Review: The Sexplorer (1975)

THE SEXPLORER
(Aka- The Girl From Starship Venus, The Diary of a Space Virgin, The Explorer, Sexplosionen Fran Venus)
(1975)
Directed by Derek Ford, with Monika Ringwald, Tony Kenyon, Mark Jones.


A long time exponent of sex and horror cinema, Derek Ford crafted his two 1975 films around the personas of two little known starlets. Sex Express a.k.a Diversions was a star vehicle for the tragically self-destructive Heather Deeley, while The Sexplorer offered leading lady status to German actress Monika Ringwald. Sex Express and The Sexplorer were unusual for British sexploitation films in the sense that they were based entirely around female protagonists. Ford who liked nothing better than to read socially redeeming aspects into his work claimed these films not only attracted men but won women over in equal proportions. Maybe…though how a ‘date’ audience would have reacted to Sex Express in which its heroine is gang raped over a jeep, bitten on the jugular by a vampire and tortured by berserk Nazis remains to be seen.

A more light-hearted Ford film The Sexplorer updates sci-fi themed nudies like The Nine Ages of Nakedness and Zeta One to the naughty 1970’s. Aliens from Venus land their spaceship slap bang in the middle of Piccadilly Circus, but their arrival comes with more of a whimper than a bang, as their spaceship is nothing more than a minute silver sphere which unceremoniously lands in a puddle. One of the aliens materializes in the form of a nude German-accented girl (Monika Ringwald) while another Venusian stays onboard the silver sphere/spaceship and continually yaks to her, having her repeat nonsensical phrases like ‘I am a Mark Twain’. Wandering into a massage parlour, the naked alien finds herself in good company with women pedalling nude on exercise bikes and other visual throwbacks to the nudie cutie era. When two airhead masseuses find her wandering around starkers they think she’s the shell-shocked victim of a clothes snatcher and send her on her way in a pea-green masseuse’s uniform and a fiver in her pocket. Monika takes the masseuse’s advice that ‘nobodies wearing much of anything these days’ a little too much to heart and ends up in a Soho sex cinema. Believing the place is for ‘educational’ purposes, Monika assumes a badly dubbed porn film called ‘Sore Throat’ is an example of how people behave in society and begins re-enacting the film’s highlights on a creep in a raincoat played by dirty mac icon Tony Kenyon, a middle aged actor who made a career out of this kind of role. Monika gets thrown out of the cinema (“we only deal in fantasies here”) and goes on to scare a man by entering a urinal and eying his ‘large probe’ while her attempts at directing traffic in a high street are met with the –seemingly genuine- amusement of onlookers.

It seems even the most basic human behaviour goes over the alien girl’s head, Monika tries to hail a taxi but instead ends up in a wedding car, where the bride and groom aren’t waiting till their honeymoon to get it on. ‘Must be a friend of your mother’s’ remarks the bare-assed groom about their mysterious passenger. At the wedding Monika is hit on by party guest Mark Jones. A legit Shakespearian actor who occasionally donned a wig to appear in british sex films, Jones puts in a nice little performance as a slightly drunken cad. He and Monika end up naked in a room full of balloons, but the ever present silver sphere puts a ‘defence mechanism’ around Monika to prevent any serious hanky panky. Whenever he tries to jump on top of her Jones gets an electric shock that causes him to go flying round the room like a burst balloon (although his wig manages to stay on).

Eventually Monika is offered a place to stay by Allan (Andrew Grant) an honest, understanding guy, who spends his nights walking the streets after being ditched by his girlfriend. Scenes between Monika and Allan are like a flashback to a Ford scripted oldie called Saturday Night Out (1963) in which a sailor has an affair with a bohemian girl and finds it difficult to cope with her eccentricities. Mistaking a baby for a ‘crippled dwarf or midget’ Monika is arrested by the police and in the cells the revelation that she has no heartbeat drives a police doctor bonkers. Allan bails her out and in order to cover up Monika’s lack of heartbeat her friend in the silver sphere equips her with a ‘full range of sensory organs’ which has the unintended effect of causing her to become oversexed and roll around naked for quite a long time. This turn of events gets the voice of the silver sphere into a huff, whining ‘decease forthwith…it’s dirty...I absolutely forbid it’ like an irate film censor. In the end Monika and Allan finally get it together and ignoring the sphere’s warning ‘you are forbidden to go out in the moonlight or accept boxes of chocolates’ she decides to stay with him on Earth. The silver sphere flies away, its inhabitant disgustingly muttering ‘there goes my pension…I feel sick’.

While on the surface it looks pretty much like a single-joke movie (alien is mistaken for sexy foreign girl and inspires reprobate reactions like ‘you Scandinavians don’t beat about the bush, do you’), The Sexplorer is actually one of Derek Ford’s better softcore comedies with his self-penned script showing an uncharacteristic amount of inventiveness and wit . No easy achievement considering Ford’s comedies were generally dire affairs that always played second fiddle to his scripts for horror movies and pseudo-documentary ‘exposes’ like The Wife Swappers and I am a Groupie. Alongside farcical misunderstandings and more nudity than you can shake a ‘large probe’ at, the film’s funniest and freakiest moment finds Monika being offered a drink in a strip-club which has the side-effect of turning her green from head to toe (complete with spray painted Afro-wig). As one character remarks- ‘she’s bloody green as a traffic light’. Ford also shows where his heart lies by throwing in lots of location work, night-time shots of Soho and Piccadilly Circus and scenes taking place in grimy men’s toilets and nicotine stained launderettes at times threaten to turn The Sexplorer into a Mondo-movie look at seedy London of the 1970’s. Supporting characters like a dirty book shop owner, a peep-show voyeur who can only deal with fantasy women and a salt of the earth bag lady are all the kind of believable misfits you’d expect to meet wandering around night-time London. As well as working in the capital, Ford also shot several scenes in Maldon, Essex where he lived at that time, but was careful enough to never shoot anything in public that might cause his neighbours to realise what kind of films Ford really made. In an unintentionally audacious touch the scene where Monika steals the baby was shot in London’s Soho Square, quite literally under the censors’ noses. The most entertaining aspect to The Sexplorer though, remains its corny theme song which the late Don Lang belts out on the soundtrack several times. Lang, born Gordon Langhorn, was a trumpeter by trade who occasionally wore the mask of rock and roll and had even had a whiff of top ten success in the late fifties. Here Yorkshire’s answer to Bill Haley serenades The Sexplorer with ‘she’s the girl from Star Ship Venus, she’s arrived from outer space, and she’s landed on our planet just to watch the human race. She’s got turned onto permissiveness now keeps up with the pace, she’s the interstellar traveller of love’.

On the scene from the early Seventies, The Sexplorer was Monika Ringwald’s only lead role, though for a limited actress (to put it mildly) Monika’s career brought her some diverse work. She was a model for naturist publication Health and Efficiency, appeared on The Benny Hill Show, had numerous ‘nude walk-on’ roles in careerist sex comedies (Secrets of a Door to Door Salesman, The Amorous Milkman) and can be seen dressed up as a ‘Spiv’s floozy ’ on the back cover of The Kinks’ 1974 concept album ‘Preservation Act 2’. Brit Horror fans might recognise Monika from her cameo in Satan’s Slave (1976) where she’s smeared with Kensington Gore and has her throat slashed by a hooded weirdo. In a similar, but even more disturbing, vein Monika was also a cover girl for Witchcraft magazine ‘the monthly chronicle of horror, Satanism and the occult’ which juxtaposed articles on the inquisition and witch-hunting with pictorials of nude models and mean looking Devil worshippers wearing goats heads! Given these brushes with the occult, you might wonder if she sold her soul to appear in a Derek Ford film. While good looking, Ringwald has a sometimes hard to understand German accent and seems to have been blessed with only two facial expressions- boredom and confusion. With a fair amount of the film’s dialogue taking place in voiceovers, Monika is often left to just stare blankly into the camera. All of which makes it tempting to view The Sexplorer as nothing more than an in-joke parody of her career. The story of a lifeless, slightly ‘distant’ girl lost in a foreign land and surrounded by peculiar Englishmen seems as much Monika’s story as it is the Sexplorer’s. That may sound a tad cruel, but with autographical touches like having her real-life agent Alan Selwyn play a man who takes one look at her then leeringly promises ‘if you’ve got what I think you’ve got under there, you’ll make a very good career out of it’, its sometimes hard to interpret the film any other way.

Ultimately appearing in The Sexplorer never made Monika Ringwald a big star, and in 1978 she retired from showbiz to marry her knight in shining armour- a car dealer. Considering the fate that befell Heather Deeley- Derek’s other ‘star’ of 1975 - Monika’s is a happy ending. For their troubles Monika and Derek have even managed to accumulate one famous fan in the form of Reservoir Dogs director Quentin Tarantino, who encountered the film aged 14 at an inner city grind house in the mid-Seventies under its R-rated US incarnation ‘The Girl from Star Ship Venus’. Suitably impressed and claiming the film had him ‘rolling in the aisles’ Tarantino has gone on to screen The Sexplorer at several 1990’s film festivals, reviving it as a midnight movie in Austin Texas, in 1996. The Sexplorer was also clandestinely filmed in a hardcore version (cryptically eluded to in a scene where Monika meets a camp photographer), in which presumably Monika researched ‘emotional involvement’ in greater depth. Both this version and the extended (i.e. hardcore) cut of Sex Express were unveiled in all their pornographic glory at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival and sold like hot cakes. ‘Foreign buyers went a bundle on this...and Ford’s next one Sex Express’ raved Cinema X magazine ‘they have scope for porno inserts where demanded overseas’….indeed they did. Unfortunately, unlike the longer Sex Express (available in the US from Alpha Blue Archives as ‘Diversions’), the raunchier edit of The Sexplorer now appears to be untraceable. Even finding the soft-core variant isn’t an easy task these days, in America according to those trendy folk at ‘aint-it-cool.com’ the film is ‘impossible to see, unless you happen to be a friend of Quentin’s and you have a 35mm projector’. While in Britain, the film was last spotted on ‘Roxy video’ one of those here today, gone tomorrow late Eighties labels whose covers always featured ‘illustrations not from original movie’ and who didn’t bother to submit their releases to the BBFC. The Roxy tape in fact looks to be simply bootlegged from the film’s initial tape release on the Cobra label which appeared in the early Eighties and quality wise is the version to look out for. That is if someone else doesn’t get there first…..Gavcrimson has personally witnessed trading standards officials seize a pre-Video Recordings Act copy of The Sexplorer at a Manchester Film Fair. Wonder if like our heroine they turned green when they saw what a silly little movie they’d gone to all the trouble of confiscating?

Text: Gavcrimson 2003
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