Still most famous as the mysterious girl on the beach who triggers a string of murders in Dario Argento's Tenebrae, Eva Robin's (also sometimes credited as Eva Coatti) was a major anomaly around the turn of the '80s: an open and proud trans actress, model, and singer who became a fringe pop culture figure in Italy. Her desire to never go through with full reassignment surgery made her an object of curiosity at the time compared to her closest counterpart, American-born actress Ajita Wilson, whose trans identity was never completely confirmed until after her death. Of course, it was inevitable that someone would put the two of them together, and that happened in not one but two movies shot back-to-back with the essentially the same cast and plotline. Conceived as Spanish-Italian co-productions to cash in on the brief but red-hot wave of post-Franco softcore sex films in Spain, Eva Man and The Return of Eva Man (originally Evaman, la máquina del amor and El pitoconejo respectively) are among the weirdest star vehicles ever made. In fact, these may be the world's only martial arts erotic trans action disco sci-fi comedies, and obviously the changes in social attitudes ever since make them play even more wildly today. They're also reminders of a freewheeling period in erotic filmmaking, particularly in what was evolving in Italian and Brazilian hardcore, when all bets were off when it came to mixing gender identities and orientations. Though neither of these films were exactly career boosters, Robin's remained busy ever since including roles in Luigi Cozzi's two Hercules movies with Lou Ferrigno.

The gorgeous and sexually voracious Eva (Robin's) is a self-proclaimed intersex being with female and male equipment, which makes her the ideal scientific subject for her professor uncle, Professor Pissinger (Centenero). Rather than surgically augment her, he decides she represents the sexual future of humanity as Eva Man thanks to an experimental device implanted within her crotch that will control her sexual powers. If it works, he believes, the entire population could be happier and more pacifist. Eva quickly tests out her newfound abilities with the companionship of several people including Ajita Wilson and Images in a Convent's Brunello Chiodetti (who became a busy Italian hardcore star right after this), but she also attracts the attention of some unscrupulous gangsters who want to tie up Eva and extract the device to help the marital problems of Gerda (Mora) and her husband. Meanwhile, everyone has sex a lot and it all wraps up with a glitzy performance of Eva's Henry Mancini-inspired pop hit "Disco Panther" which she recorded under the name "Cassandra."

The sheer joy of watching Eva Man has been hampered considerably over the years by its primary availability on the gray market derived from a fuzzy VHS of the Italian version, which was heavily altered against filmmaker Antonio D'Agostino's wishes and injected with ill-fitting hardcore scenes (plus salvaging some goofy footage from the original shoot with a prosthetic phallus). The original Spanish version seen on the 2025 Mondo Macabro Blu-ray is vastly superior and utterly giddy in its infectious energy, with Eva and Ajita making for a truly endearing pair of pals who occasionally hook up with each other and anyone else around. It's no exaggeration to say that this crazy pulp concoction feels liberating in the way it celebrates its two stars, and even the obligatory crime movie tropes with them being imperiled at gunpoint and tied up feel more like cliffhanger throwbacks than anything mean-spirited.

It's no wonder that D'Agostino (who soon relented and decided to make hardcore himself since that was the only route) refused to allow the sequel to be released in Italy, which is why The Return of Eva Man has remained far more obscure. It's essentially the same film, reprising that "Disco Panther" bit at the beginning (a sequence not originally at the end of the Spanish Eva Man, oddly, but appropriately included on the Blu-ray) and even wrapping up with another swimming pool frolic. Apart from Eva and Ajita, pretty much everyone else gets rotated around into different characters which can be a bit confusing when they start reacting with surprise again to what's inside Eva's undies. This time the professor has come up with a custom-made gun that, when fired at a person, unleashes their inner sexual urges and could inhibit the need for any violence. Of course, a renegade military commander and his cronies decide it'll be the perfect way to distract the population and make them submit to a coup, with only Eva and Ajita possibly standing in their way. The pulp influence continues here with a dubious Fu Manchu-style yellowface character that will obviously raise some eyebrows, but otherwise it's business as usual with everyone stripping, getting tied up, and delivering kicks and punches in fight scenes done for zero money.

Both films make their disc debuts in the Mondo Macabro edition and looks quite nice in these 2K restorations, which are probably about as punchy as these very low-budget productions can get. The Spanish DTS-HD MA 2.0 mono tracks sound fine and have optional English subtitles, with the first film having a much more luscious soundscape thanks to a slew of well-chosen library tracks by Alessandro Alessandroni. (You can get pretty much the entire score on this compilation which is sadly quite scarce now.) A new audio commentary by Willow Catelyn Maclay and Caden Mark Gardner is a fun listen as they parse out the pop culture references in the film (even dropping a Kate Bush reference early on and noting later trans-related narratives like Emilia Pérez) while pointing out the numerous praiseworthy aspects of how the film treats its main characters.

A real gem here is a new interview with Robin's (21m16s) about working alongside Amanda Lear, her previous appearance for D'Agostino in the marvelous Ceremony of the Senses and memories of the "fatherly" director, her primal reaction when the production ran out of money, the reason for her "Coatti" credit here, her thoughts on the "sex maker" device from the first film, the filming at the home of spaghetti western actor George Ardisson, warm thoughts about all of her fellow actors, and her more recent acting pursuits. The last line is a classic, too. Then you get an Ian Higbee video essay, "Chiaro e scuro: The Double Life of Antonio D'Agostino" (20m14s), chronicling the progression from Ceremony through the two Eva films and into his bizarre adult film career peppered with superhero parodies, Karin Schubert, and other oddities, as well as his more recent erotic experimental work. An example of that last aspect can be found here in the 2006 D'Agostino short Metamorfosi (13m20s), essentially a performance art piece with a cocooned woman doing a routine similar to the opening of Ken Russell's Mahler. "Solving the Ajita Wilson Mystery" (47m58s) with Alex Mendíbil digs through the challenging and often contradictory life and career of the beloved Eurocult icon, with significant more recent confirmed data about her birth as well as highlights of films from The Naked Princess onward including work with Jess Franco and Joe D'Amato navigating the murky waters between soft and hardcore. Then two of the crew members appear starting with cinematographer Hans Burmann (22m42s), who talks about how he got into the business in his father's footsteps, what he felt were cinema's shortcomings during the '60s including insufficient sound capabilities, the paperwork shenanigans necessary to make sexy movies involving Spain, and the enthusiasm he put into films like this that didn't necessarily translate into the final result. Then in "Echoes of Eva" (11m16s), sound recordist Luciano Muratori recalls his work with production manager Ennio Onorati, his surprise at Eva's first nude scene, and his general impressions from the shoot. Also included is the original Spanish ending of Eva Man, which stops abruptly at the end of the swimming pool scene. The limited red case edition also comes with a set of three lobby art cards and a 24-page booklet with an essay by Ismael Fernandez focusing on D'Agostino's career starting with Ceremony and pointing out what both of the leads brought to this singular and still audacious pair of films.

Reviewed on June 29, 2025