhouse film Sex Roulette states it is “a West German/Belgian erotic oddity”.  That’s seems like an accurate description because this is, indeed, one weird production. While most X-rated fare from the era were relatively unimaginative, micro-budget affairs, Sex Roulette looks relatively lush and was filmed in some exotic European locations. It also presents some of the strangest characters ever assembled in a film of this type. We can start with Robert Le Ray, an actor who began his career in legitimate films only to transcend into the world of X-rated fare. Le Ray is the male lead in the film and he’s debonair and handsome in a Leslie Nielsen kind of way. He was also 77 years old when he was cast. He plays Lord Robert de Chamoiz, an affable aristocrat with a sizable bank account and seemingly no responsibilities or worries. He has an unusually close relationship with his vivacious young niece, Veronique (Vanessa Melville). The two travel the world in style to indulge in their greatest passions. For Veronique this means the gaming tables at top-tier casinos where she gambles without abandon. For Lord de Chamoiz (who she refers to simply as “Uncle”), this means trying to tame his insatiable appetite for sex by bedding seemingly every young woman who comes into his orbit. He has a special passion for chamber maids and bribes them with large sums of money to not only go to bed with him but to also participate in sex acts they would otherwise not ever contemplate. These include arranged group sex encounters during which Uncle acts as a sort of perverted narrator for the action that is unfolding. He possesses an almost hypnotic ability to comfort the women involved and speaks to them in a soothing, paternal manner even while they are engaging in wild acts. Uncle is also a voyeur and he takes every opportunity to engage in this secondary passion. When he has a chance meeting with an auto mechanic who is repairing his car, he bribes the man to allow him to surreptitiously watch him make love to his girlfriend. Meanwhile, the gorgeous Veronique finds herself virtually frigid due to the fact that all of her time and thought process goes into gambling. Uncle has a solution for that: she should assertively have sexual encounters with the strangers in order to reawaken her libido. Turns out it’s good advice. After she is seduced by lesbian sisters (!), Veronique finds her love life is back to whatever passes for “normal”. The third major character is the Lord’s faithful butler, a black man who also happens to be a little person. He’s just as sex-crazed as his boss and functions as both a solicitor for his women but also manages to use his physical condition to attract women for himself on the basis that they’ve never made love to a little person. A running gag in the film is the butler’s preference for engaging in sex on desktops, which mandates that he stand on a stack of telephone books. Every time he walks through the room with some telephone books, the Lord jokes that his loyal servant has gotten lucky again. After traveling to Monte Carlo and living it up on the Lord’s seemingly inexhaustible funds, the film takes an even more bizarre turn when Veronique seduces her uncle. The whole story climaxes, if you will, with a big orgy atop gaming tables in a casino.

There are so many distasteful elements to Sex Roulette that one can hardly chronicle them all here. However, the movie is genuinely funny, sometimes intentionally sometimes not. The dubbing is wildly inconsistent with some characters’ lip movements rarely matching the associated dialogue. The exception is the voice over artist who dubbed Uncle with a gentle, soothing voice that somehow fits the character we view on screen. The film also boasts some impressive elements that seem out of left field. An extended scene of a car ride down a major highway at high speed benefits from having the camera mounted inside the car, which gives a real big budget feel to the sequence as well as some impressive footage. There are also scenes of Monte Carlo shot from a helicopter that seem appropriate for a mainstream travelogue. The most amusing elements of the film revolve around the characters of Uncle, Veronique and the butler. They seem straight out of ‘The Munsters’ or ‘The Addams Family’ in that they appear to be complete oblivious about the fact that their activities don’t fit in with those of ‘normal’ people. Just as Gomez Addams blew up toy trains with TNT and his children chopped off doll heads on a mini guillotine, the principals in Sex Roulette act as those their strange sexual doings are quite normal. Uncle is being serviced by a hotel maid? Okay, I’ll just wait until they are finished to enter the room and discuss important matters. Veronique’s encounter with lesbian sisters got her mind off gambling for a few hours? Marvelous! The butler finds love with a BBW-type who he met at an orgy?  How wonderful that he’s found his soul mate! There are some Bondian elements to the atmosphere with the trio visiting high stakes casinos where men wear tuxedos and women are adorned in expensive dresses and gowns. (One suspects the other elegant people who appear in these scenes probably had no idea they would turn up in a sex film.)  Here, Uncle demonstrates a bizarre but unique talent. At the roulette table, he insists on tasting several of the steel balls used in the wheel. He churns them around in his mouth until he finally finds one that is acceptable-then with lightning speed he spits it out and has it land precisely on the number he wants to play on the roulette wheel. It’s oddball scenes like this that make one think that these characters could have had a life in a ‘legitimate’ comedy that wasn’t dependent on hard-core sex scenes.