Spanish Fly

Spanish Fly? If I were a bloke, I’d be hanging as limp as a wet sock after watching this sorry excuse of a bawdy romp comp.

Enter the sizzling world of sunny Spain, glamorous models, flash cars and gorgeous scenery. Add countless gallons of foul wine, a lecherous old cad, a middle-aged and sexually frustrated cad, and a certain ingredient that makes the aforementioned foul wine potent in the truest sense of the word… What do you get? A movie called Spanish Fly from 1976.

Terry-Thomas plays expat Sir Percy de Courcy, who, on the island of Minorca, tries to make a living by selling truly awful tasting wine to the locals. Well, he is the archetypal cad and bounder, so of course he tries to get away with it. Only he doesn’t. Realising that the wines needs to be made, well, more drinkable if any profit is to be made from this business, de Courcy and his butler accidentally come up with an ingredient that turns wine into a powerful aphrodisiac!
That’s when our sexually frustrated cad, Leslie Phillips aka Mike Scott, comes into the picture. He plays a married man in full-on midlife crisis, and who runs a lingerie business with his wife Janet (Sue Lloyd). Obviously, this Janet never sings “Touch me, touch me, I wanna be dirty” to him. Mike arrives in Minorca for a photo shoot, with an array of sexy lingerie bimbettes in tow. He also happens to run into an old friend on the island, and who should that be? A free bottle of De Courcy wine if you guess right!

From there on, the film descends into all sorts of silly frolics that slide between embarrassing scenarios, harmless tittle-tattle style dialogue – and plenty of boobs and derriere shots.
On an upbeat note, Terry-Thomas and Leslie Phillips as pervy upper class twits are great fun to watch, and I’m certain they had as much fun playing their parts.
Sadly, it’s not quite enough to push this movie above mediocre, and the saucy DVD sleeve promises more than the film delivers.

The vintage sex comedy has been re-mastered from original materials with this version, including its as-exhibited cinema aspect ratio.