Necronomicón

After making several "normal" horror/exploitation films, Franco indulged in this baffling but engaging fever-dream of supernatural fantasy. Around this time, Franco, like his French counterpart Jean Rollin, began an arty phase, weaving haunting scenes of surrealism, eroticism, and horror into enigmatic, loosely constructed stories.

Both directors were notorious for writing scripts a few hours before shooting or starting a film without a script based on a dream, trusting improvisation and inspiration to furnish the rest of the story. The difference is that Rollin usually discovered some logical explanation along the way for all the weird goings on, while Franco's work remains ambiguous.

Our story begins with the beautiful redhead Lorna (Janine Reynaud) as a dominatrix in an avant-garde S&M nightclub act for jaded sophisticates. She is the symbol of dangerous seduction and the obsession of men and women alike. Her Mephistophelean manager (Jack Taylor) has somehow transformed her into "the essence of evil - a devil on earth", but how and why is left unexplained. There are long, lyrical dream sequences (nicely shot in soft, hazy tones) where she repeatedly returns to a Gothic castle by the sea. Roaming through the elegant rooms, she has memories of a past life as a countess. (Her thoughts, like the thoughts of most of the characters, are related via narration.) In a highly effective scene, a room full of mannequins dressed in period gowns become animated and threatening.

As fantasy and reality blend together, there are many strange encounters, tastefully restrained nude scenes (unusual for Franco), a few murders that may be hallucinations, and a decadent party straight out of "La Dolce Vita". In fact, Franco seems to be under the spell of Fellini (especially "Juliet of the Spirits") for much of the film.

As the story shifts from Portugal to Berlin, there are some nice scenes of the austere German city and creative shots (reflections in a car window, ducks on a pond) accompanied by poetic and philosophical musings. Clearly, there is some kind of artistic intent here despite a flawed and confusing narrative. A profusion of random ideas and beautiful/bizarre images pop up like wildflowers all over this crazy dreamscape but offer no explanation. Like many David Lynch films, the story is a head-scratcher, but there is enough stylish and visually rewarding material to make it worth seeing.

"Succubus" has Janine Reynaud as Lorna, a nightclub performer whose sadomasochistic live shows attract a plethora of wealthy onlookers. Though her shows are a success, Lorna begins to lose her grip on reality, fading in and out of a dreamlike marathon of bizarre encounters, images, and even murders.

As with virtually all Jess Franco films, "Succubus" suffers a serious incoherence issue— the editing is at times sloppy, the pacing is languorous and sometimes un-involving, and the central premise and exposition are all but essentially forgotten within the first ten minutes. The opening scene is clear and captivating, but the audience loses any and all potential grip immediately after— such is Jess Franco. With a plot that is either intrinsically unintelligible, or perhaps ingeniously molded to mirror the schizophrenic mind, the film instead offers visuals a plenty.

Sexually-charged, gaudy, and thoroughly dazzling are the aesthetics here, from the seediness of the nightclubs to the various sets and scenarios which Lorna is immersed in; there is a consistent visual flair that Franco employs which guarantees audience attention just on a surface level. The hallucinogenic nature of the film is reminiscent of adventures down the rabbit hole, albeit a bit more macabre and ten times as sexual. The stringing together of waking reality or waking fantasy is powerful on a subconscious level, as each of the images provoke without relent.

It's not difficult to see why some people can't stand the film, or Jess Franco, but there's something unusually captivating about "Succubus". Not being the biggest Franco fan, I did stumble through the film at times and I did find it dull in more than one instance, but it is a thoroughly bizarre amalgam of images and mindsets inhabited by a murderous nightclub S&M stripper/performance artist, and there's something inherently fascinating about that whether you like it or not. Even if you wanted to be bored, it's kind of hard to be. Confused? That's understandable. 6/10.

I am fascinated by simple things: watching a 'feelgood' movie makes you feel good, and the opposite. Yet, this simple process comes from the most astounding mechanism, which props up every aspect of waking life. You pick your friends this way, dream, suffer and love this way—all intuitively, without much conscious thought.

Now turn to this film. Franco is sort of a gamble for me. He works so fast, that when cameras start rolling the thing is basically half-formed and taking shape as you watch. This is nice. I don't mean to make any excuses for what the films clearly lack, but it's an interesting way to make films, more loose than usual; what some of the best filmmakers attempt, trying to sneak up to who is really watching. It's a living experience if you can stay mindful. (by contrast to someone like Kubrick or Nolan who puts the vision first, deftly maps everything ahead of time so it reaches you lifeless)

So for me, the gamble is squeezing past the sloppy overall vision faster than you can reason. This is staying mindful, by which I mean let yourself be neither numbed nor swayed by the sex or violence or the apparent sloppiness. If you don't squeeze past fast enough, you'll be stuck behind a wall of finding faults, not a fun place to be. If you do, Franco can reward because that is the level where he starts to be intuitively interesting; the idea is to be already on the inside when he starts tethering images.

Sometimes when you get there, it's just empty fabric, but sometimes not. The point is that he can work on a semiconscious level, which is not conscious thought and most filmmakers utterly miss. This film gets there better than any of the rest I've seen.

The main premise is a woman unsure of herself and reality. The opening scene is in a dungeon where she has a couple tied up and playfully tortures them with a knife, this would be the typical Franco film you are geared to expect but we soon find it's a staged scene, pointing at fabrication. Back home, she performs a striptease for her man but he's bored and rolls to sleep. The next scene is where, dismayed, she walks out as if in a dream and wanders to a seaside castle, where apparently she has another life and a child. More. She suffers from amnesia, and later she pops with others in a party what looks like acid tabs.

This is all loosening up reality so we can get to the interesting stuff, simple entry points.

So the film is where the woman wanders around in a narrative haze of folded time, not unusual for Franco. But there's more than languid air here. Franco namedrops Godard at one point, I was reminded more of Resnais and later Raoul Ruiz, who was also influenced by Resnais.

Men approach her claiming to know her (we presume sexually), but she can't remember. Won't?

All sorts of hypnotic images intrude in her story, usually of men who pressingly ask questions about art and pop culture—a Godardian 'loan'. Her man assumes the role of Mickey Spillane and slaps and interrogates her as if she's a film noir dame holding out on him. At the party, the host reads up from a book about the woman as temptress and succubus who seduces, leads astray and drains men. All this reinforces a sense of sexual guilt and suffocation.

Superficially, it's about the woman's journey through masculine perceptions of her, boring if you think of it in the Catholic context which the conscious mind of Franco was probably addressing. Superficially, this is presented to us as 'brainwashing' by her man. Bo- ring.

What's powerful about this, is wondering a bit about who or what is tethering images into a story. This is beyond conscious control of images, up to you to ponder.

From the inside of her dream, you can't separate inside from outside, images simply bubble up in some order. These images are all her own dream, gradually they take the form of violent urges, being in that story gradually she feels more impure. What is causing this to happen? What starts out as her own reverie, is it slowly polluted by these other perceptions?

Surely making out with the young girl is her own genuine urge to be apart from men, interrupted by the compulsive desire to kill. Or is it? Is it something her man would fantasize about, who she wants to please? Is she becoming the character imagined of her? Is the self fetching the images or the other way around, the images gradually acquire a self?

This right here is the level where Franco is intuitively interesting. It is that semi-abstract space of story not tainted by logical mind, involuntary memory. If you have to see only a single Franco film, make it this or Eugenie De Sade.

The timing was right. Art house sex films were all the rage and the marketing in the States was simple and brilliant, taking good advantage of punters seeking cinema kicks during the dawn of the sexual revolution. A phone number was published for people to call who wanted to know what the title meant. The bewildering erotic-horror element and the hallucinatory visuals and dialogue were not what many of them expected.

Old-timers in the Manhattan theatrical exhibition business told me it did very well at the box office. The put-downs by Canby and Ebert didn't hurt. Newspaper of the subway crowd, The New York Post, gave it a good review. The gloss of Euro-sophistication gave it a veneer of respectability that the crude sleaze of routinely shot American sexploitation films lacked. Viewers didn't feel the urge to slink out of the theater trying not to be seen.

In today's DVD and streaming world, with thousands of independent theaters now vanished from the landscape, without titillating ads in big city newspapers, Succubus-style films released today would be quickly forgotten.

This was an early color film for Franco but he seems to have mastered the new process with relatively little problems, here utilizing a decidedly Bava-esque palette (the famous scene with the mannequins, for instance). SUCCUBUS is considered a transitional film for Franco because, from here on in, the emphasis on eroticism will become much more pronounced until it almost turns into pornography sometime during the next decade. I haven't watched any films from the latter category but this film certainly pushes the issue as far as it was permissible at the time! Here, too, because of its dream-like nature (as was also to prove the case later with A VIRGIN AMONG THE LIVING DEAD [1971]) the film's narrative lapses and general 'incoherence' are easier to accept than in, say, EUGENIE DE SADE (1970) where one does not really expect to find such liberties – though I am beginning to realize that, with Franco, virtually anything goes!

Even though he does not receive credit for writing the screenplay, it is hard to imagine that Franco had no hand in its actual conception, as the themes the film explores are certainly in keeping with the rest of his oeuvre (right from the very first scene, the sleazy nightclub act, which reappears over and over in his films). While the plot is not easy to follow (it actually pays to read about it beforehand, because otherwise it would be practically impossible to make head or tails of anything!), it copiously references noted figures from the various arts – paintings, literature, cinema, music – which apparently pre-occupied Franco during this period. Unfortunately, most of it is probably beyond the reach of most audiences (myself included) but I must say that I was very pleased to learn that Franco, through a line spoken in the film by Janine Reynaud, held Bunuel, Lang and Godard as the epitome of cinema – three film-makers whose work is unmistakably linked (Bunuel chose film as his creative métier after watching Lang's DESTINY [1921]; Lang appears as himself in Godard's CONTEMPT [1963]) and all of whom clearly influenced Franco in the initial phases of his career. In particular, there is a brief repeated scene where Michel Lemoine, looking straight at the camera, describes Reynaud as 'a devil on earth' which reminded me of a similar 'gimmick' used by Bunuel in THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL (1962).

The film has some very striking imagery (not least of all, the two S&M scenes that were pretty much taboo at this point) with the soft-focus and often sensual dream sequences being particular highlights; another key scene finds Reynaud and Jack Taylor going up to her castle and he recounts the tale of Faustine, a Succubus, to her. But, even in this shortened version of the film, one still has to contend with banal passages like the drugged costume party sequence and other moments where the pace drops. Also, I have a quibble regarding the film's latter stages: why did Jack Taylor all of a sudden want to do away with the Janine Reynaud character (the irony of his unconsciously 'hiring' the Devil himself to do this is interesting but it remains frustratingly unexplained).

The music, as is customary for a Franco film, provides the perfect counterpoint to the onslaught of visual and narrative ideas; special care is also taken with the sound effects which are meant to illustrate Janine Reynaud's disorientation (and, with her, the viewer's). The casting of the main roles is appropriate as well: Reynaud may not rank among Franco's loveliest leading ladies but it is arguable whether anyone could have essayed the part with more conviction and, in any case, her sensual body is certainly utilized to the hilt throughout; Jack Taylor is commanding enough as her shady manager/lover; Michel Lemoine makes for a mysterious and sinister Mephistophelean figure; Howard Vernon's brief appearance is a natural, and typically professional.

Obviously, I would love to see the original full-length German-language version of the film released as a SE DVD, but one wonders whether that will ever come to pass. At least, my VHS copy was a one-up on the now-OOP R1 Anchor Bay DVD, as the film was presented in its correct (I assume) widescreen ratio! The film's silly pan-and-scan theatrical trailer (for the U.S. version) was also included.