Very Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind is an Italian sex farce focussing on three scumbags who dress up in cheap spaceman costumes and trick women into being intimate with them, committing any number of felonies in the process (not the least of which is being criminally unfunny), but who are only ever arrested for running a red light while dressed up as women. (Their clothes had been stolen and the only things nearby to wear were dresses, but that didn’t explain why they all felt like they needed to be in full drag complete with wigs and hats.)
Emmanuelle is an astronomy professor putting up with three horny students who disrupt class by asking crude questions about the reproductive habits of aliens and inserting dirty pictures into her slideshow. She kicks them out of class and since this is 1978 Italy, instead of being expelled from college, they spend the weekend dressed up as refugees from a German rubber fetish movie, invade her house and fondle her while holding her hostage with toy rayguns.
Reluctant at first, Emmanuelle quickly realizes this is all being done in the name of science and making first contact with an alien species so she does her part for interspecies relations and goes along with their demands. She also has a maid named Moncia, who isn’t as educated as Emmanuelle so it takes a bit more convincing before she’ll join in as well.
Things are complicated when the neighbors get involved and the husband spends the film attempting to stalk and shoot the “martians” who are having their way with our earth women. The faux martians take turns with his wife and she thinks it’s her husband and can’t believe that he finally had it in him to do it three times in one night!
But these Martians aren’t just causing trouble by giving wives unrealistic expectations of what their old tired husbands should be doing in the bedroom ! Somehow they also turned the professor and her maid into lesbians! At least until the end of the movie when it is revealed that the professor knew all along it was really students and not aliens with vacuum hoses on their mouth and buttplugs on their heads that she was involved with! (I don’t think the maid ever figured it out, but then again she’s no astrophysicist, right?)
None of this even approaches what us earthlings would call funny. The lame, predictable sex jokes (the husband’s gun points up and accidentally fires when he was excited seeing the women) combined with the icky, unsettling feeling that so much of what was happening wasn’t occurring with everyone’s knowing consent, make for an extremely unpleasant viewing experience.
Director/writer Mario Gariazzo (who also made Eyes Behind the Stars, a regular sci-fi movie) doesn’t help himself with a story where not only very little happens, but what little that does happen is just repeated. Aliens show up a couple of different times to have sex with the women, husband huffs and puffs after them, one alien spends his time trying to eat food through the hole in his helmet, repeat until you hit the 75 minute mark and need to wrap it all up. And with the three guys going skinny dipping with each other and sleeping together naked, I wasn’t even sure anymore who the intended audience was!
Special mention though must be made of the soundtrack. Fracturing all the known laws of our universe, the strange collection of songs erratically shifts from earsplitting trash to mindless background music to impressive porn-style funk. And that doesn’t even take into account the annoying whistling the spacemen do to “communicate” with each other. The only reason you’ll be able to keep your eyes open during this sleazy skinfest is because your ears will be bleeding.
© 2022 MonsterHunter
Where did you find this one? I can’t find it anywhere…that I won’t need to spend money on it. Judging from the review, I’m guessing that’s a sensible approach to obtaining this one.
I don’t recall where I found it, but it doesn’t appear to be streaming anywhere at the moment. I wouldn’t lose any sleep over that though. I wish I had that hour and a half of my life back.
Gentlemen, let’s not joke! The Italian answer to “Close encounters of the third kind”…ah!ah!ah! Pure craftsmanship 70/80, a cultmovie, with very low budget but immense imagination. This film was really distribuited all over the world…and it was also released in hard version with inserts! It is available on American production dvd, but the video quality is terrible… everything seems to be shot at night! The soundtrack is simply irresistible! And still unpublished, what a pity!