Continuing to plumb the stranger nooks and crannies of Greek cinema, Mondo Macabro presented its fifth double feature in 2025 with a pair of sexy melodramas on Blu-ray. First up is the black-and-white potboiler Lady Desire, a.k.a. I Blame My Body, which rips the lid off the hip and hot single lifestyle in modern Athens. In the middle of the night, a flashlight-waving burglar invades the home of chic Christina (Allen) in a striking giallo-style sequence. What seems to be a simple robbery targeting jewels and other valuables turns out to be something a lot more complicated as investigating cop Dimitris (Prekas) soon discovers. The intruder seemed to be familiar with Christina, who has a thing for male physique magazines, and it's all connected to others in her circle as private lives start tumbling out all over the place.

The title of Lady Desire might lead you to expect a succession of softcore sex scenes, but this is actually more of a heated noir-style drama like something Audubon Films would have picked up in the mid-'60s. For the most part it's a framework to see our protagonist hopping through a series of male and female partners, with a few flashes of nudity and a handful of truly crazy visuals to make it all marketable. Complete with a smoky jazz score, it's a short and entertaining ride with some striking cinematography and a twisty storyline that ended up being remade in Greece twice (more or less). The film was quite clearly shot without sound in a multitude of languages (nobody has ever seemed to pin down Allen's real nationality or background), but the dubbed Greek track seems about as authentic as anything else and is presented here with optional English subtitles. An insert card with the disc notes that an authoring goof omitted the last subtitled line of dialogue at the 77-minute mark, but even without it you could probably figure out what was being said. The restoration here looks great with the crisp monochrome photography delivering plenty of razor-sharp eye candy.

Then we switch to color and add a whole lot more nudity with 1974's Sexomania, which the label itself feels is likely two different productions stitched together with the main one starring veteran actress Maria Ioannidou (in her only role with nudity). In any case, we first see her in the role of married Lena crying as she presses a handgun to her head about to pull the trigger. However, she's interrupted by her hunky neighbor who needs to borrow a pair of pliers, so they proceed to make passionate love while wearing underwear and having bedsheets wrapped tightly around their waists. Despite her plan being thwarted, Lena drops a suicide note in the mail anyway, the latest in a succession of behaviors that have alarmed her frequently absent businessman husband, Dimitris (Farmakis). Apparently her affairs and self-destructive behavior came to light six months into their marriage, and now he's consulting a psychiatrist (Mistakis) to help untangle her horny and tormented psyche. From there we plunge into dizzying flashbacks showing her childhood in the countryside, her parental issues, and various traumatic incidents that linger with her today, sometimes with a significant disconnect between what we're seeing and hearing. That includes a hot-blooded mother, lesbian experimentation, incredibly garish furniture, and odd village customs including a creepy, masked nocturnal ritual straight out of a horror movie.

A dizzying experience with lots of narrative swerves and scorching colors, Sexomania is really something else as it mixes an indictment of provincial morality and a fatalistic look at unhappy married life in the big city. Pretty much unseen outside of Greece (where it got a nominal VHS release), this was part of a string of films released by Art Film, one of the companies of Greek-based distributor James Paris who also released Lady Desire and brought the world titles like The Wild Pussycat. Apparently it was kept in mint condition over the years as the presentation here is again quite impressive with nice detail and extremely healthy colors; only the final shot appears to be taken from a (much) lesser source. Again the DTS-HD MA 2.0 Greek mono track sounds great and features optional English subtitles. The video extras consist of video tributes to Prekas (3m20s) and Ioannidou (4m22s) mixing lots of stills and promo shots with a few biographic facts, plus Sexomania's trailer and a 2m20s gallery of stills and posters. As usual, this was first released as a limited red case edition featuring reversible sleeve art, a set of four art cards, and an insert booklet featuring "James Paris and the First Greek Sex Wave" by Jacques Spohr, an extensive and illuminating chronicle of Greek cinema's progression from the '60s to the end of the '70s and how numerous filmmakers and distributors including Paris proved to be the cinematic voice of an era.

Reviewed on July 3, 2025