Fongaluli, Madame Zenobia, The Healers (Facts, Review) Sexual Healing Trilogy: 1972-1973 Films by Eduardo Cemano

Persephone Black in Fongaluli, 1973

In this article, I'm providing an extensive, fact-based, and director-approved review of three outstanding adult absurd comedy films from the early 70's — Fongaluli, Madame Zenobia, and The Healers by Eduardo Cemano (also known as Ed Seeman).

This article features the director's comments that he provided personally for this blog post in our email conversation. In his comments, Eduardo provides detailed explanations of the meaning behind each film. He also shares interesting facts and anecdotes.

 

I also conducted an entire interview with the director separately from this blog post. Learn more about his cinematographic and artistic career from my interview with Eduardo Cemano (Ed Seeman).

 

Now, let's get down to business.

 

General Information About the Trilogy

Here is another set of weird cult classic films from the USA — a compilation of three movies by the director Eduardo Cemano (Ed Seeman), who is particularly known for his collaboration with Frank Zappa.

 

The trilogy consists of The Healers (1972), Fongaluli (1972), and Madame Zenobia (1973) — all of these three can be described as weird, absurd erotic comedies. Eduardo Cemano himself calls it "anti-porn". These films feature appearances of various adult film actors like Ultramax, Valerie Marron, and others.

The films are obviously cheap (yet very artistic) which makes them even funnier. Interestingly, the music used in them is mostly classical. It's used in a clever way, with humor, especially during sex scenes. First, I assumed this was mostly to avoid paying copyright fees and spending extra for a complete custom-written score. But there is a deeper meaning to this choice. Eduardo Cemano explains further in this article.

Custom-written psychedelic music is present too, in certain amount: I actually discovered these films thanks to a piece from Madame Zenobia included into this compilation of soundtracks from sleazy retro exploitation films.

 

Although these films are comedies, there is also a serious side to them. Eduardo Cemano says:

On the DVD that includes my three films — Fongaluli, Madame Zenobia, and The Healers — the producer allowed me to do a director’s voice overdub of each film where I had the chance to explain what each metaphoric scene meant. Most viewers miss this as they just look for the story as presented while I was using farce to tell an underlying message of my thoughts on sex and life.

Let's talk about each film in detail. In the dedicated sections, you will find the director's detailed explanation about the serious messages he placed in each film.

 

I prefer to begin with the one that I liked best.

Fongaluli (1972)

Plot Summary

The main character is an extremely eccentric scientist who works on creating ridiculously weird hybrids of animals by trying to crossbreed completely different species.

 

Once upon a time, he meets a mysterious man who looks like a drug dealer. The man offers him to try leaves of a plant that supposedly has magical qualities. The professor hopes this plant will help him in his experiments. He returns home and tests the plant on his animals trying to have them make love to each other, but it doesn't seem to work.

However, after a while he discovers that one of his beasts (of course, the weirdest kind of species the writers could come up with) can talk to him. Moreover, it turns to a beautiful young naked woman. But, unfortunately, only temporarily.

 

The professor, who has run out of the magical leaves, tries to find the mysterious man, but fails. So he needs to go on a dangerous and fantastic trip with his little animal to the island where, as the mysterious man said, the Fongaluli leaves grow.

 

This is just the beginning of the exciting story followed by multiple incredible adventures including the protagonists' encounters with fantastic characters, similarly to Gulliver's Travels.

Persephone Black eating a fongaluli leaf

What You Get from This Film

Humor

I really loved the director's (who is also the script writer) sense of humor. The whole film is ridiculously witty. As this should be expected from any Z-Movie, the lack of the budget was used to its full advantage.

 

Weirdness

• A romantic relationship of a crazy professor and his animal who turns to a human and back.
• A giant naked high-rise size woman. Guess what she wants from the professor, despite the difference in size (and she does get it! Watch the film to find out how).
• An extremely bizarre family of islanders.
• An island witch conducting weird black magic orgies.
• Bizarre, cheap, and funny special video effects and psychedelic music.

Interesting Plot

The story is intriguing. It reminded me Homer's Odyssey with all that fantastic adventures the main characters are going through.

 

Nice Scenery

Although the video quality wasn't the best in the world, I still enjoyed the beautiful exotic places shown in the film. It was shot in Florida and in Bahamas.

Eduardo Cemano in Fongaluli as the Professor

Nudity and Sex Scenes

Of course, the film features many sexploitation elements and a lot of sex scenes. It's difficult to tell which ones are hardcore and which ones are acting. As Eduardo Cemano says in one of his interviews, the scene with Persephone Black pleasing herself after the encounter with the giant woman was real masturbation, with a real orgasm.

 

Interestingly, for some of the scenes, Eduardo found people who weren't actors but who believed in his artistic idea and agreed to have real sex on camera, but only if their genitals wouldn't be shown. 

Although it's technically an erotic or softcore porn film, the sex scenes aren't the main thing you should watch it for. It's more about humor as well as serious messages behind the film (read on for the director's comments on this). However, the women are pleasant to look at, especially the professor's pet-lover. I also loved her cute innocent voice.

The Director's Comments

Just as Luther Burbank created the Nectarine by crossing a peach with a plum, I decided why not crossbreed  humans with animals. I chose a lobster as the most absurd creature to crossbreed with. The word Fogaluli is a derivative of the Italian curse word fongue-goul which means “fuck your ass”.

The fongaluli leaf is a substitute for all psychedelic drugs. I chose this drug to help change Shirley the Lobster into a real girl so that I, professor Leviticus Wirtsis, could cohabit with her to make a lobster/human new kind of animal that could live on land or under the sea.

As in Gulliver’s Travels, I had to travel to many islands to find more Fongaluli leafs because the one I used to bring the lobster to life ran out just as I was about to mount her and she turned back into a lobster.

However, I also realize that Shirley the Lobster would be a virgin as a girl. So the story now twists into the flowering of a Virgin. Shirly as a human watches the Giant go through some very frantic emotions while the professor inside her vagina is getting her off. She is frightened so that she has to explore her own vagina and has a real orgasm masturbating while leaning back on a palm tree.

I fled at her having a real orgasm with one facial sex scene to let the audience see that a real orgasm shows more agony than a smiling or pleasurable expression (see my separate writing on facial orgasms).

The evil Fongawitch is only into sex for pleasure and has nothing to do with sex as a love act. She represents free love and orgies.

Meanwhile, I show a radical incest scene where I raise the question of if a family lived outside of a civilized culture that frowns on sex with a relative as immoral, would they not sleep with each other? Also, if sex with love is the right thing to do, then why aren’t we allowed to have sex with the family rather than some stranger for whom love has nothing to do with having good sex? I am not in favor of incest, but just raise it as anthropological theory of human sexuality. Dolphins and manatees do it, and I’m sure other animals do it as well.

There are love scenes that are more romantic than the other sex scenes portrayed in the film, especially the orgy scene at the conga witches garden. There I get raped by all the orgyists and escape to finally have a loving sex scene between the two lobsters. So rather than bringing Shirley to the human world, I take the advantage of the witch turning me into lobster and have sex with Shirley as lobsters which ends with the two lobsters going into the sea to meet Shirley’s mother.

Bunny Yeager, a famous Playboy model (that eventually, as a photographer, was the one who discovered and made famous BETTIE PAGE, one of the first and most famous erotic models in the early days of Playboy and men’s magazines) was the agent that I got all my talent from that appeared in Fongaluli.

 

For those who love the film, I have print shirt designs that I created in collaboration with Ed Seeman himself to honor his movies. Download them for free (as well as my 50 other b-movie shirt prints) and order a shirt from any print-on-demand service you like.

Additionally, watch Ed Seeman talking about the making of Fongaluli in this video interview:

Fongaluli Time Promo. Eduardo Cemano: I love the quote: “A wonderland of giants, dinosaurs, witches, and incest for children over 21."

An article about Fongaluli (French screening title — Sweet Love) in Le Figaro, a major French newspaper.

Additionally, the article by Christian Valor on Psychovision offers more historical facts about the success of Fongaluli in Europe, the difference between its video releases, as well as other valuable information about the Trilogy, other Eduardo Cemano's works, and his life and career. The article is in French, but you can use automatic translation.

Madame Zenobia (1973)

Plot Summary

A young woman, Marcia, who lost her beloved husband a year ago, cannot move on with her life, even despite living with a new boyfriend. Marcia's boyfriend feels unhappy because of Marcia's obsession with her deceased husband, which also makes her unable to be sexually satisfied by him. The woman talks to her friends who decide to take her to a witch — Madame Zenobia who can help her by conducting very bizarre rituals.

Christina (Tina) Russel as Marcia in Madame Zenobia

Elizabeth Donavan in Madame Zenobia

My Impression

This film is very good, though it didn't impress me as strongly as Fongaluli. It contains explicit hardcore pornography elements, but it's still mostly a comedy.

The plot is pretty intriguing and mysterious at the beginning, and then it becomes more absurd somewhere around the middle. This change feels very interesting. Like realizing that at the beginning the author was making fun of you trying to make you believe that the whole story is moving towards some kind of spooky supernatural events. And then suddenly he makes it explicitly ridiculous. However, from the very start, you can tell that the style of acting is too odd for a serious horror film.

 

There are plenty of psychedelic special effects. Everything looks cheap, but this is what we like in this genre.

 

The Director's Comments

Madame Zenobia is the mystic woman that is in touch with heaven and is a fantasy character that can see into heaven and be in contact with the recently deceased.

Marcia, whose husband recently died, is still in love with him so much that she can’t achieve orgasm from her new lover — her chauffeur. She represents all the women in our real world that can’t achieve the sex life they still remember that they had with their dead husband although they try to go on with new relationships in all other aspects of life except in sex.

Along with this story is the everlasting question: is love necessary to have the best sexual fulfillment for a woman? Or can women get just as much pleasure from casual sexual relations without being in love? Very atypical of most porn movies.

We show that sex with Marcia’s present lover leaves her so unsatisfied that she has to go and masturbate to her husband’s grave. While she is grieving, she gets a call from her friends and orgyists that just love having sex in a very carefree way with no need for real emotional intimacy.

After they find Marcia, who has now donned her late husband’s clothes and is masturbating to his image in a mirror, they try to show Marcia how much fun sex can be by screwing her while we see Marcia’s face in pain during all the action.

After Marcia explains how she only wants to relive the pleasure of sex with love of her late husband, they decide to take her to Madame Zenobia who can bring her dead husband back spiritually for her to have one more sense of what that was like, and therefore hopefully bring orgasm back to her body so that she can again be able to have an orgasm with her new lover.

Madame Zenobia contacts Marcia’s late husband who as man can still enjoy sex even in heaven, without love. Madame Zenobia brings his spirit back to have one more loving sex act with Marcia.

In all cases, I shoot the frivolous sex act artfully and humorously but purely as a sex scene. However, I shoot the love scene more romantically. All this is resolved in the end where Marcia is again trying to have sex with her current lover when the spirit of her late husband joins the two of them in what may look like a gay encounter. But in fantasy, the husband is making love to Marcia through her current lover which brings Marcia to full orgasm. As her late husband’s spirit leaves the two of them, we find Marcia totally happy with him and what they achieved together.

Finally, to make my point that love and making babies go together, I show that Madam Zenobia turns herself into a black baby (explained in the dialogue by Marcia) that the New couple can raise as a product of their sexual fulfillment.

I farcially end with Jewish wedding music as they all celebrate their success.

As you can see, I had no intention of making a porn movie that will sell in the porn market. My backer was a broker with E.F. Hutton who just needed a movie as a tax shelter which gave me the opportunity of making a film that I would enjoy doing and possibly as an allegory convey a positive message for couples to enjoy together and see that sex in movies need not be dirty! And to the Supreme Court — show that a sex film can have socially redeeming value and be artistic.

Eduardo refers to Wikipedia:

Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973), was a landmark decision of the US Supreme Court modifying its definition of obscenity from that of "utterly without socially redeeming value" to that which lacks "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value." It is now referred to as the three-prong standard or the Miller test.

More Facts About the Film

According to IMDB:

• It took only five days to film.
• The plot was inspired by the neighbor of Eduardo Cemano. She told him that her recently deceased husband had visited her being reincarnated into a butterfly.
• According to Eduardo Cemano, Elizabeth Donavan was a real prostitute attempting to start a career in show business by using this film as an opportunity.

 

For those who love the film, I have this print shirt design that I created in collaboration with Eduardo Cemano himself to honor his movie. Download it for free (as well as my 50 other b-movie shirt prints) and order a shirt from any print-on-demand service you like.

The Healers (1972)

Plot Summary

A doctor and his nurse, who are also lovers, receive patients having different kinds of clearly sexually-unrelated problems. They heal the patients with a revolutionary medical method called "Orgasmic Free Flow". Like in Fongaluli, Eduardo Cemano also played a role in this film. Here he was a weird professor too, but in a slightly different domain of biology.

Lady Vulva (Ultramax) in The Healers

Eduardo Cemano as the sexology professorin in The Healers

The Nurse (Margo Sanger) in The Healers

My Impression

This film neither beats Fongaluli, but I still had much fun watching it. It's a pornographic comedy parodying the whole genre. The amount of sex scenes here is the highest among all three films in this compilation.

There were a few moments that made me laugh hard, especially the conclusion where the narrator is talking about the actors. The narrator has an excellent old-fashioned style male TV or radio narrator voice. The voice sounds very professional and serious contrasting with what he is talking about. I'm really impressed by Eduardo Cemano's humoristic talent. According to IMDB, this part was filmed just to add more length to the movie, as it was too short.

There was also one scene that I didn't find pleasant to watch: it contained male gay sex; thankfully, not explicit. However, it has a special serious message. Read on to learn about it directly from the director.

 

The Director's Comments

The Healers was based on theories of Wilhelm Reich about sex being a healing act. It also refers to Freud’s belief that sexual repression can manifest itself in many psychosomatic illnesses. That, of course, is my interpretation of what Freud talks about and the effect dreams and our past experiences have on our current emotional problems which in many cases results in frigidity in ability of some women to experience total sexual fulfillment.

Learn more about Wilhelm Reich’s important studies of the healing capabilities of sex from Wikipedia.

Of course, this message is played throughout in a funny farcical way in The Healers which simply shows a variety of situations of people with psychosomatic health problems getting cured by fucking.

However, in the scene where two couples are cured by having sex with the same gender mate, I tackle the realistic problem of how many gay people have committed suicide and been tortured mentally by fighting the fact that they were born gay! So The doctor approaches their ridiculous problems like quitting smoking and tooth aches etc by being cured by coming out. They have same-sex sex and are cured.

It was all simulated to make a point that for some repressed gay people finally acknowledging that having gay sex makes them feel better about themselves and coming out saves their lives.

The shooting of the fake sex scene is made to be ludicrous and in no way have I ever filmed a real gay sex act.

There is no need to explain each scene except to say they are all both funny or beautiful resulting in the fact that they are all healed. Thus the title of my DVD that includes The Healers.

Summary: All three films preach that Sex is Good and depicting it can be done with humor and beauty with the avoidance of the old in-and-out images.

Anecdote: When my films were presented to the leading owner of porn houses in New York for bookings, he responded “If I showed that film in my theater, they would cut up the seats”.

Noting that when I made these films, porn was used by porn movie goers to masturbate in their seats.

Which shows how courageous and non-commercial it was for me to make these films. Thankfully, they were very successful in Europe and Canada.

More Facts About the Film

According to IMDB:

• The movie took three days to film.
• The film was awarded for the best screenplay at the second New York Erotic Film Festival in 1972.
• It was the first film for Ultramax. Eduardo Cemano met her for the first time at one the of orgies Eduardo used to attend in Manhattan.
• All dialogues are improvisation.

 

For those who love the film, I have this print shirt design that I created to honor Eduardo Cemano's movie. Download it for free (as well as my 50 other b-movie shirt prints) and order a shirt from any print-on-demand service you like.

The Director Comments on the Music

I asked Eduardo Cemano:

You used mostly classical rather than modern music in your porn films. This is uncommon for this movie genre. Did you do it to avoid copyright costs because classical compositions are old enough to fall into the copyright-free public domain? Or was there another reason for this choice?

First of all, I am very familiar with classical music. I knew which music would score the scene with the right mood. I also felt the contrast with the genre made my films more unique. I wanted a romantic feel to the scenes of love making and the fun music with the lighter funnier scenes. Most porn use Jazz which would never go with my films: it would make them seem trite or pornier.

As far as modern music goes, to me that means electronic music which I do use when the mood is weird.

I chose The Nutcracker Suite to score Fongaluli because I wanted it to be a fairytale. I chose all the greatest classical composers to enhance the quality of my films and because I love these pieces. It makes me so happy when I hear them played on radio or wherever because now when I hear Brahm’s symphony or the others, I see the particular scene in my film.

Naturally, I was concerned with rights to the music. So I used a lot of Deutsche Grammophon records which weren’t only produced in Europe, but I knew no one would know which orchestra version is playing. This made me feel safe about using them.

There are classical pieces from every composer that convey many moods and I knew them all. But for romance you can’t beat Rachmaninov for the pink bubble bath scene in The Healers. Also, I had fun using Can Can Music with Angel Spirit’s belly dance also in The Healers.

Jazz is only romantic when it is sung by the great jazz singers, and I wouldn’t want lyrics to interfere with my story.

 

Documents

The following materials were provided to me by Eduardo Cemano. Despite the lack of appreciation by the pornography lovers expecting dumb explicit scenes, the films were highly valued by the lovers of artistic cinema.

Eduardo Cemano: Fongaluli review. This critic in Canada referred to it as a "fairytale". He said it was like an erotic ballet. So Tchakovsky’s Nutcracker was well chosen if it gave that feeling to the critic.

A document for application for an award (the film didn't get this award eventually).

Additional Links

Visit Eduardo Cemano's (Ed Seeman's) official website for more scans of historical documents on:

• Fongaluli
• Madame Zenobia
• The Healers

The whole story of Ed Seeman's artistic path in pictures:

• Coexisting Dualities: Ed Seeman and Eduardo Cemano
  
  

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