In short: Lorna the Exorcist (1974)

Original title: Les possédées du diable

Because a mysterious woman named Lorna (Pamela Stanford, making up for her lack of eyebrows with the most extreme eye make-up the 70s have to offer) says so, rich guy Patrick Mariel (Guy Delorme) takes his wife Marianne (Jacqueline Laurent) and his nearly eighteen year old daughter Linda (Lina Romay) to some brutalist looking nightmare city in the Camargue instead of St. Tropez as he promised them. He doesn’t have much of a choice, for Lorna is a demon (or something), and eighteen years ago, Patrick made a pact to beget Lorna’s daughter and future replacement in the soul buying biz on his wife – don’t ask about the technical details, please – in exchange for the usual prosperity and power.

Now, Lorna wants Linda, her kinda-sorta daughter. Patrick isn’t willing to actually give away his beloved daughter to Evil, but he will have little choice in the matter.

In between this, we regularly pop in with a Madwoman (Catherine Lafferière) who likes to wear no panties and rave about Lorna. She’s under the care of a Doctor played by Uncle Jess Franco himself, so I’m sure everything will turn out well for her.

Why she is in the movie at all is anybody’s guess – she might be meant to be just another victim of Lorna jacking up the nudity and writhing quota, or the rest of the film may be her hallucinations. We don’t know, Jess doesn’t tell, as is par for the course with him.

As regular readers of this blog know, I have a high tolerance for Jess Franco’s style of bullshit – at least in his films made before 1990 or so – but this movie – decidedly not about an exorcist named Lorna – is a bit of a drag. Despite being on the pornier side of Franco’s output, until its final twenty minutes or so, this lacks the languorous perversity of many of the director’s better films, but keeps the usual tedium. What is laughingly called the plot takes ages to actually reach the point I’ve described above, and there’s not much else going on.

The moments of weird visual poetry that are a large part of the draw of Franco’s films for me are few and far between, and much of the expected copious full frontal nudity with dollops of the macabre feels curiously perfunctory and definitely un-erotic. Lorna really only comes into its own as something of interest in its final twenty minutes or so, when Franco doubles down on the perversity – nothing says class like Lina Romay sucking Stanford’s breast while Stanford repeatedly moans “my daughter! my daughter!”, not to speak of the dildo – and things become a bit more lively than they were before.

For the Franco initiate like me, that’s at least enough to make this supposed attempt to jump on the possession movie bandwagon worth watching once; sane people should probably avoid the experience.

In short: Erotic Ghost: Siren (2004)

A gang of Yakuza whose members are gifted with typical Yakuza names like Chucky and Jews has made a big robbery. The group decides to hide out in an abandoned gold mine until a boat will get them and their ill gotten gains of one and a half million dollars out of the country.

While they are picking up supplies from a girl (AV actress Sora Aoi) waiting for them by the side of the road, their quite badly tucked away loot just falls onto her. These are not the most suave of gangsters.

Obviously, the girl now knows too much and has to be kidnapped.

At their hide out, the gangsters' egos and greed start to clash something fierce. The situation isn't much helped by the fact that the poor helpless girl isn't as poor and helpless as you might think. In fact, she is a demon preying on the greed of men, driven by a healthy love for killing her victims during intercourse. She is having a fun time setting the men against each other. Which wouldn't be all that difficult with these men even without her hypnotic powers.

Another Japanese sex and horror film about a men-murdering siren? Well I'm in. This is somewhat different from Siren X in that it is not a true pinku, but a made for DVD film with a lot of sex (yes, there's a difference - namely less sex and a longer running time in this non-pinku).

The film's main selling point is of course Sora Aoi, who (besides being really rather hot when she puts her mind to it) has a strange screen presence perfectly fitting for this role. Her fluctuation between a weird zoned-outness and inappropriate girlyness wouldn't work in your typical drama, but for a mythical creature her demeanor seems perfectly appropriate. I am in fact a bit reminded of Christina Lindberg, whose performances mostly weren't "good" by acting school standards, yet who was able to inhabit her roles through a combination of presence and intelligence.

The rest of Siren is mostly alright. The male actors are all doing their jobs professionally, the script is a little talky and could have used a re-write by someone who hasn't seen quite so many other movies (although I liked the references to Reservoir Dogs), or at least someone who didn't feel the need to throw the fact in your face.

Satoshi Torao's direction is good enough in a cheap hand-camera-loving way. He sometimes uses the dreaded digital colour filters to better, less annoying effect than usual, but mostly he seems to be trying to keep the film's obvious low budget in check and the talking head scenes dynamic through movement.

All in all, I found this to be a perfectly entertaining little film in the classical exploitation manner, which is a lot more than I usually expect from anything shot directly for the DVD market.

 

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