While Europe, the U.S., and Japan seemed to have the market cornered on sexploitation during the '60s into the pre-hardcore '70s, Canada certainly gave it a good shot as well with a string of erotic dramas and comedies mostly originating out of Quebec. Some of them like Valerie and L'initiation, starring vehicles for Danielle Ouimet (Daughters of Darkness) were even big box office hits but have been mostly forgotten now. Two other significant and highly enjoyable examples from the same era were also revived for a Blu-ray release in 2026 from Canadian International Pictures, Maple Syrup Pix., Vol. 1, both from director Claude Fournier and writer/spouse Marie-José Raymond marking a big shift from their origins in documentaries.

First up is 1970's Two Women in Gold (Deux femmes en or), which was intended as a quickie sex comedy similar to what the U.K. was cranking out around the same time. However, thanks to wildly overachieving writing, directing, and performances, it became a big local hit, earned some international play including an English dub, and got a remake in 2025. Here we follow the insane journey of beauty-obsessed bird lover Violette (L'initiation's Turcot) and her friend and neighbor Fernande (Naked Lunch's Mercure) find their lives of indifferent spouses, absent children, and endless laundry hanging in desperate need of some excitement. Inspired by a feminist self-help book, they find what they're looking for in the carnal company of various men in the neighborhood (or a random phone repairman or milkman), all of them barely worth the attention, with the madcap escapades taking a sudden turn when one of the guests drops dead. No matter what they do from that point, their lives will never be the same.

Shot in Techniscope with an emphasis on colorful, often eye-popping production design, this is a great-looking film with a pair of charming lead performances and a goofy attitude towards their sex lives that still works today. There's a lot more nudity here than you'd expect for a relatively mainstream 1970 Canadian film, and the saucy highlights include a wild soapy romp that ended up being reused in numerous films including Revenge of the Cheerleaders. It's all played far more for laughs than eroticism, but the crazed plot twists in the third act will definitely keep you on your toes.

After shifting gear with the unusual fact-based adventure drama Alien Thunder, Fournier and Raymond returned to sex comedy territory in 1976 with The Apple, the Stem and the Seeds! (La pomme, la queue et les pepins), which couldn't be more aesthetically different if it tried. Shot on 16mm and blown up to 35mm, it's a gleefully tasteless farce about Martial (Lautrec, the milkman from Two Women in Gold) who's set to marry Louise (Masson) but waiting to have sex on their wedding night. After his buddies play an incredibly convoluted, brutal prank involving a woman Martial hooked up with several months earlier, Martial goes through with the wedding only to find that he's inexplicably unable to perform in bed. Declaring that "even rockets sometimes crash," he's pulled into an ongoing quest involving pretty much everyone in their lives to get him up and running...

Visually and verbally coarse, this one is a lot closer to the fare you'd find on '80s late night cable with a lot of focus on bodily functions and rough puns that don't quite translate to English. In this case it's probably just as well that an English dub apparently wasn't created, though the results would have been truly surreal if they'd tried. The opening credits featuring an animated dick popping out of an apple should give you an idea of what to expect, and the film certainly delivers from that point including a couple of scenes that strive for actual eroticism. On top of that you get funky belly dancing, sexy optometry tests, and nude lesbian modeling among other diversions.

Both films come from restorations done in Canada and provided to the label, with quality obviously relying on the source material itself. Two Women in Gold looks gorgeous with nice, saturated colors and good detail. The source for Apple appears to be a blow-up print which may be all that's left; framing is extremely tight which indicates it was probably composed for open aperture but evidently doesn't exist that way now. Both films come with DTS-HD MA French Canadian 2.0 mono tracks with optional English subtitles, plus the English dub for Women (and it isn't bad). New audio commentaries are provided by Alex Rose for both with Justine Peres Smith joining him for the first and Ralph Elawani for the second; both are fun and very informative as they shed quite a bit of light on aspects that non-Canadian viewers might not know including Toronto geography, "the Canadian Super Bowl," the Fargo-style turn the script for Women originally took, the market for "maple syrup porn" movies, the Quebec intelligentsia scene, and the diverging reception of critics and the public. The fun "Maple Syrup Promo" (23m7s) spans several key films in the cycle from 1969 to 1975 with trailers for Valerie, L'initiation, The Awakening, Q-Bec My Love, both of the main features here, Master Cats (which will hopefully be in volume two and gets a pair of very different trailers), The Heavenly Bodies, and of course two heavy hitters with Carole Laure, Death of a Lumberjack and La Tête de Normande St-Onge, with optional audio commentary by the Fantasia Film Festival's Marc Lamothe. Then Raymond turns up for no less than three featurettes: "Golden Years" (19m42s) on Two Women in Gold, "Gold Sounds" (5m13s) on composer and actor Robert Charlesbois, and "Coup de guele" (11m45s) on Apple, discussing her entry into filmmaking, her collaborations with her husband, peddling reels of prints back and forth between theaters, the perceptions of masculinity and femininity in the '70s, and taboo subjects they dared to tackle. Also included is an insert booklet with an essay by Éric Falardeau laying out more context for the maple syrup sexploitation fad and how Fournier and Raymond figure in its development during a key period in the sexual revolution at home.

Reviewed on October 8, 2026