The Erotic Misadventures of the Invisible Man (2003) AKA Butterscotch a & Butterscotch B

Great fun! Looks so much like the Justine series made some ten years earlier. I wonder if those camera rotating scenes are supposed to be in 3D, too.

The Erotic Misadventures of the Invisible Man is loosely based on a comic-book by Milo Manara, an Italian graphic artist who specialises in adult comic-books. The film adapts Manara’s Il Profumo dell’Invisible (1986) – in English, literally The Invisible Scent and known in translation as Butterscotch. This concerns the erotic adventures of a scientist who creates a formula that makes himself invisible but also gives off the scent of butterscotch. The comic-book was loosely adapted into the erotic cable tv series Butterscotch (1997), which appeared to only last for seven episodes. Several years later, episodes of the series were re-edited into The Erotic Misadventures of the Invisible Man and released as a video/cable movie.

By this point, the sophisticated comic romp of Milo Manara’s graphics has been watered down and all that The Erotic Misadventures of the Invisible Man is is a lowbrow softcore farce typical of the adult cable films of this period. You are struck by the silliness of some of the scenes – like where Scott Coppola looks in on an encounter between Elina Madison and Bobby Shah in the wine cellar, which consists at one point of two long-haired people throwing their masses of hair around as they thrash their heads like head bangers. Later the invisible Coppola has a dream scene where he and Gabriella Hall are engaged in a sexual Olympics up against Madison and Shah on opposing beds while judges sit at a table and hold up numbered cards to rate their performances.

There is an equally silly scene with the orgy in the British manor that involves Kim Dawson dancing around dressed as a maid tickling Sheila Vane with a feather duster and vacuum cleaner before squirting cleaning fluid over her own breasts. One appealingly silly sequence is the parody of an Italian horror film, which has a wonderfully imaginative scene playing on a classic image from horror where Leslie Ollivan tumbles with her undead lover in the graveyard and zombie hands reach up from beneath the soil of the grave to play with her nipples.

In practice, the erotic adventures of the invisible man concept never amounts to much. Surprisingly, the one thing the film never gives us is what would almost seem the natural possibilities such a state would lend itself to – of being able to peep in on girl’s undressing or go into girls’ locker rooms, something that Hollow Man (2000) readily leapt aboard. We do get a few scenes of seeing breasts and nipples being invisibly kneaded. At most, we get a threesome between two women and the invisible agent where we see them pretending to suck and be invisibly humped by someone who isn’t there. Mostly though, the so-called invisible man sex scenes consist of no more than Gabriella Hall lying on a bed pretending to writhe in ecstasy in the midst of a solo act. One of the objectionable things about the film is how when people become invisible, it is suddenly assumed that they have the right to tear off women’s clothing because they don’t like the woman or merely want to get frisky with her.

The plot is fairly random, no doubt due to being made up of episodes from a tv series. Immediately after Scott Coppola becomes invisible, rather than explore the condition or even seek a remedy, the first thing he does is accompany Gabriella Hall as she joins her landlord Kim Dawson going to England to conduct an exorcism of a ghost butler, followed by their heading on to Italy so that Hall can attend an audition. The nemesis of Doug Merrill’s invisible agent only really turns up towards the end and the confrontation with him consists of no more than a fight in a bar.

Typical of this type of film, there are all manner of sexual interludes that randomly deviate away from the main plot – the encounter in a wine cellar; the invisible agent watching two women making out in his office and then joining in; Scott Coppola wandering into an Italian film shoot and deciding to hump the actress over a coffin after she is told to “make love to the wind”; Kim Dawson making the decision that they must participate in an orgy with the British home owners as a means of driving out their ghost butler; the invisible agent turning up and having his way with the desk clerk at a hotel. To its advantage, the film does have the gorgeous Gabriella Hall, of softly innocence face and a phenomenal set of breasts, who became a star performer in a number of erotic films made around this period.

This was one of the films of Rolfe Kanefsfy, a specialist in softcore erotica. Kanefsky has made other works of genre-related erotica such as You Only Live Until You Die (1997), Alien Files (1998), Jacqueline Hyde (2005), Pretty Cool (2006), Emmanuelle in Wonderland (2012) and Adventures Into the Woods: A Sexy Musical (2015). Outside of this, Kanefsky has made several horror films with There’s Nothing Out There (1998), Corpses (2004), The Hazing (2004), Nightmare Man (2006), The Black Room (2016), Party Bus to Hell (2017), Sunset Society (2018), Art of the Dead (2019) and Pool Boy Nightmare (2020).

I’m no prude and am actually thankful for the opportunity to see this film. My problem is that I love the original graphic novel, and am very fond of the Frech animated adaptation of the work: Le Parfum de l’invisible, by Francis Nielsen from 1997. Milo Manara is a master at rendering the female form, and his drawings are what really make this the celebrated erotica that deserves its reputation.