The Coming of Sin (1978)

One of my all time favorites.

Brilliant and touching

What a freaking movie. So many twists and turns. Absolutely intense from start to finish.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

"The Violation of the Bitch", is a very interesting title and one that made me confident that I was about to see something at least passable...but unfortunately, the film doesn't live up to it's title and unfortunately it's more of a missed opportunity than a great exploitation flick. The plot makes it sound like the film is going to be interesting too, and we focus on a young girl who has a recurring nightmare of a man on horseback raping her. She goes to live with a sex starved female and they soon kick up a relationship; but then the nightmare rapist manifests himself and a strange love triangle develops. I have to admit that the version I saw was only seventy three minutes long and may well have been a cut version; but unless they cut out all the interesting bits, this is still a bad film. The characters should really be important in a film like this; but instead they are non-existent and that ensures the plot is not very interesting either. As the title would suggest, there's a handful of hardcore sex scenes thrown in; but they're not very well filmed either, which really makes this a rather torrid seventy three minutes of film viewing. Not surprisingly, this is a rare film and it's one that is not worth tracking down.

Unless you like dreamy softcore erotica and get a kick out of watching naked guys ride bareback on horses, THE COMING OF SIN has very little to recommend it to fans of Euro Horror like myself. I sought this out based on director Jose Ramon Larraz' reputation from other films of his like DEVIATION, THE HOUSE THAT VANISHED, VAMPYRES and the wildly over-rated BLACK CANDLES. I'll even admit to guiltily enjoying some of his later shockers like BITS & PIECES and the teen oriented SAVAGE LUST. While they are an inconsistent lot, the films do have two elements in common, specifically an air of artful creativity and some sort of a payoff.THE COMING OF SIN is by contrast a long trip for an extremely short day at the beach. A fetching young gypsy girl with a penchant for sleeping in the nude comes to live with a ravishing aristocratic blond painter who very quickly helps her dark guest come to grips with her bisexuality, which is par for the course for these sort of things. Tension is added in the form of Chico, a Duran Duran lookalike who spends the majority of the film riding around completely naked on a horse. Like the girl he is also a gypsy and lives in a hut he made down by the river where he spends his time lying around waiting for women to wander by. Seems like kind of boring living to me but whatever, that's Spain for you.Chico eventually joins the ladies at the house after some nonsense involving trampled flowers, lost necklaces, breech loading shotguns, 19th century figure painting, and the film's iconic dream image of the gypsy girl crouching inside a life-sized horse model. You sort of have to see it to understand what I mean but the running theme in the film is that none of the sumptuous imagery and erotic tension ever really pays off aside for some softcore fumblings. The movie's alternate English title VIOLATION OF THE BITCH has to do with the scene where Chico proves his love to the lady of the house by apparently buggering her while the family is over for a dinner party. Gee whiz!All of it leads up to a climax of violence that happens for no particular reason at all, other than perhaps Larraz' wish to try and pull the rug out from underneath the trenchcoaters who would be flocking to the grindhouse to see the movie. The problem is that the movie -- while as sleazy as they come -- isn't really sick or demented enough to warrant some of it's reputation, and reading over some of the other comments here I wonder if perhaps the version I saw on a PAL format DVD may have been missing some scenes.If anything this is sort of a Euro Sleaze couples movie, chock full of both female and male nudity, all of it very tastefully and artfully photographed. And hence the problem with it on a thematic level for those used to Larraz' more well-known work: It's a bit too tasteful and aside from the bizarre dream sequence involving the horse never really grabs the imagination. Which may have been the point -- to make a watchable little softcore that doesn't really push the envelope too much. The film was made at the end of the Franco era in Spain when overt sexuality was a no-no on the generalissimo's cinema screen and might have simply been an attempt to make a cheap little sex thriller with a cast of about eight people, and on that level it isn't bad.The bottom line is that if you want to watch Euro Trash softcore without much in the way of plot you should give this one a try, as the film is endowed with the steamy soft focus look of a Penthouse spread. But if you are drawn to Larraz' horror work you'll be scratching your head and watching the runtime clock tick off waiting for something to happen. Unfortunately, not much does.4/10

Larraz is one of those directors who succeed in making a picture with virtually no money (e.g. Jesus Franco). By using some unorthodox images like a naked man on a horse, and by doing some smart editing, he manages to give this film a creepy feeling that shows you don't need millions to make a decent picture.This does not mean this is a good movie, although it had some strong scenes, including the infamous horse-with-woman-inside scene, it has a weak ending, a couple of standard middle-of-the-road sexscenes and the acting is (as always in eurotrash cinema) rather amateuristic.I'd recommend this to anyone who has seen every Franco 70s movie available and wants to see something similar. However, Larraz made a much better picture with Vampyres which stands much higher on my all-time top eurotrash list.

Good luck tracking this one down at BlockBuster (that's a laugh!) or any other local video store. Joseph Larraz's long lost slice of Euro-trash is a must see for lovers of decadent cinema, but your only hope is to hook up with a collector who'll no doubt supply you with a poorly dubbed, multi-generation copy. Still, this sick puppy is about as sleazy as it gets (the composite version I saw even contained some hardcore sex scenes), yet manages to tell a rather engaging story about a gypsy orphan girl who comes to stay at a lonely widow's villa and keeps her "company" in more ways than she bargained for. Throw in a naked dude on horseback, a few surreal dream sequences and an assortment of sex, sex and more sex (with a little violence thrown in for good measure), and it all adds up to a highly unforgettable viewing experience. Alas, the only way you'll ever get to see it is by posting a trade request on alt.video.tape-trading.