The Sexplorer (US title: The Girl from Starship Venus; UK re-release title: Diary of a Space Virgin) is a 1975 British sex comedy film written and directed by Derek Ford and starring Monika Reingwald.[1] It was produced by Morton M. Lewis. A hardcore version of the film was also made for the foreign market.[2][3]
Plot
A Venusian explorer, adopting the form of a human woman, visits planet Earth to study the behaviour and customs of Earthlings. She lands in a Soho sauna, and discovers from the Soho bookshops that humans come in male and female forms. She investigates further, visiting a sex cinema, sex shops and a photographer’s studio. She meets and falls in love with a young man, and with him she discovers the pleasures of sex. She decides not to return to Venus.
Cast
- Monika Ringwald as The Explorer
- Mark Jones as lecher
- Andrew Grant as Allan
- Anthony Kenyon as man in cinema
- David Rayner as photographer
- Beatrice Shaw as old lady
- Michael Cronin as doctor
- Prudence Drage as sauna attendant
- Anna Dawson as store manageress
- Tanya Ferova as stripper
- Chris Gannon as store detective
- Alan Selwyn as bookshop manager
- Roy Scammell as ballet dancer
- Juliet Groves as ballet dancer
- Albin Pahernik as man in toilet
Reception
The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote “The Sexplorer is meant to be funny as well as erotic, introducing an element of supposed self-parody through the person of its otherworldly sexologist and the ‘bizarre’ activity on which she turns a quizzical eye, whilst striving of course for the usual quota of titillation. Unfortunately, as it is totally lacking in wit or style, the self-parody acts as a banana skin on which the film slips in its first minutes, falling flat on its face and remaining quite inert for the subsequent eighty minutes.”[4]
Film academic Steve Chibnall wrote that the film: “takes a wry look at human sexuality and gender relations through the eyes of a female scientific investigator from another planet … By setting the investigation in London’s Soho, the centre of Britain’s sex industry, Ford takes the opportunity to satirise the superficiality of permissiveness. … The Sexplorer may be a hand-me-down Barbarella in Soho, but its celebration of female sexual potential is just as joyful.”[5]
The film is on Quentin Tarantino‘s list of “Top 20 Grindhouse Classics”.[6]
References
- ^ “The Sexplorer”. British Film Institute Collections Search. Retrieved 28 November 2023.
- ^ Sheridan, Simon (2011). Keeping the British End Up: Four Decades of Saucy Cinema. Titan Books Ltd. ISBN 978-0857682796.
- ^ McGillivray, David (2017). Doing Rude Things (2nd ed.). Wolfbait. p. 67. ISBN 9781999744151.
- ^ “The Sexplorer”. Monthly Film Bulletin. 42 (492): 160. 1975. ProQuest 1305831278.
- ^ Chibnall, Steve (2006). “Alien women: The politics of sexual difference in British SF pulp cinema”. In Hunter, I.Q. (ed.). British Science Fiction Cinema. Routledge. pp. 70–71. ISBN 0415168686.
- ^ Haselbeck, Sebastian. “Quentin Tarantino’s Top 20 Grindhouse Classics”. The Grindhouse Cinema Database. Retrieved 9 October 2025.