Linda

Well, it's 1980 and prolific Spanish film director and probable king of sleazy cinema Jess Franco fills 80 minutes of screen time with nudity, frolics, torture and riotous sexual activity - all accompanied by an occasionally inappropriate score from Gerhard Heinz. Inappropriate because the music is jazzy, light, disco-froth throughout, which is fine, but hardly conducive to the occasionally dark moments.

For a film that was seemingly designed to be viewed once by gentlemen in raincoats in darkened cinemas, it is probably redundant to suggest that the tone is all over the place. I mean, who cares? If the film were made today, we would be invited to feel the horror and indignity of the various females whose bodies are used purely for show or as a marketing device. Here, however, no other consideration is given other than the spectacle of flesh and (occasionally uninvited) sex. And yet with lines like "I'll give you so much at once, you won't be able to take it," "I'm almost a virgin" and "You're the wildest, most desirable witch in the world," there's a through-line of camp fun on display that reminds us that Franco knows exactly the kind of film he is delivering.

The various actors and bodies on display invariably melt into one, and it is difficult to distinguish between then. The styles and fashions from the late 1970s bleeds into everything here, and it is just as well we have recognisable faces like Katja Bienart (who only features briefly) and Antonio Mayans (who is far and away the best actor here) who stand out from the crowd. Ursula Buchfellner as Betsy and Raquel Evans as Sheila are also of note. Enthusiastic though the other performers are, it makes me realise how much I miss the idiosyncratic charms of a Lina Romay or Anne Libert.

'A journey into a tropical sex paradise', as the trailer tags this, might be over-estimating things, but ultimately 'Linda' is a fairly light and frothy porn-laced drama that has no pretensions whatsoever. My score is 6 out of 10.