Fantasm

Sexploitation doesn't get much more obvious than Fantasm, a series of wordless set-ups leading to sex and nudity. The central premise is that this film is a documentary aiming to help female viewers get off by visualising their fantasies. This means that we're shown ten seperate soft-porn scenes, with each scenario introduced by a supposed academic (John Bluthal) giving cod-psychological explanations behind the fantasies being enacted. There isn't much of a plot, and there isn't much reason to watch it unless you're looking for vaguely humourous retro (soft) erotica.

As far as justification for putting erotica on screen goes, it's pretty feeble (and dull) stuff. The filmmakers know they're not kidding anyone so the professor-character (the only person to really have any actual lines in the whole film) is very tongue-in-cheek. Unfortunately, these bits go on for too long and are quite unfunny... the only bit that made me laugh was when he first wanders onto the screen while a woman pleasures herself. After a brief moment she suddenly notices that he's there, gets embarrassed and leaves. It seemed to suggest the film was going to strike a fairly successful mix between parody and sophisticated sex stuff, but the rest of the film doesn't really see any further interaction between the professor and the fantasy-sequences. He seems to be a satirical character but as I said, it just isn't funny because he goes on and on and what he says is mostly irrelevant.

The sexual liberation of post-1960s Australia meant that the Australian film industry opened up to a lot of projects that bordered on the pornographic (see the excellent documentary Not Quite Hollywood for more information on this wave of filmmaking). Nearly all of these films, whilst titillating, didn't really take themselves seriously. Fantasm therefore has no real pretensions about being anything othan exploitative - it's all shot in soft, bright light and even features international pornstar John Holmes in one of the fantasy scenarios. Some of the fantasies are a little eyebrow-raising (EG. One white woman's rape fantasy involves a big black man) but the suggestion that the film makes about helping women is pointedly ridiculous - the camera work is largely staged in favour of focusing on the females in each of the scenes, suggesting that Fantasm is aimed primarily at heterosexual males (not that this should surprise anyone).

Fantasm is a very 1970s movie with very 1970s music and very little in the way of substance if you're judging it by the criteria usually used to review mainstream films. It's definitely a film of its time and it's hard to see the Australian film industry producing anything remotely like it now. I was expecting something a little bit more plot-centric or funny, but it's actually barely watchable as far as narrative films go and will probably only be of interest to die-hard ozploitation fans or people with a fetish for borderline pornography made in the 1970s.

DIRECTOR: Richard Franklin
WRITER/SOURCE: Script by Ross Dimpsey, based on an idea by Antony I. Ginnane.
KEY ACTORS: John Bluthal, John Holmes, Ushi Dicardo, Clement St. George, Al Ward, Roxanne Brewer, Maria Welton, Shayne, Con Covert, Gretchen Rudolph, Rene Bond, Al Williams, Dee Dee Levitt, Maria Arnold.

RELATED TEXTS:
- Followed by a sequel, Fantasm Comes Again.
- Director Richard Franklin previously made the sex-comedy The True Story of Eskimo Nell. After Fantasm he would go on to make the now-classic ozploitation thrillers Patrick and Road Games.