‘The Curious Dr Humpp’: Outrageously pervy 1960s softcore zombie sex cult film
“From every act of pleasure comes an equal act of perversion!”
In The Curious Dr Humpp, a demented Argentinian doctor (who gets his instructions from a talking, megalomaniacal brain-in-a-jar that is all that’s left of his late mentor) kidnaps attractive and horny couples—as well as a few hippies, strippers and lesbians, natch—and uses them for his own nefarious ends.
Dr Humpp and his team of goofy, rubber-masked zombie henchmen (and a buxom blonde nurse who likes to be smacked around) keep them prisoners in his creepy island mansion. They are injected with an aphrodisiac drug that turbo-charges their sexual desires, and they have orgiastic group sex as the doctor drains a “sex particle” fluid from their bodies. The resultant libido smoothie prevents him from doing a Dr Jekyll and turning into a bloodthirsty, monstrous Mr Hyde.
“The strength of human body fluids taken during coitus … they help me go on!”
The original early 1960s Argentinian film—which must have been pretty racy to begin with—was spiced up with additional sex footage when a North American distributor picked up this tawdry cult item in the early ’70s. The name was probably meant to call to mind the XXX box office smash, I Am Curious (Yellow), although the two films have absolutely nothing in common, except for perhaps a high nipple count.
“Sex dominates the world and now I dominate sex!”
I doubt that I’d have ever heard about this kooky celluloid atrocity had it not been for these two brothers, slightly older than me, who went to my parents’ church. When I was like ten or maybe even younger, my parents were visiting their parents, and they showed me how they lived behind a drive-in movie theatre. But not just any old drive-in showing Herbie Rides Again or Jaws, but one that often screened R and even X-rated movies! I mean, imagine that! And this was in West Virginia in the ’70s. Go figure.
Anyway, the thing that was unspooling up the hill from their house on that particular night was The Curious Dr Humpp, as they informed me, and we watched it (from a fairly great distance) from a second-floor window, trading binoculars like the kids in Stranger Things if they were in an episode directed by David Lynch. Years later, I found a massive poster for the film in lurid shades of yellow and purple along a stack of lobby cards at the Pasadena Flea Market.
This thing didn’t just pop up out of nowhere. The Curious Dr Humpp was cooked up in Argentina in the early ‘60s by a guy named Kurt Land, who mostly made low‑budget thrillers. It started as a pretty racy local production and then got hacked up, padded out with extra soft‑core loops jammed in to keep drive‑in crowds awake. That’s why you’ll find different versions floating around, some more “sci‑fi horror”, some just full of sweaty inserts. The whole thing looks cheap, but not dull.
What makes Dr Humpp such a glorious oddball is how it can’t quite decide if it’s a monster movie, a sex film, or a mad scientist flick—so it just goes all in on everything at once.
One minute it’s “bring me the sex fluid”, the next it’s horny zombies dragging topless dancers around a castle like they’re extras from a Bela Lugosi knock-off. It’s clumsy, sweaty, shot in funhouse shadows—and somehow still manages to feel like it means something, even when it clearly doesn’t. There’s this wired, sweaty paranoia to the whole thing, like it’s trying to convince you it’s important between bong rips and boom mics.
I’ve always believed that the best trash art isn’t bad—it’s somewhere between broken and brilliant. The Curious Dr Humpp is in that and then some. This film lives in margins: the margins of taste, the margins of films that scholars pretend don’t exist. But those margins are where we glimpse the strange, the repressed, the unanswerable.
If you ever see a faded poster with yellow, purple, latex and a brain jar, buy it. Put it on your wall. Let it stare back at you.
