VERY CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE FOURTH KIND (1978) ***

If you took Revenge of the Nerds, Private Lessons, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, threw them in a blender, and cranked the setting to “Italian Comedy”, then you might have something approximating Very Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind.  

Three college pals pull a prank on their sexy astrology teacher (Maria Baxa) and are expelled.  (In their defense, it was a pretty cool prank as they substitute naked slides during her presentation so that when she talks about a “black hole”, it shows a bare butt.)  Knowing their teacher has a thing for UFOs, they decide to dress up as aliens and try to seduce her.  Much to their delight, she willingly submits to the extraterrestrial in-and-out.  (“We are guinea pigs to them…  If they want to study my body, they can do what they please!”)  Eventually, she convinces her hot friend (Monica Zanchi) to join in on the interstellar probing.  When the trio of pseudo-aliens bang Maddalena (Marina Daumia) the sexy wife of a hunter (Mario Maranzana), he goes out looking for them with a shotgun.  

Since this is an Italian comedy, much of the so-called comic hijinks are lame.  Even worse is that they are usually punctuated with annoyingly juvenile music.  That’s okay though because you can always just turn down the sound and enjoy the silly and sexy sci-fi shenanigans.  The alien costumes are pretty well done (they look like a cross between the Gimp costume from Pulp Fiction and a low budget Star Wars Darth Vader knockoff, but with purple dildos on their heads), and the encounters themselves are surprisingly decent.  

Seeing Baxa slowly getting turned on by her E.T. encounters is real a treat.  There’s an especially great scene where the aliens get scared off by the hunter, leaving Baxa and Zanchi all hot and bothered.  Eventually, they decide to fulfill their desires with one other.  And just when the encounters threaten to get repetitive, the film decides to spice things up with some even racier material (like when the aliens probe their teacher with their dildo helmet).  I’m not going to pretend this is high art or anything, but if you have a fetish for aliens in S & M gear fondling nude Italian bombshells, you will find Very Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind to be out of this world.

AKA:  The Coming of Aliens.