"They say, love is a many splendored thing... and the fact of the matter has never been proven more entertainingly than in Libido Mania. Bruno Mattei, Italy's acclaimed master of the obscene, promises "sexual aberrations" galore and delivers them in explicit detail in this ultra-rare mondo shocker, slapping his unprepared audience with an onslaught of such colorful perversities that even the mere act of listing them gave the film its notorious reputation. Deservedly so – Libido Mania is pure rock’n’roll! Beware, however: You might see your sex partner in a different light afterwards...
The nausea of necrophilia. The dilemma of dildos. The sexiness of sadism. The truth about transsexuals. And the karma of coprophagia. Get ready for a rollercoaster ride into the darkest corners of human affection/affliction! Sigmund Freud meets the Marquis de Sade: firmly anchored to the moral code of its scientific approach (of course!), this film goes all the way to document the unspeakable in the most uninhibited fashion imaginable."
Libidomania is great for what it is, an ambitious and exploitive attempt to categorize and critique every manner of paraphilia in graphic detail, but it all has no shock value as most of the movie is comprised of dramatizations of different fetishists in action and different extreme angles on sexuality from around the world. You get some nice gory dramatizations such as a penile dismemberment (a great effect that beats the one in Cannibal Holocaust hands down), a sex-change operation, and a gut-slicing necrophiliac plus a woman wearing a prosthetic penis to stand in for a transsexual. Figure in some sleazy historical scenes like a nun getting head from a bishop, too. At least Mattei keeps it sleazy.
There's a definite attempt here to show a little of everything. There's an overused bit of mondo footage of African death rite and cannibalism that Mattei previously tried to insert into his bomb Hell of the Living Dead. The "extreme" makeup effects scenes are well-done and comparable to that snuff film scene in Emanuelle in America. Mattei even interjects a little scat, offal painting, a pairing of an adult baby and a lactating woman, watersports, and bizarre (some look made up!) paraphilias like a pervert who peeps on a woman's pee in a public bathroom and then goes in to have a sniff at her leavings when she's gone.
Libidomania tries to be a serious piece with nods to all sorts of authorities' writings, but it is basically a softcore (but extra kinky) sleaze vehicle. For a decidedly more mondo sleaze documentary give a look to Shocking Asia, but Libidomania certainly succeeds in being the more "well-rounded" and entertaining feature.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52gb816kcRw
