Sex Is Crazy

Cahiers Du Sex

Sex is crazy
Aka El sexo está loco
Directed by Jess Franco
Spain 1981
Severin Films USA Blu Ray 

So once again I find myself, as many of Severin Films’ target audience might proclaim… ‘in the land of Franco’. Jess Franco, to be a little more precise.

Now as some of my readers may remember, I do find Franco a bit hit and miss. When he’s good, he’s great. When he’s not he’s… churning out something much less than great and, while the latter verdict could be said for this particular movie, Sex Is Crazy, it also lives up to the caveat that, whether a Franco film is good or bad, it’s still always at least interesting… and this is certainly that.

This particular Classificada S film, it has to be said, since it was made in 1981, seems to be a bit of a throwback to earlier days. Just not to the earlier days of this particular director. Perhaps a more polite way of saying this is that it’s perhaps an experimental homage… and more on that a little later down the page.

The film stars Franco’s wife and muse Lina Romay who, like pretty much every other actor and actress in the film, appears in a state of undress for the majority of the running time. We start off with her having been abducted by naked, badly silver grease painted aliens… a bunch of whom (the male ones) subject her to alien impregnation. That is, they put their extra terrestrial penises inside her, within three seconds her stomach pumps up and within nine seconds she’s delivered a new baby. So maybe ten babies in and the whole thing is revealed as an elabourate stage show.

However, we then get into the behind the scenes drama where a conspiratorial plot seems to be about to come to fruition, before that is itself revealed as a movie being made. Which, then, like Russian nesting dolls, is also revealed as a movie being made, possibly and yeah… social norms are broken, such as two men and two women all marrying each other as a foursome, some direct fourth wall breaking and various other metatextual ploys, so to speak.

This makes for some bad simulated sex scenes (although it has to be said Romay herself is quite watchable and seductive in these moments… such as when it’s just her, the camera and her water bottle) and, a lot of it (not all) is fairly dull and pedestrian.

There don’t seem to be any specially built or dressed sets in the film… all internal and external locations but, of course, in the scenes where he’s not getting distracted by his zoom lens, Franco shoots these very well and there are some nice shots of exterior architectural detail captured in his lens.

However, the whole film felt, to me, like an homage to the early films of the French Nouvelle Vague movement… especially those films directed by Godard. A scene where a taxi driver is following a car and a later car scene felt like something you might find in À Bout De Souffle and, in addition, there are a lot of those typical distancing devices set up. I talked about the constant reveal structure earlier but we also have stuff like the narrator shouting out the constant, naked appearances of the producer’s girlfriend and also the use of music, which may stop or start suddenly, or sometimes just change style, within the middle of a scene, deliberately calling attention to itself in yet another attempt to disrupt the viewer from immersion into the film. It’s like the director was watching stuff like Godard’s Le Mépris and began taking notes for later use.

Unfortunately, for 1981, this feels like a very late homage to a style of cinema which had already played out a decade before this one… making it seem like a home movie where the actors… although most of the many male members on show are not actually erect, even in the simulated sex scenes… are having a better time making this stuff than any future audience might have. It reminded me a little, in spirit, of Jim Jarmusch’s movie The Dead Don’t Die (reviewed here), which employed similar tactics and also seemed to be doing this stuff way too late for any of the so called punchlines to fall anything but flat.

And that’s me about done, I think, on Jess Franco’s Sex Is Crazy. Not anywhere up there on my list of favourite Francos but, if you are into stuff like Shining Sex (reviewed here) you might be able to get something out of this one. It’s not a disaster but… yeah, it’s equally not great.

Shining Sex

Sex Shooter

Shining Sex
Italy/France/Belgium/Switzerland 
1976 Directed by Jess Franco
Severin Blu Ray Zone A/B/C

Warning: Kind of spoilers... I guess. It’s basically just sex.

Okay then... this is probably going to end up being a really short review. Shining Sex is a movie by Jess Franco I’d not heard of before. I do like the director a lot but find his films hit and miss... usually they hover between absolute masterpiece classics such as Vampyros Lesbos (reviewed here), She Killed In Ecstacy (reviewed here) and Female Vampire (reviewed here) to... almost unwatchable stuff like Nightmares Come At Night (reviewed here) or his not so great Fu Manchu films (reviewed here and here). Now, the only reason I bought this beautiful Severin restoration of Shining Sex is because there is also a CD in here presenting the first part of a compilation of cuts from Jess Franco soundtracks (many of which I don’t have on other CD compilations) so, yeah, even if I never watched the film it was still a good buy for me. 

However, I did watch the movie and... well... it really is just a sex movie to be honest. Nice to look at but it’s almost non-stop sex going between different locations and a surprisingly small amount of dialogue. It looks nice and if you want to see as much of Franco’s girlfriend (later wife) and second muse Lina Romany as it’s possible to capture on a camera which doesn’t actually enter a person’s body, then you’re in the right place. And she is fine in this.

The entire plot, as it is, will reveal everything here. Lina plays Cynthia, who works in a nightclub doing her special (not so special) strip show entitled Shining Sex. A strange couple pick her up after the act and she takes them back to her place to do sexy business. But it’s clear there is something strange up with them. The woman, Alpha (played by Evelyne Scott) is a bit unused to sex and a bit bitey. Her partner Andros (played by Raymond Hardy) doesn’t have much to offer in terms of sparkling conversation either. They sex up Cynthia and rub a special ointment on her which causes her body ecstacy but also turns her, unwittingly, into a killing machine (much like the lips of death kiss in one of Franco’s Fu Manchu movies). Alpha is really a being from another dimension and Andros her brain washed slave (in some readings he’s her robot... although his erect member seems less mechanical to be honest... I haven’t seen the French language edition of the film but it’s possible the term robot is used in the original sense of the word as ‘slave’?).  They send Cynthia out, using telepathic control signals, to kill humans who are onto the fact that there are beings from another dimension in our reality... to sex them up and kill them with the poison her body has absorbed. 

There’s also a bizarre sub plot with Jess Franco as Dr. Seward (presumably named after the one in Dracula) as he has a psychic connection with Alpha whenever Cynthia does sexing... or something... it’s all a bit loose. We see Cynthia sex a few people to death and then her body succumbs to the ravages of the ointment/virus thingy and she dies herself. The end... nothing more to see here folks. 

It looks nice and there are many trade mark Jess Franco zooms if that’s your kind of thing... lots of zooms in and out of Romay’s hairless labia and other such fleshy visions are on offer here. And the decor in some of the interiors is pretty cool and made me think of some of his earlier films. Not too much else to say about this one though, to be honest. The last 20 minute sequence takes place in Africa (or somewhere like it) and it really doesn’t need to. I know Franco shot this with the same cast in the same ten days that he also shot a movie called Midnight Party so, perhaps that movie called for an African sequence (or, as likely, since it’s Franco we’re talking about, perhaps he was also shooting bits for this while he was making a third movie in the same period). It doesn’t add or detract fro the plot, such as it is... just gives us a refreshing change of landscape at some point. 

Despite the lovely Lina and various actresses getting naked and frisky for the director, I found this... not a hard watch exactly but I did find myself almost dozing off in a couple of places. It’s more the extras to this wonderful Severin set which are the big draw. The score CD was always going to be the thing for me but there are some nice interviews on the second disc plus, again if this is your thing, almost a quarter of an hour of outtakes which didn’t make it into the movie... comprised totally of close ups of various vaginas as they are being licked or of cocks being similarly stimulated. Maybe this would make a good back drop, projected onto the wall at a party but, yeah, it’s all a bit samey, to be honest. 

That being said, it’s not a terrible film from a technical level and I’m genuinely pleased I saw it. I will continue to seek out another Franco here and there (I still have his House Of Lost Women to watch, which I bought for the inclusion of the second volume of the CD soundtrack compilations) but I would say that, unless you are a Franco completest (and that’s probably not a bad thing to be... although challenging because of the amount of movies he made and their current availability) then I would say Shining Sex is probably something you could live without, to be honest. 

Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein

Muted Monster Mash

Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein
aka Drácula contra Frankenstein
Directed by Jess Franco
Spain/France/Liechtenstein/Portugal 1972
Severin US Blu Ray

Warning: I guess some spoilers but, meh, it’s not that kind of movie.

Like many people who tend to weigh in on the subject, I find that Jess Franco is a bit of a hit and miss affair. Sometimes he’s an absolute genius producing classic films such as Vampyros Lesbos (reviewed here), She Killed In Ecstacy (reviewed here), Countess Perverse (reviewed here) and Female Vampire (reviewed here). Then there are the many movies he’s directed which are just plain awful, such as Nightmares Come At Night (reviewed here) or A Virgin Among The Living Dead (reviewed here). Then there are the in-betweeners... movies which are still pretty awful but have some great sequences in them and also manage to maintain a high entertainment value... like Shining Sex for example (review coming soon... been holding that one back for possible inclusion in a themed ‘sexy week’ on the blog, perhaps?).

Anyway, I think it’s safe to say that his monster mash-up  Dracula, Prisoner Of Frankenstein falls into that third category.

The film stars the British ‘thespian’ Dennis Price playing possibly the most casual and ineffective Dr. Frankenstein I’ve ever seen. Then we have Franco regular Luis Barboo as Morpho, Frankenstein’s variant Igor for the movie. We also have Alberto Dalbés playing the Bram Stoker character Dr. Seward and yet another Franco regular, Howard Vernon, playing Count Dracula himself. All four would be back for what I can only assume is some kind of sequel the following year, The Erotic Rites Of Frankenstein (which I’ve not seen but I hope to grab a copy for the blog in the next few weeks), although only Price and Dalbés would be playing the same roles.

Added to this cast you have Geneviève Robert as a gipsy witch woman (of the good variety), Carmen Yazalde as a vampire lady, Fernando Bilbao as the Frankenstein monster and, just in case you thought this film didn’t have enough monsters in it, somebody called Brandy playing the Wolfman!

Okay, so the plot is almost non-existent with its simplicity and lack of credibility. After Dr. Seward tracks down Dracula in his coffin and stakes him through the heart, reverting him to the model bat which we have glimpsed hanging from strings earlier in the film, Dr. Frankenstein absconds with the dead bat, removes the stake and revives Dracula, making him his slave and leader of his growing vampire army (which numbers an incredible... four... by the end of the movie) with which he wishes to dominate the world. But luckily, the wolfman pops up for the last five minutes (the make up is... less effective than you may imagine) and then gets soundly trounced by the Frankenstein monster. 

Meanwhile, Frankenstein sees some kind of betrayal from Dracula (although I couldn’t see one myself) and stakes him again, also going on to destroy his own monster, for no apparent reason that I could figure out. When Dr. Seward arrives on the scene and thanks the spirits for their help in aiding him to defeat the monsters, you have to wonder why he thinks he had anything to do with it at all... he literally arrives on the scene after the monsters are all dead and Frankenstein has fled.

Now, I had a strange experience with this film. The first 17 minutes, which I watched in Spanish, were free from dialogue and, despite the fact that those suffering from epilepsy in the audience might be affected by the huge amount of zoom shots used to establish various environments, it’s actually an incredibly effective and eerily atmospheric film up until this point. However, as soon as I got to the first word spoken... I realised that the subtitles were not working correctly, they seemed to be subtitles for the hard of hearing for the English language version, which was obviously using slightly different dialogue (another subtitle option was heavily out of synch from scene to scene) so I switched to the English dub and rewatched. More wordage is added (when mouths are out of sight ) for this opening and it’s perhaps a little less effective. Although, I don’t think the Spanish dub could possibly save a lot of the rest of the movie, that’s for sure. It’s ridiculous and, although there is a total lack of nudity in the film (hey, Jess, what’s going on?) it does make for an entertaining and, sometimes unintentionally funny movie.

But there are also touches of brilliance. The entrance of Price’s somewhat antiseptic Frankenstein starts with his blurred head in close up in the left of shot inside his car. Then his head, consisting of just his eyes and a bit of his forehead come into focus before, the inevitable ‘Franco zoom out’ reveals more of his features. It’s a brief shot but it works quite well. There’s another shot where two characters eyes are zoomed in and out of, in turn, for about three rounds each, to establish an empathy between them... and that’s not half as bad as it sounds.

Now then, things of note...

Some of the location shots feel a little like they’re a part of a spaghetti western of the time but, honestly, that’s not a bad thing. What is a strange artistic choice, I thought, is the Frankenstein monster’s skin being green (just like the beautiful Mego Boris Karloff version action figure I had as a kid). Now this green colour has quite often been used in some nods to Frankenstein over the years and I suspect it comes from people seeing behind the scenes colour stills of Karloff (and possibly Glen Strange) in the Universal films of the time (there’s some film footage of Karloff in the green make-up from Son Of Frankenstein, reviewed here, for sure). However, I suspect/believe that, since these films were black and white movies, the green paint was applied in the make up to make the features appear drab and lifeless, zombie-like if you will, in monochrome. I don’t think it was Universal’s, or Jack Pearce’s intention to ever suggest that the Frankenstein monster actually had green skin but, yeah, there it is... and certainly the monster in this movie is a beautiful shade of green.

Then there’s the music. Bruno Nicolai’s score is pretty cool in this. Imagine my disappointment, then, when I went to Soundtrackcollector online and found that it has never has a commercial release. But hold on though... I then found a website review claiming that the score was recycled from that composer’s score for Franco’s Justine. So, yeah, I will at some point crack open my Blue Underground Justine Blu Ray set with its bonus soundtrack CD and give that a listen when I get a chance (and, you know, watch the movie too), for sure.

And that’s me just about done on this one, I think. Dracula, Prisoner Of Frankenstein is not a great movie and certainly not a great ‘Franco movie’... but it is entertaining and does still have a certain pizazz to it. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world and am grateful to Severin for putting this one out. If you are a Franco fan then you’ll obviously want to pick this one up (if northing else than for another couple of Francophile Stephen Thrower’s entertaining featurettes) but if you’re new to this particular director, I wouldn’t recommend starting on this one.

The Castle Of Fu Manchu

 

Cold Cuts

The Castle Of Fu Manchu
UK/West Germany 1969
Directed by Jess Franco
Indicator Blu Ray Zone B

Okay, so I said that, as much as I love Jess Franco, after seeing his previous effort in The Fu Manchu Cycle, I wasn’t exactly looking forward to this one and, frankly, I was right to be thinking that. That being said, The Castle Of Fu Manchu is actually slightly better than The Blood Of Fu Manchu (reviewed here).

Once again we have the regular cast of Christopher Lee as the titular character, Tsai Chin as his daughter and Howard Marion-Crawford as Nayland Smith’s assistant Dr. Petrie. Marion-Crawford died shortly after filming this one and, frankly, he does kind of look on his last legs here (check out Stephen Thrower’s extra feature on the previous disc in the series to get a quite credible explanation of just why the performances in the two Jess Franco films look a little half-hearted and phoned in). Returning from the last film we have Richard Greene in his second go round at Nayland Smith and, I’m happy to say, he has a lot more to do here too. Not a huge deal but, you know... more.

I knew this was a troubled production as soon as I started watching this one when I realised that pretty much the entire pre-credits sequence was edited footage from two completely different movies. One of them being from the climactic scenes of the earlier film The Brides Of Fu Manchu (reviewed here) and the other I somehow managed to correctly identify (although I’ve never actually seen the film itself) as being from the black & white 1958 movie A Night To Remember, with the Titanic doubling as a ship destroyed by what I think must be Fu Manchu’s deadly ice weapon... although the true nature of the device with which he threatens the world seems to be deliberately unclear, at least in scientific terms. For some reason, the footage mixed in from A Night To Remember is dyed blue, possibly because the producers were maybe trying to distract the audience to thinking they were using some kind of night footage, perhaps? I’m not so sure it’s... well it’s pretty obvious and just looks completely out of place and, also, way more interesting than a lot of the rest of this film.

So yeah, budgetary problems which would make sense seeing that Fu Manchu decides to destroy a big dam with the weapon as another demonstration but a) there seems to be no explanation of how the dam is in any way affected by the mechanism that causes its destruction, the writers don’t seem to give a damn, so to speak and b) because the actual footage of the dam bursting is tracked in from a film I’d not heard of before called Campbell’s Kingdom. Which explains why, if you look carefully, you can see Dirk Bogarde and Stanley Baker running around in one or two shots (which is what prompted me to investigate because, I was pretty sure they just weren’t around as background extras in a scene).

Also, once again, Fu Manchu threatens the world with some bizarrely indescribable destruction unless ‘the world obeys him completely’ but... and this now seems to be a theme in series... it’s still not really made clear what he actually wants. Just that he wants it... or else.

And in this film especially, everybody seems to be either discovering a necessary clue a fair few times... such as Smith figuring out the source of the opium required is in Panama, then making the revelation again later and then somehow figuring out they need opium which, yeah, they also already knew... or in the case of Fu Manchu himself, asking for information he already has. Such as when somebody tells him that he has Nayland Smith in the building just across the water and they will give him over to him if he releases a certain prisoner... and then Fu Manchu interrogates him as to where Nayland Smith is and, you know, he gives him the exact same information again, like everyone is just going around in circles. I can only suspect that the script was changing here at an alarming rate and scenes were maybe shot and then different ones also shot as an alternative and then, maybe, with not enough money to finish the shoot, all the versions of scenes or logical deductions were just edited into the same picture to pad it, hence the further need for tracking in footage from other films too. I have no idea but it’s as good a guess as any, I suppose.

So, yeah, cheap and cheerful but way better than the previous film, although that’s obviously not saying much. However, there are some nice things to watch out for. For instance, Rosalba Neri wearing a fez... that’s got to be worth the price of admission alone. And, yes, she looks ridiculous but, you know, enjoy it while we have it. Also, although this is certainly not Franco at his best as a director (and not too far from his worst), he does manage to get in some more creative shot designs as in some of his other, more lionised films and there’s some lovely lighting used in Fu Manchu’s castle where he pitches a lot of purple against green and sometimes red. This film looks very nice in some sequences but, in this case, a good looking film does not add up to it being more than the sum of its dire parts, alas.

Actually, one of the more ‘creation through necessity’ Franco moments comes when Christopher Lee is spliced into the footage watching the destruction of the damn. Some of it is from master shots of something which actually belongs to the scene and other stuff in close up is spliced in from what is obviously an entirely different studio setting, possibly where Lee’s wearing a different costume too. It actually put me in mind of some of those earlier Russian propaganda films by the likes of Sergei Eisenstein, where he would deliberately take a character out of context for the close ups. So that was kind of interesting. It’s also nice to see, again, Franco turning up in one of his own movies (at least he’s not focus pulling with his spare arm while still in the shot on this one, I presume) in an uncredited but in no way minor part. I always enjoy seeing him pop up like this so, if you’re a Franco fan, you might definitely want to check this one out.

That being said, the film is still a bit of a mess and I definitely wouldn’t recommend it to most people. Indicator have, as usual, pulled out all the stoppers on this box set Blu Ray restoration of The Fu Manchu Cycle but, while this disc has a few extras, such as The Coughing Horror, a restored half hour episode from the silent film serial sequel, The Further Mysteries Of Dr. Fu-Manchu, I noticed that this is the only disc in this set where they couldn’t find anyone to record a commentary track. Maybe it was time reasons or maybe, you know, they just couldn’t find anyone to say anything polite about the movie but it’s a shame they couldn’t get Francophile Stephen Thrower to do a commentary for this. That being said, the film is still a valuable addition to the set and I think Indicator have, once again, done themselves proud. A sturdy release of a not so sturdy sequel. Grab this box set though because, yeah, it’s precious treasure in Blu Ray form. 

The Harry Alan Towers Fu Manchu Cycle at NUTS4R2

 The Face Of Fu  Manchu

The Brides Of Fu Manchu

The Vengeance Of Fu Manchu

The Blood Of Fu Manchu

The Castle Of Fu Manchu 

The Blood Of Fu Manchu

Zoom Manchu

The Blood Of Fu Manchu
UK/West Germany 1968
Directed by Jess Franco
Indicator Blu Ray Zone B

Wow, this is a terrible movie. In my review of The Vengeance Of Fu Manchu (which you can read here), I said that at least the next one would be more interesting. Well, I was right in so far in that it does have a couple of points of interest but, honestly, these didn’t stop the film from being a truly dull affair and, for me, an even lower water mark in the series than the previous.

So, The Blood Of Fu Manchu is the fourth of the Harry Alan Towers produced cycle, restored and uncut for this truly wonderful The Fu Manchu Cycle 1965-1969 boxed edition from Indicator. Once again the film stars Christopher Lee, Tsai Chin and Howard Marion-Crawford as Fu Manchu, Lin Tang and Dr. Petrie respectively. The film also stars former Robin Hood, Richard Greene, as the latest screen incarnation of Nayland Smith and Maria Rohm, who I believe was Towers’ personal love interest at the time. She certainly appears in a fair few of both his and Jess Franco’s movies from this period. And there’s also an appearance from former Bond girl Shirley Eaton which, frankly, was spliced in without her knowledge (until years later) from one of the Sumara movies she made (possibly The Girl From Rio, directed by Franco, although that one wasn't released until the following year). In fact, the card on screen reads... “Guest starring Richard Greene as Nayland Smith and Shirley Eaton”... so if you read that the wrong way you could be forgiven for thinking that Richard Greene is actually playing Shirley Eaton himself but, alas, he doesn’t put on a blonde wig so he can start acting like a femme fatale in this one.

So, yeah, Jess Franco is a director I find very hit and miss. He often made several films a year (his total just before his death, according to the IMDB, was 207 films directed by him) and often also starred in them and, in one anecdote about him, was also pulling his own focus when he was appearing in a shot... at one point reaching around the frame for the camera controls. He often, from what I can tell, secretly diverted the budget for one film into two or three movies and, I suspect that’s what possibly happened with this one, which was filmed back to back with both the next (and final) movie in the sequence. He is, quite rightly, a legend in the world of directing and I’ve covered a few of his films here such as Countess Perverse (reviewed here), She Killed In Ecstacy (reviewed here), Female Vampire (reviewed here) and his classic, Vampyros Lesbos (reviewed here).

Now, I’ve marvelled at some of his films and the brilliant shot designs. I’ve also heard people complain about the amount of times he uses zoom shots and rack focusing in his films but, often, I’ve found that they can come off as a quite creative use of this technique when he’s got his eye in. Here, alas, the film is filled with irritating zoom shots and... yeah, most of the shot compositions did nothing for me, to be honest.

It’s a dull affair but, even the ludicrous nature of the story doesn’t make up for things. The plot is that Fu Manchu sends out his young ladies to kill his enemies with their poison lips. First the victim goes blind, as is the case with Nayland Smith at the start of the movie and then, after a number of days, said victim succumbs to death. Indeed, in some territories like the US, the film was renamed Kiss And Kill, which just goes to show how the initially successful run of films had got distributors losing confidence in the ‘Fu Manchu brand’ in such a short space of time.

And, yes, we all know of the female assassins in history who have been slowly primed to become immune to deadly poison and carry that poison in their lips to send a victim to the grave. Here, however,  the method of despatch makes no sense in any way shape or form. Basically, the villain gets a certain snake to bite a girl and then, instantly, she’s somehow immune to the poison without dying from in and we see that, in less than a minute later, her kiss carries the deadly poison to another. What the actual...? And then, to pile on the insults to the negligible intelligence needed to recognise the preposterousness of such a proposition, we are told that the girl’s blood is also a vaccine for the poison. This allows Petrie to pull a last minute rescue for the now blind Nayland Smith towards the end of the picture by giving him a makeshift blood transfusion. And when I say makeshift I mean it. He just cuts a girl’s arm and then Smith’s arm and... just squishes the scars together which, more or less, serves to heal Smith in what seems like minutes.

Not only that but, there’s a subplot in the film about a kind of Mexican style bandit and his gang who are killing the good and bad guys willy nilly and... it’s just awful but it also takes up a good majority of the screen time and threatens to completely swallow up the main through line of the movie. Fu Manchu and Nayland Smith really do seem to take a back burner to the action in this one.

Being as it’s Jess Franco we’re talking about, there is actually some limited nudity in this one (which is now finally restored to the prints) but, yeah, it doesn’t really add anything to the impact of the movie, or lack thereof. The music by Daniel White is also quite terribly married to the on screen visuals and one gets the impression that it might even been written ‘away from the images’ and then just needle dropped into completely inappropriate places by Franco.

And that’s really all I’ve got on The Blood Of Fu Manchu... I like Jess Franco, I really do. But this is a truly dull and lifeless affair and it’s such a contrast to the snappy direction that Don Sharp brought to the first two movies in the cycle. As usual, Indicator pulls out most of the stops and the disc is full of extras including a talk with Franco expert Stephen Thrower, which sheds some light on certain elements of the making of the last two in the series and also a wonderful half hour episode, The Fiery Hand, from the 1923 silent film serial, The Mystery Of Dr. Fu-Manchu. But, yeah, extras aside, I couldn’t recommend this one at all. Easily one of the worst Jess Franco movies I’ve seen, I’m sad to say. Not expecting too much from The Castle Of Fu Manchu now but, yeah, that will be the subject of my next review.

The Harry Alan Towers Fu Manchu Cycle at NUTS4R2

 The Face Of Fu  Manchu

The Brides Of Fu Manchu

The Vengeance Of Fu Manchu

The Blood Of Fu Manchu

The Castle Of Fu Manchu 

 

Nightmares Come At Night

Lorys Slain?

Nightmares Come At Night
(aka Les Cauchemars Naissent La Nuit)
Liechtenstein 1972 Directed by Jess Franco
Redemption Blu Ray Zone A

Well this is going to be a somewhat short and hard review to write, methinks. I always find Jess Franco a bit hit and miss although, I think I’ve been lucky in that the majority of the reviews of his movies found on here have been quite favourable. However, Nightmares Come At Night is a bit of a miss as far as I’m concerned.

The film stars Diana Lorys as Anna, a woman who used to work at a strip joint although, also, she might be a princess. She might also, as it happens, be losing her mind but it’s so hard to tell one thing from another in this movie, to be honest. The film also includes legendary Franco star Soledad Miranda... although the date of ‘release’ is a good two years after her tragic death (for more information on her, see my review of Vampyros Lesbos here). However, I should point out that Soledad really isn’t in it very much... I’d guess much less than ten minutes in total and there’s a reason for that which I’ll go into later.

After an opening credits sequence highlighting stills from the ‘film’ against a groovy soundtrack by Bruno Nicola, we are introduced to naked Anna as she sleeps and dreams of a threesome with her ‘employer’ Cynthia, played by Colette Giacobine, and a man whom she promptly stabs in the throat. When she awakes there is blood on her hands and after she has a shower, she has a conversation with her doctor who is treating her for her mental health issues... or is he?

Not a great deal on offer here in terms of fans of Franco’s work, to be honest. There’s not that many ‘still’ shots in the film and Franco often zooms in or out of a shot before panning around to follow the action, sometimes culminating in another zoom in or out. It’s colourful in places but the compositions are not as clever as some of the ones I’ve seen him use in other movies from this same period which were, obviously, shot much earlier, from when Soledad Miranda was alive (that comment should make more sense if you continue reading). There are some slight pleasures to be found in Franco’s eye for a pretty girl and the sheer amount of nudity on display, no doubt. There’s a long, very slow strip sequence with Diana Lorys which is so slow it’s almost static, something which is justified by some dialogue at the start of the sequence  but which, like a lot of the movie, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Now, if I was being really kind I could call this Jess Franco’s stab at capturing the mystery, puzzle box nature of a movie like Resnais’ Last Year In Marienbad... only in colour and with a fair amount of nudity. Which is a description which would absolutely sell the movie to me but it lacks the clinical rigidity and continuity in the presentation which make Marienbad a masterpiece and this film... much less so. There’s the occasional interesting thing which crops up such as a conversation between Anna and her doctor in a car where all the close up reverse shots of her seem bleached out while the doctor is at full strength in terms of colour... but moments like these are few and far between. Indeed, I’m guessing that last thing I mentioned was a deliberate artistic choice because of the way the footage is edited together but I could easily be mistaken for thinking it is just the print which has gone wrong here because, frankly, for a Blu Ray presentation, it has to be said that the print on this is truly terrible to the point of being almost unwatchable in certain sequences. There’s a reason for this, though, as there is for the fact that the story, such as it is, is a real hodge podge of impenetrable nonsense and the answers to the questions raised in the viewing experience are cleared up, to a certain extent, in the excellent extras which are also included on this Zone A US Blu Ray disc.

As it turns out, this is not a single film, as such. It never had a real release and this is a patchwork job done by Franco to make sense of at least two unfinished projects which have been, I would say almost haphazardly, spliced together and presented as one piece. The footage was never actually released on this ‘lost’ film apart from a few screenings, from what I can make out, and it only exists as an ‘answer print’... which is the first test done with colours and sound synched. The producers of the Blu have obviously done their best with he material on offer and cleaned it up as well as they can while having to keep a lot of stuff on there because of not wanting to loose what detail there is. The various bits of footage were also in different aspect ratios so they’ve gone for the ratio they believe Franco would have presented this in if he had created a ‘release print’ from the material but that’s handy, as it happens, because the existence of some footage on an ‘ending’ shows that it must have been shot to make some kind of warped sense of the narrative (although the resulting talk of a hypnotised killer makes no sense either) and maybe explain why the footage with Diana Lorys doesn’t ever match up contextually with the fairly fleeting ‘spying neighbours’ footage of Soledad Miranda and her lover/partner in crime. So at least it’s possible to deduce for these, and a few other reasons, why we have this ‘lost’ or ‘ghost’ Franco movie in the shape it’s in.

All in all, though, I personally would have said that maybe this would have been best presented as an extra on another Franco package. It’s a real mish mash of a film and, as entertaining as it may sound, it really wasn’t remotely entertaining to this audience member. Bits of it are well shot and bits of it are less easy to decipher from the print. Nicolai’s score is good, as it always is, but doesn’t really help the picture out much, if truth be told. This is not the least favourite of the Jess Franco movies I’ve seen, and he’s a director who’s made some incredible, visually addictive movies... but it’s definitely down there in the lower depths of his work as far as I’m concerned so I can’t really recommend this one myself. If you’re a Francophile and a completeist, you’ll almost certainly want to check this one out. If not... I’d maybe proceed with caution.

She Killed In Ecstasy

Miranda Rights In Tights

She Killed In Ecstasy
Spain/West Germany
Directed by Jess Franco
Severin Films Zone A/B/C Blu Ray

Warning: Ecstatic spoilers within.

So this is another of those films I haven’t seen in a while and am just catching up to again because of the beautiful Blu Ray transfer just put out by Severin Films. In my previous review of the companion Blu Ray to this set, the famous Franco classic Vampyros Lesbos, I mentioned how this was one of the last few films that the inimitable Soledad Miranda made for Jess before her quite tragic and untimely violent death at the age of 27... in circumstances which surely go down in movie history as one of the most cruelly ironic twists of fate. For my review of that movie and a very brief history of that untimely end, please see my Vampyros Lesbos review here.

Now, She Killed In Ecstasy is a film I’ve always remembered, after first seeing it more than a decade ago, as being the poor half sister to Vampyros Lesbos. I recalled it as being quite fun but nowhere in the same league and, it seems, a lot of people would have agreed with me. However, now I see it again, looking utterly fantastic in Severin’s new, crystal clear transfer (which is the best it’s ever looked), I’d have to say that I actually prefer this movie in some ways and that Vampyros Lesbos, while absolutely great, runs it a very close second, now, in my estimation of these two movies.

The films begins with the famous Manfred Hübler and Sigi Schwab psychedelic and deeply groovy music but it’s playing over shots of really grim cabinets housing medical curios such as brains in jars and still born babies... totally undercutting the jollity of the score in a bizarre juxtaposition of sound and image which almost sets up a schizophrenic conflict in the intended audience. It’s a really strange choice.

A woman comes out of an amazing looking architectural home (the same one Franco uses in his later film Countess Perverse, reviewed here) and takes a long flight of stone steps onto a beach. Wearing a purple cape and with an air of cool confidence, she could almost be either Countess Carody from Vampyros Lesbos herself, or Lina Romay’s character in Female Vampire (reviewed here). When we see a close up of her face and she starts telling her story, via the main body of the movie, in flashback with her narrative voice over, her beauty hits you right in the eye like a big pizza pie... that’s Soledad. At least, I think it’s mostly in flashback... I’ll come back to that point a little later.

Once again, the movie is one of Franco’s most visually arresting and he’s up to his tricks of using flashy zooms and lots of reactive, moving camerawork here. With this one especially, Franco shoots the film is like it's being voyeuristically observed through a psychedelic fog. Like someone was standing on the other side of a hot wax lamp, almost, and watching the action through the glass distortion. Once again he uses lines and shapes created by the environments he shoots in to split up the performers into sections and have them interact with each other from different perspective planes within the same shot. And it’s rarely distracting enough that you’ll necessarily catch all this stuff within the first viewing... it’s all just shot perfectly without, for the most part, intruding on the consciousness of the audience.

Back to the story of the movie and we have Soledad Miranda’s character, Mrs. Johnson, being shown around her husband’s laboratory by the short lived character... um... Mr. Johnson, played a bit woodenly, it has to be said, by Fred Williams. Soledad is wearing an “almost not there” silver bikini in these earlier scenes and it really is quite something to see. Not many ladies could probably pull off wearing something this amazingly revealing but she is able to get away with wearing it and, combined with her absolutely amazing and powerful screen presence, I was wowed by her costume, rather than finding myself laughing at it.

Her husband, it turns out, is doing something medically revolutionary which can't help but look like mad and creepy science to anyone not inhabiting his or, possibly, his on-screen wife’s head. The medical panel who he seeks to approve his project thinks so too... in no uncertain terms. He is banned from continuing his experiments with embryos and his licence to practice medicine is revoked. His lab is smashed up, even, by the group of enthusiastic medical nay-sayers.

This, understandably, upsets the character a tad and it’s not long before he finds that he’s a man driven insane by the constantly corny repeating flashback dialogue of the medical council’s conclusions on the soundtrack. That is to say that, from this point, whenever he is on screen and being looked after by the wonderful Mrs. Johnson, he has the voices of those characters echoing in his head and is unresponsive. Those characters being played by regular Franco collaborators Paul Muller, Howard Vernon, Ewa Strömberg and, of course, Jess Franco himself in a fairly large role. Who wouldn’t be driven mad by these voices constantly following you around on the foley? It’s not long before Mr. Johnson slashes his own wrists and, after rolling awake and naked on her bed, Mrs. Johnson finds him in this state. The film very quickly turns into a revenge thriller, not a million miles away from François Truffaut’s movie adaptation of The Bride Wore Black (reviewed here), it has to be said... but Jess Franco style... which means it’s sexy, bloody and has a gorgeously 'swinging' soundtrack on it.

The rest of the film follows the otherwise un-named Mrs. Johnson as she tracks down the four above mentioned members of the medical council and sets herself up as a honey-trap to lure them to bed with her so she can give them her own brand of justice. While the film is full of little 'off the cuff' details like Howard Vernon’s character silently praying before he has sex with her, like he’s saying grace before dinner, it’s mostly a film of big, broad strokes, it has to be said.

Soledad Miranda’s character starts off by stabbing Howard Vernon in the throat and cutting off his genitals before leaving a typical serial killer style note on the wound left by Vernon’s castration... or as Franco’s own character puts it... “his penis was severed”. It’s interesting because you can see the history of the censorship issues this film has had over the years in the way the stock changes to a slightly different quality a little towards the end of the scene where Franco find’s Vernon’s body. He walks into the hotel room and we see him standing over the bed and we register the shock and horror on his face. Then the stock has a bizarre shift in quality which Severin were obviously unable to fully compensate for (but believe me, compared to other versions I’ve seen of this movie, they’ve done a really remarkable job here) as the camera pans down to the bloody aftermath of Soledad’s sexually charged crime.

Next up is the lesbian seduction of Ewa Strömberg’s character, perhaps recalling similar scenes between the two actresses in Vampyros Lesbos. Here, the girl’s love scene is once again shot in such a way that it feels like Franco is looking through surrealistically tinted glasses... quite literally in one small sequence where, at the start of the gal’s scene, Soledad very specifically places a half full glass of sherry in front of the camera, obscuring about a half of the screen in the middle of the shot and carrying on the tactic of making things look dynamic and interesting There also seems to be a lot of shadow work in the film, It’s not blatantly overt like an old 1940s noir thriller or even an Indiana Jones homage to such, but the shadow element is there, set up by the way the light is thrown onto the actors in certain scenes such as this one.

This scene is completely wonderful because Soledad kills her victim by smothering her with an inflatable, stripey, transparent pillow which magnifies her victim’s struggle as the camera looks through the pillow at her magnified face. It’s a bit like the smothering scenes you see in the TV show The Prisoner, when the Guardian known as Rover smothers an actor and you see his face pushing through the plastic... but it’s a more colourful and transparent version of that here. It has to be pointed out, though, that the scene does look fairly implausible. Ewa Strömberg puts up virtually no struggle and it seems very strange to think that Soledad could possibly hold her down... and she’s not even trying. The struggle on Ewa’s magnified face is completely at odds with what her flailing arms are passively doing in the long shot here. You know what, though? It really doesnt matter because the aesthetics of this particular murder win out over the implausibility of the crime anytime in my book

The third crime, where Soledad “scissors” Paul Muller’s head and then contemplates him and all else that has happened in her recent past, is notable because it gives us a slow pull back from Soledad’s face to finally end up with the absolutely iconic shot of her that is usually the first one that anyone of my generation remembers of her; the one for which Severin have had a new illustration painted for the new cover. It’s the one shot of Soledad Miranda which has burned itself into my brain over the years from its repeat usage by various companies on video and CD covers.

After this we get another of many brief scenes where Soledad is having an internal conversation with the corpse of her dead husband on their bed, going so far as to make love to it in this part of the movie. Which I find really odd, actually, as the police have been investigating his death and everybody knows about the character’s suicidal demise... so why they let Soledad keep the body, which they evidently did because they find it in her car at the end of the movie, is anybody’s guess. Perhaps  post death laws in the country in which this is set are less stringent than they would be in the UK? Or, you know, perhaps the movie is completely implausible in the details of its storyline.

Franco himself is the fourth and final revenge victim and, frankly, he really leaves himself open for it after swooning upon finding his wife dead at the hands of Soledad’s character. He ends up tied to a chair so Mrs. Johnson can carve him up a bit before stabbing him repeatedly to death... Miranda’s always deeply expressive eyes showing the hate for her victim as she completes her final act of vengeance before... driving her car off a cliff with herself and her husband in it.

Wait. What?

I thought the film was being told from a flashback of her standing on the beach looking lovely at the start of the film. Okay so, if this is the case, how is she dead at the end of her story. Is it a case of the flashback ending at a certain point in the narrative and just being fairly unclear where this takes place? Well, yeah, I would guess so. Not quite sure where that opening sequence comes in unless it’s after the third victim’s demise but... I’m sure I missed a trick here which, you know, is okay because this certainly won’t, I hope, be the last time I watch this beautiful movie.

So there you have it. A beautful work of art with nudity, death, vengeance, some insanely gorgeous looking compositions and a groovy soundtrack by Manfred Hübler and Sigi Schwab... with the very occasional musical insert by Bruno Nicolai, it turns out. Perhaps tracked in from one of his scores for Franco’s other films? Who knows? If you do, just let me know via the comments section at the bottom of this review. The film would be nothing, however, or at least a lot less, without the truly divine presence of the late and very great Soledad Miranda... an actress with amazing screen chemistry who was definitely going to be going places, if not for her truly tragic demise. She Killed In Ecstasy is one of her's, and Franco’s, best films. If you see any of either of their films, make it one of these last few they did together. They truly are a great team... Franco and his original muse, before he found his lifelong partner and star Lina Romay. Especially make a point of buying this excellent new Severin two disc limited edition Blu Ray of the film because the second disc in it is an extended CD of the music from Vampyros Lesbos, She Killed In Ecstasy and The Devil Came from Akasava... which is even longer than the expanded version of the Vampyros Lesbos Sexadelic Dance Party CD put out some years ago. It’s gorgeous music for putting on at swinging, psychedelic parties and your ears certainly won’t regret the purchase.

Vampyros Lesbos

Fluids And Soledads

Vampyros Lesbos
Germany/Spain 1971
Directed by Jess Franco
Severin Blu Ray Zone A

Whenever the name Jess Franco tends to come up in polite, and often not so polite, conversation it usually conjures up an insane director who prolifically wrote, shot, directed and acted in low budget exploitation movies, sometimes even reaching around a shot to operate the camera while filming himself in some of the more extreme but, completely believable, stories I've heard about him. The man who Orson Welles once called his best Assistant Director and a man who churned out films of various quality and comprehensibility over his long career, usually starring his muse and partner Lina Romay. The films which may at first come to mind would possibly be Female Vampire, Countess Perverse (reviewed here), She Kills In Ecstacy (perhaps) but certainly one of these which will almost certainly spring to the front is this key work, Vampyros Lesbos.

Part of that is to do with the fact that it’s a pretty cool movie with some nice photography and female nudity... which there’s still a big market for these days. The other reason is that it was one of the last three films of his to star Soledad Miranda, who has since become a bit of an icon of an actress due to her tragic demise, which took place before any of these last three films were even released into cinemas a year later. A demise which hit Franco hard and it’s no wonder as she was, from the look of the way he photographed her in this and certain others of his films with her, his original on screen muse. A kind of Lina Romay Mark 1, so to speak.

The story goes that Miranda had retired from acting to have a child but came out of retirement when she got a small part in the Hollywood western 100 Rifles. After that, Franco kinda discovered her and started using her in small roles in his own films, like Franco's attempt at a more serious counterpart to the Hammer Dracula movies, Count Dracula, where she starred as Stoker’s character Lucy Westenra opposite Christopher Lee, Klaus Kinski and Herbert Lom. After a few films like this, Franco put her in more starring roles in films like The Devil Came from Akasava, Vampyros Lesbos, She Kills In Ecstacy and Eugenie De Sade, usually billed as Susann Korda to divert attention from her name due to the sexually charged nature of her roles. It says something about Franco’s pace as a director that there were three films in the can and not yet released before the actress met her dreadful fate.* A fate that came along under the guise of opportunity when she, her husband and her child were on their way to Franco’s house by car. Franco had just received news that his producer would sign a contract with Soledad and make her a big star and she was rushing over to Franco’s house to finalise the deal when a collision with a lorry crushed her car. Her husband and child escaped serious harm but she received injuries which put her in a coma from which she never awoke. A few hours after the crash she was dead. Life can be unbelievably cruel and ironic at times.

Vampyros Lesbos is a great movie. It’s confusing and unspecific in its direction at points, sure, but not as much as some of the worst of Franco’s movies and, out of all of them, I think this film could be classed as one of his great masterpieces.

It opens with a shot of the sun burning orange at dusk on a sea scape and then alternates this during the credits, with a shot of Soledad Miranda as the main antagonist/protagonist (take your pick) of the movie, Countess Nadine Carody. She is either being looked down on or up at by the camera and her presence is full on and in your face as she waves her hands around in an expression of vampiric mesmerism which, okay, sounds a bit rubbish but, because she has such a remarkable presence, it all just kind of works. It also helps that it’s set to one of the most insane but grooviest pieces, Countdown To Nowhere, from the score by David Khune, Manfred Hubler and Siegfried Schwab and... yeah... David Khune is another pseudonym for Franco helping out with the music too.

After this we are treated, straight away, to another gorgeously scored scene where Soledad is performing a kind of “reverse strip” routine in sexy clothing with a naked mannequin. She gyrates slowly as she removes her clothing to dress the mannequin in separate bits and it’s not very long before we realise the mannequin is actually a another 'real' naked woman, a lesbian bond formed between the sensual Countess Carody and her nude puppet. An audience watches the scene attentively in the nightclub in which she is revealed to be performing this routine, including the other main protagonist of the film, Linda, played by Ewa Strömberg (another Franco regular at this time) and her boyfriend. The scene is all raw raunchiness but Soledad manages to still retain her elegance as she performs her piece, writhing naked between the legs of her puppet lover.

The next morning, disturbed from her slumber, Linda is mentally lured by the Countess, apparently in her dreams but it’s all a bit vague an interpretation and Franco’s imagery is, probably quite deliberately, fairly hazy with the details of the narrative. She finds herself in Soledad’s massive island estate where we see blood on the window pane and a scorpion scuttling. We then cut to later when Linda is describing the scene to her psychiatrist. It soon becomes clear that he is not taking her too seriously when we see the pad he is “taking notes” in is filled with his own doodles... which is a nice little sight gag and done, like I’m sure many other films have probably also done over the years, decades before a similar note pad revelation was made in The Cohen Brothers’ greatest movie, The Big Lebowski.  

It is soon revealed that  Linda’s full name is Linda Westinghouse, in vague deference to her origins in the Lucy Westerna role in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a character already played once by her co-star Soledad Miranda, as detailed above. Actually, by the time Linda is sent by her place of employment to see the Countess on her island estate to discuss the legalities of an inheritance left to the Countess, it must be pretty clear that the film is, in many ways, a remake of the stage version (at the very least) of Stoker’s legendary play, loosely based on his own novel. To be fair, most of the movie versions tend to be riffs on the play as opposed to the novel, at least in my experience of them. In this first part of the film then, and presumably in deference to the name of the more commonly used title of the piece, it’s clear that Linda is also, at this point in the movie, a partial stand in for the Jonathan Harker character too (a role satisfied by Renfield at this stage of the story, in some iterations).

Once Linda arrives to talk through the legal proceedings she realises that the Countess is both the lady she saw performing the lewd dance routine and also, quite literally, the girl of her dreams. It becomes even more of a metatextual mystery in terms of the story line when we find that the estate that has been left to her, a castle and so forth, is willed to her by her former lover... one Count Dracula. So this is both a sequel and a partial remake of that earlier story, it would seem. The two get on pretty well and it isn’t long, a matter of minutes, before the girls are shedding their clothing and inhibitions in the sea and on the beach... all lovingly photographed with Franco’s passionate eye for the female form.

When the Countess finally takes her pleasure of Linda, and bites her neck in the time honoured tradition of vampires, it is in a direct metaphor of the nightclub routine earlier in the movie, even utilising some of that same music. However, when Linda awakes, she is confronted with a vision of Carody’s death, floating in her swimming pool. Things then get a bit hazy for a while as Franco tries to keep a shape to the story after this...

Linda wakes up in Dr. Seward's sanitarium after having gone a bit loopy. In this version of the Stoker source, Seward is played by movie veteran Dennis Price, with a strangely inconsistent tone due, I suspect, to possible changes in the scripting which may have been why the structure of the film is a little shaky in the second half. Seward’s role is much more similar, in actual fact, to the Van Helsing role in the original novel, in that he’s much more interested in the supernatural and the occult than you might comfortably expect him to be. There's also a female version of the insane Renfield character from Stoker’s story at the sanitorium called Agra, played by Heidrun Kussin.

After going a bit Renfield-loopy herself, Linda then starts to properly fulfil the Lucy Westenra role that is her “almost namesake” in the original. Or Mina, depending on which adaptation you are taking as your source material for this one, the characters have occasionally switched to fulfil each other’s roles in the cinematic history of the Dracula story (as I point out in my review of the Hammer Dracula here).

At the sanitarium, she flashes back to her boyfriend who she returned to after her "incident". At some point, for no apparent reason, Linda’s boyfriend momentarily takes over the Lucy role with his own loss of blood and... things get a bit confused, I feel. There’s lots more sexuality on display with Linda and the Countess by now and it includes a scene where Linda is fully aware, by this point, that the wine she has been drinking in the company of Carody is, in fact blood. Perhaps Linda’s boyfriend is the source of said beverage but it’s never really made clear, considering Francos slightly surreal mixing of flashback and present but, in the words of William Hurt in The Big Chill... “Sometimes you have to let art wash over you." However, the countess is also suffering from her own dilemma because she is, as she puts it, under Linda's spell also. Something which has never happened in any of her previous vampiric conquests.

By the time the film rushes to its doom laden and crowd pleasing conclusion, the course of the plot line tends to get on a more even keel but story isn’t really the point in a Jess Franco movie, to be honest... hence why I don’t mind revealing some of the details of the tale here. There’s nothing particularly complex about the plot or even the visual metaphors in this movie, but it is stunningly beautiful with lots of fantastic reds, flesh tones and rich blacks, brought to life the best they ever have been in Severin’s new Blu Ray edition of the film. Simple and elegant compositions which are, it has to be said, very erotically charged.

Quite a lot of the film is shot at a slight angle in respect that the camera tends to be placed just slightly above or below the eye line of the actors involved in the set up and, certainly, I think this movie marks one of the times when Franco is at his most visually poetic but, also, his most in-your-face. There are lots of predatory images edited into the main body of this film at key moments, like the scuttling scorpion, to indicate hunter and prey, the drowning scorpion and, at the end, a kite that comes crashing down to earth. However, even when Franco is being quite overt with his metaphors, the shots are so well put together that you can forgive him a lot for any little bumps this movie has at certain points.

There's an impressive shot, for example, with Linda’s boyfriend and the escaped Agra in conversation. Agra is pressed up against a glass window, they are both facing the camera as we look in from outside while they talk. The camera, again looking just slightly up at them, slowly pulls back to reveal the full length of the glass pane. We then see one of the workers at the sanitarium in a reflection of the window opposite on a higher floor, as he sees that Agra has escaped, even though the two in conversation don’t notice and, it’s an almost blink and you’ll miss it moment. Stuff like this is pretty cool and easily worth the price of admission.

At the end of the day. Vampyros Lesbos is a groovy movie with a Francophile pleasing turn by the director himself as a psychotic, sexual killer driven mad by the state of his wife Agra and a full on jazztastic, psychedelic score that was previously released with cuts from this film and She Kills In Ecstasy by the record label Crippled Dick Hot Wax as Vampyros Lesbos Sexadelic Dance Party (one of my favourite albums). There was later a more expanded version of the same album... just a few years ago, in fact. It was also on a rare Lucertola recording of an even more expanded version called Three Films By Jess Franco, which also included music from The Devil Came from Akasava. If you get the new limited edition Blu Ray Severin version of She Kills In Ecstasy at the moment, a reissue of this CD is included inside as the second disc... so that was an instant purchase from me. Also, if you like the music that much, there was also a CD issued by Sideburn Recordings of modern remixes of the tracks from these albums called The Spirit Of Vampyros Lesbos... but it has to be said that, like the majority of these kinds of remix albums, it’s a bit of a hit and miss affair and not nearly as fun as you might think... having the effect of sending you straight back to the original recordings when you’re done listening.

But I digress. Basically, in a nutshell, Vampyros Lesbos is a beautiful looking movie full of extraordinary music and gorgeous looking naked women gyrating around each other as the camera caresses them on your behalf. It’s also one of Franco’s best movies so, if you are a lover of his work and you’ve not seen this... shame on you, go grab the new Severin edition now. If you’ve not seen any of this director’s work before... well this would definitely be one of your best introductions to it too... so definitely look this one up as soon as you get a minute. It’s one of the great sexploitation movies of our time and... Soledad is just perfect in it.

*He directed at least 203 films before his death in 2013 and has a lot more credits besides director on a lot of his movies. Low budget tends to mean you do everything yourself.

Female Vampire

When in Romay...

Female Vampire
1973 France/Belgium
Directed by Jess Franco
Redemption BluRay Region A/B/C

This is one of those eurocinema films you see when you’re young and the imagery stays with you for years... although it’s not exactly the greatest movie ever made. This was one of Lina Romay’s earlier films with the director and of the 120 movies she made before her death last year, the majority of them were made for her lover Franco... taking up “muse duty” after the tragic death of Franco’s equally famous figure of inspiration, Soledad Miranda (perhaps best known for the starring role in two of his movies in particular, Vampyros Lesbos and She Kills In Ecstacy). That Romay was a self confessed exhibitionist meant a match made in heaven for her and Franco and the images of her walking around this film and coming towards the screen out of the fog wearing just a hooded cloak (which manages to reveal everything about her) and a black belt will probably stick in the minds of most red blooded young men who come into contact with this film at an early age.

As a horror film it’s not much good, truth be told, but as a softcore exploitation movie with little dialogue designed to inflame the lusts of all those with a vampire fetish... well it does pretty well on that count (or countess).

The story, such as it is, tells the tale of Countess Karlstein, a mute vampire who sustains her life by giving fellatio or cunnilingus to her sexed up victims (depending on whether she happens to be sexing up a man or a woman, obviously) and then sucking the life force out of them from their respective “naughty bits” when they reach orgasm - a much shorter, toned down version with people wearing clothing and where the Countess gets her vampiric fix by sucking blood from more traditional, self made orifices, was released in some countries as the inappropriately titled, given its highly censored nature, Erotikill.

The film is very much like the more classic Vampyros Lesbos in many ways, but there’s a lot less going on here and, while this makes use of references to Karlstein’s family (which was probably as close as they could get the more famous vampiric name of Karnstein without having copyright issues, is my guess) and even has references to Franco’s earlier Dr. Orloff movie, this doesn’t share the same kind of substance as Vampyros Lesbos, which could easily pass for a not bad parody of Bram Stoker’s Dracula book (or stage version for that matter).

Still, the film is quite hypnotic and not just for the fact that most of the running time is taken up with female nudity, sex and a touch of badly restored S & M (with still material missing from the original shooting, I suspect, as Romay’s character is pre-wounded before we get to the main body of those scenes). Although I imagine the budget for this movie wasn’t what Franco would have wanted, it seems that the inspiration behind some of the shot designs are every bit as thoughtful as some of his other classic works. It’s just that there are vague distractions when a hand held camera is used, for instance, when you suspect the director would rather have used a proper tracking shot for certain sequences. Still, you can still make out the intentions behind the shots and a lot of it is very good.

You also have present Franco himself, as a kind of light weight/minor inconvenience Van Helsing type character, and it’s far from unusual for Franco to save money on his productions by casting himself. One story tells of him shooting himself in close up on a shot for a movie once while operating the camera himself (reaching around it) at the same time.

The presence of cult genre actors Luis Barboo (The Case Of The Scorpion’s Tale, The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein, The Wind And The Lion and Conan The Barbarian etc.) and Jack Taylor (Dr. Jekyll y el Hombre Lobo, The Ghost Galleon and Tender and Perverse Emmanuelle etc) make for another tick box for lovers of this kind of movie too... each of them turning in serious performances for a less than serious movie.

The scoring is pretty decent, although Daniel White’s music is less funky than some of the stuff you might equate with this director. There really does need to be a proper soundtrack CD of this score sometime... it’s really quite infectious and captivating.

So... a brilliant movie of little consequence, although I have to say that the Redemption BluRay I have here surprised me a little in that something seems amiss in terms of quality. I can’t work out if it’s the original source print that the BluRay has been mastered from that’s just absolutely crap in places (especially the opening sequence of Romay emerging from the fog in a forest) or if it’s the actual transfer that’s at fault and, while I’m pleased to have this version and it’s extras, I have older films which look a whole lot better than this on my BluRay and so I did wonder if I’d have been better not purchasing and sticking to my old Region 1 DVD edition from Image Entertainment. I’m fairly new to BluRay so maybe I should start being a bit more discerning when it comes to trusting who is doing what and from which available materials they are doing their “what” with in future.

Anyway, this doesn’t effect the slow burn, cumulative quality of the film any and, if you’re a fan of gratuitous nudity and beautiful women with a touch of somewhat pretentious vampiric angst thrown into the mix and some fairly questionable acting from Lina Romay on this one, then you’re probably going to be able to watch this movie on its own terms for what it is. For novices into the world of Jess Franco, too, I would say this is worth a look, although it’s not quite in the league of such works as Vampyros Lesbos, She Killed In Ecstacy and Countess Perverse (reviewed here). The iconic imagery, however, should pull you in a bit and make you seek out some of this man’s other works. If you do that, let me know what you think.

Countess Perverse (La Comtesse Perverse)

Thus Spake Zaroff’s Frau

Countess Perverse (La Comtesse Perverse)
France 1974
Directed by Jess Franco
Mondo Macabre Region 1

Okay then, The Most Dangerous Game, aka The Hounds Of Zaroff, was first published as a short story by Richard Cornell in the Collier’s Weekly in 1924. It was made into a movie in 1932 and used the same sets as the Skull Island sequences from King Kong, shooting on them at night while King Kong shot during the day (presumably, King Kong’s 1933 release date was due to the vast amount of special effects sequences that were needed to finish the film). Bearing in mind that two of the actors in the movie, Fay Wray and Robert Armstrong, were also shooting in King Kong during the day, I’m guessing they were on something a lot stronger than coffee to keep them on their gruelling schedule (I’m just guessing, don’t quote me on it... I just know what Hollywood studio practices were like in those days).

It’s an entertaining film but also a very important one because it was hugely influential and has left its mark on a variety of films over the years. That is to say, the story has been appropriated in many an official and unofficial remake both at the cinema and as TV episodes of long running series over the decades... the last variant of which I remember seeing being the fifth installment in the Predator series (reviewed here). It’s a very simple story. A man and a woman are shipwrecked on an island owned by one Count Zaroff, who is the world’s greatest hunter and who releases his captive “guests” onto the island in order to continue to feel the thrill of the hunt of “the most dangerous game” in the world... his human prey.

So yeah... it turns up a lot.

Jess Franco’s fast and loose reworking of this concept, Countess Perverse, at least acknowledges its roots while gifting the film with a huntress, Countess Zaroff with her “side kick”, of sorts, being her husband Count Zaroff.

Now then... I’ll get my little grumble about this movie over with and out the way first, okay?

Did Jess Franco, the people marketing this film or, frankly, anyone who was watching it, actually know what the word “perverse” actually means? Obviously not, I fear. As any reader of Edgar Allan Poe’s story The Imp Of The Perverse will tell you, the word means “willfully determined or disposed to go counter to what is expected or desired”, which is why Poe uses it to describe the action of confessing one’s sins instead of allowing oneself to get away with whatever one has successfully kept hidden. It is not, in any way except in application of the words meaning to a specific sentence dealing with sexuality, a term connected to that of sexual perversion. So calling your film Countess Perverse when what you really mean is “Countess who’s really into kinky, sexy stuff”... really doesn’t make sense now, does it? Get it right!

Okay then. Jess Franco.

I always find his particular brand of sexploitation and trash “classics” to be somewhat hit and miss, despite Orson Welles once calling him the best assistant director he’d ever had (the two had worked together on Welles’ adaptation of the stage distillation of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, V, VI and Richard III... Chimes at Midnight in 1965). However, this particular Franco film, in a truly startling, crisp and shiny bright transfer by Mondo Macabre, of an unbelievably gorgeous print, has to be among my favourites... right up there with Vampyros Lesbos, She Killed In Ecstacy and Female Vampire.

Starting off with a flashback sequence told to a couple by a naked woman they “find” washed up on their beach, who has somehow managed to escape the Zaroff’s ideas of deadly entertainment, it soon becomes clear that this other young couple are the ones who supply the Zaroff’s, on their island retreat, with plenty of "fresh meat". I guess you could call either of them... the pimp of the perverse (thanks Edgar). And fresh meat, is exactly right, as it turns out, because Franco’s additional twist to the story is that the hunted game are eaten by the Zaroff’s, who first feed some of their, usually female, last victim unknowingly to their new guest before having sex with her, between the two of them, as a prelude to revealing their sinister nature and their particular “rules of the game”.

The young couple, who supply them and who are looking to get out from under the Zaroff’s employment, also have a penchant for menage a trois style sex and get it on with the survivor before dumping her back on the island for the Zaroff’s. However, when a new young thing played by LIna Romay, who was a very important companion and constant star to Franco right up to her death earlier this year, turns up as the potential next victim for the Zaroffs, things start to go a bit wrong for everyone. One of the couple, Tom, gets quite attracted to Romay’s undeniable charms... and, of course, the three way sexy shenanigans with her kind of clinches the deal and sets up the end of this movie.

The ending is great, by the way. 15 minutes worth of Countess Zaroff, naked except for her bow and arrows, stalking a nude Lina Romay through the long grass of the island. To say that the actress playing the Countess, Alice Arno, is breathtaking beautiful, would be an understatement. Her absolutely gorgeous body with red hair in all the right places is just one of the seductive birthday suits showcased in the film. If you are into watching Franco’s films for the nudity aspect, then this one is one of his best. It’s also worth mentioning the young Lina Romay again. She’d worked with Franco before, and I suspect they became an item very quickly, but she’s really meant a great deal to him in his life after his first actress/muse Soledad Miranda, died very young, very shortly (I think within a day or so in a car accident) after signing a big American studio contract. Lina Romay became the thing Franco most needed her to be in his movies, someone who could play both achingly innocent or the personification of sadistic corruption as needed... sometimes a little of both in films like Female Vampire. She acted in 120 movies, most of them for Franco, who has directed 197 films to date (his new one is still in post-production).

Looking at this movie, Franco’s shot design is crisp and elegant, even in its intended original aspect ratio of 1.33:1 (aka 4:3) and he manages to get away with a lot of stuff which I’d usually deem bad practice myself such as fairly fast zooms in and out of shots, without killing the swinging mood of the piece or popping you out of the action. I could watch this again every year, I think, without getting bored with it... which is why I was so surprised to find, in Mondo Macabre’s excellent notes on the film, that this was only one of "twelve movies" that Franco directed that year. Twelve! Busy period. I’d heard he’d had a nervous breakdown or two during his time... directing that many feature films a year and maintaining a reputation for bringing them in on time and on budget, it’s really no wonder.

Countess Perverse is an enjoyable romp and I’m really glad I bought this one. It’s a piece of fluff but it’s an extremely well shot piece of fluff with a transfer by Mondo Macabre (still one of the all time great DVD labels) giving it an excellent presentation. This one deserves to be on every Francophile’s must see list... and it’s also a good one to start off with if you’ve never seen any of his films before, I suspect. One of the best DVDs I’ve bought all year. Thoroughly enjoyed it. Check it out.