Kiss of the Piranha Woman (1986) User Reviews

In This Jean Garret late film, there is a lot of hardcore sex, but there is also a story!

[guisreis · 7/10 · 20 January 2023]

In the 70's and 80's, there was a very active exploitation film production pole in São Paulo named Boca do Lixo. Azorean filmmaker Jean Garret was one of the most important in Boca do Lixo, making, among others, good movie Excitação and terrible film Possuídas pelo Pecado, both of which I had watched before. While there was also in Boca the production of violent flicks, the most recurrent trait was actually the presence of a lot of sex scenes. Indeed, there was a Brazilian genre of sexploitation comedy called Pornochachada, and an important part of those films have been made in Boca do Lixo. When that production faced a great crisis, with a shrinking audience, its films moved from softcore to increasingly explicit sex. O Beijo da Mulher Piranha (the title is a joke with a good and important film from the year before by Héctor Babenco, Kiss of Spider Woman) is an example of those hardcore films produced in Boca do Lixo in aforementioned years of decay. However, Garret was a skilled director and his technical abilities appear in the way he edits and shoots non-sex scenes. Anyway, there is a lot of sex here. The ratio of explicit sex scenes and non-sex scenes is similar to a regular pornographic film. In this medium-length 68-minute flick, there are nearly 11 minutes of explicit sex that is totally irrelevant for the story, 25 minutes of sex between two or more important characters, six minutes of sex with a piranha fish (!!) and one additional minute of single sex with a washing machine (!!!). Besides Garret's concern about the formal elements of his late sexploitation movie, he also brought some story to it, and I shall admit: it is narrow, absurd, exploitation-biased, not credible, and developed in very few minutes (just sum the minutes without explicit sex), but it was imaginative and amusing. It tells the story of a police inspector who investigates the weird death of a detective novel writer. The latter, in order to help an old friend he had not met for many years, went to São Paulo. There, he found a vamp woman, who could be placed somewhere between Homer's Odissey nymph Calypso and the demon Succubus. Oh, there is also a piranha fish...