Never before released on DVD, Jess Franco's 1982 softcore opus Cecilia is remarkably short on story but has some nice atmosphere, great cinematography and more quirky bumping and grinding than you an shake a stick at.

Muriel Montosse plays the titular lead, a foxy young woman who has become bored in the scant few years she's been married to her husband, Andre. When her driver takes her off the beaten path to allow his two brothers to rape her in the back of the car, she finds that her initial resistance soon turns into a sexual reawakening of sorts. When she returns home, she tells her husband of this and the pair soon embark and a strange journey of sexual discovery. Andre's affair with a black woman leads to a voyeuristic experience on Cecilia's part and before you know it, she's taking part in orgies and watching a strange woman in a bad blonde wig (Lina Romay) have sex with her sixteen year old son. Soon, Cecila and Andre's collective experimenting starts to sour their relationship and the emergence of one of Cecilia's old flames only serves to pour gasoline on the fire...

The bulk of Cecilia's overly long running time is made of up the various softcore sex scenes that are scattered in between very minimal bits of plot and character development. As such, the film is very shallow, there's really not much going on outside of the lovemaking and group sex. That said, the film certainly looks great as the camera does an excellent job of capturing the Portuguese shooting locations (with a scene or two shot in Paris) and Daniel White's familiar score, while rather repetitious, adds a certain quirkiness to the whole shebang.

Muriel Montosse, who worked with Franco on a few other films (most notably The Inconfessable Orgies Of Emmanulle - recently released on DVD from Severin Films) and she does shine here, bringing a brash and wanton sexiness to her part that makes things a little more believable. Surrounded by an interesting supporting cast made up of Franco regulars including the aforementioned Lina Romay as well as Olivier Mathot, Pierre Taylor and Antonio Mayans she really does lit up the screen a fair bit. It's a shame then that the film has little to offer besides well shot sex scenes. Had more effort been put into crafting and interesting story to go along with the undeniably lush visuals then Cecilia could have stood alongside some of the better Franco films from this period - instead it turns out to be a fairly disposable film with a few stand out moments.

Video:

Blue Underground debuts Cecilia on DVD in North American in a very nice 1.66.1 anamorphic widescreen transfer that preserves the films original aspect ratio. Color reproduction is nice and detail levels are strong despite some softness inherent in the source material thanks to the films cinematography. A couple of stock footage inserts (look at the boat towards the end of the movie) show some print damage but this is otherwise quite a nice transfer - it's clean and quite colorful and it looks very much like a a nice film print, it isn't overly digitized or artificial looking.