The penniless but pretty couple of Stefano (Danilo Micheli) and Diana (Anna Massarelli) is thrown out of their hotel room. Fortunately, a woman jumps out of the window of the room above them, so they are able to escape with their personal effects.
Since they are in dire need of money, the pair's next stop is a racing track. There, a rather weird one eyed woman (Anna Bruna Cazzato) promises Stefano to point him at the winning horse of the next race if he in turn promises to help her cross a mysterious gate. Stefano is either fascinated or just really really gullible and agrees.
The horse wins and Countess Angela, as is the mysterious stranger's name, brings Stefano and Diana into her mansion and into the realm of surrealist, magickally inclined weirdness. Soon another mysterious woman (Mirella Venturini) appears, and there will be a lot of sex, naked dancing and dire danger for Stefano's life energy.
Blow Job is a difficult film to evaluate. It is a cheap piece of exploitation with ambitions of home-made surrealism that holds (and keeps) all the promises of people dropping their clothes and declaiming bizarre dialogue this sort of film (when coming from Italy) usually makes. In other words, it is as mind-boggling, weird and mind-bogglingly sexualized as some of my favourite films. However, director Alberto Cavallone seems determined to give the naked jazz dancing and the weird-acting people a grounding in magickal theory and esoteric thought. I take Cavallone to be a true believer, and as it goes with the works of true believers, there's a lot of stuff in the film only another true believer will care about. It is nice that an Italian weirdo exploitation horror for once is trying to explain what's going on in it, but its new age babble mostly tends to weaken the pure effect the unexplained weird would have achieved.
This doesn't mean the film is unwatchable. Or rather, it will certainly be completely unwatchable for people who already capitulate when confronted with the much milder and a lot more logical films of someone like Jess Franco, but that's really not my problem.
There are enough moments of cheap, dream-like beauty and an excellently silly orgy sequence to make up for the magickal theory, and I for one find it hard to criticize a film too much when it is so determined to be exactly what its director pictured in his mind, even if what that director pictured is a little stupid and quite insane and will drive half of any potential audience away.
It's just that I think Cavallone should have followed the advice he gives his characters in the film and should have just let go of all those explanations.
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