Franco Files: Gemidos de Placer / ‘Cries of Pleasure’ (1982)

OBLIGITORY DISCLAIMER: Readers should be aware that the screengrabs above are NOT sourced from Severin’s 2019 blu-ray edition of ‘Gemidos de Placer’, which I can confirm looks splendid. They originate instead from an older, seemingly VHS or TV-sourced, scan of this film which I happened to have knocking about.

One of the pleasures of life as a Jess Franco fan is that, just when you think you’ve finally got the drop on where the great man was coming from at any given point in his sprawling and tempestuous career, he can still turn around and surprise you.

Never was this more true than during the early 1980s, a period which saw Franco cranking out a frankly bewildering quantity and variety of celluloid, most of it delivered directly to the door of his sometime paymasters at Barcelona-based Golden Film International - a firm whose naive husband and wife proprietors can easily be pictured weeping uncontrollably as yet more couriers arrive at their office door bearing new film cans to add to the ever-growing mountain of unreleased / unreleasable product piling up around them… all courtesy of the tireless Senor Franco.

As more of Franco’s Golden-era films become readily available to viewers who were denied the opportunity to obsessively haunt back-street Spanish sex cinemas in the early 1980s (largely thanks to the noble efforts of Severin Films, Stephen Thrower and Francophile underworld of the fan-sub/trading circuit), his work during this creatively fertile era is increasingly revealed as a series of sharp left-hand turns, with his output during 1982 alone ranging from lackadaisical sex comedies to sado-erotic treasure hunts, neo-noir / new wave youth movies, gothic horrors and inexplicable, family-oriented kung-fu fantasies. In the midst of which, we find the little number we’re looking at today - one of the most sombre, disturbing and formally experimental works of his entire career.

Sketchily distributed around porno theatres for a few months in 1983, with promotional material consisting solely of a generic photo-collage poster featuring a man who doesn’t even appear in the movie thrusting his Y-fronts in the direction of Lina Romay’s face, ‘Gemidos de Placer’ [‘Cries of Pleasure’] is, like many of Franco’s best erotic films, a work that only a stone-cold psychopath could emerge from feeling frisky.

Yet another descent into the soul-withering, sex-horror netherworld previously explored in the likes of Lorna the Exorcist and Doriana Grey, ‘Gemidos..’ takes place, perversely, in just about the most beautiful location imaginable – a luxurious villa situated high on the cliffs above the director’s spiritual home, the Valencian coastal town of Calpe. (1)

Bright, elevated and open to the elements (not to mention publically visible for miles around), this villa seems a frankly absurd place for this tale of insular, amoral depravity and dead-eyed introspection to play out, but… would it be too much of a stretch to suggest that Franco is deliberately playing on some Antonioni-esque notion of spiritual disconnection between human beings and their environment here? I wouldn’t put it past him.

Beginning with a stunning vista of the Calpe’s unmistakable Peñón de Ifach, the film’s opening shot slowly pans across the bay to reveal the figure of Franco’s regular camera tech/right hand man during this period, Juan Solar, here playing the mute, guitar-strumming servant who will go on to act as mute witness to the assorted atrocities committed within the villa.

After zooming in for a close-up on Solar’s fingers picking out a cyclical guitar melody as he leans precariously on the balcony’s guard-rail, the camera then pulls back as a heart-rending Daniel White piece for solo cello abruptly cuts in on the soundtrack, revealing the shimmering surface of a swimming pool. In what appears to be the director’s tribute to ‘Sunset Boulevard’, a naked male corpse (recognisable to fans as Franco’s ubiquitous ‘80s leading man Antonio Mayans) floats face down in the water.

Sadly we don’t get a narrating voiceover from Mayans’ corpse in this case, but Solar’s character instead does the honours (dubbed with Franco’s own voice, weirdly), and it is within his warped, potentially unreliable, memories we will presumably be spending the next eighty-something minutes.

Already in this this extended opening shot, we have a Leone-esque sense of grandeur and clammy, melancholy feel which immediately sets ‘Gemidos..’ apart from the fly-by-night sex comedies and exploitation flicks which surround it in Franco’s ’82 filmography, but as we slide back, noir-style, into the past, the minimalist plot which begins to unfold nonetheless feels very much like a mish-mash of familiar bits and pieces, reheated from the director’s numerous earlier tales of Sadean libertines getting up to no good in Mediterranean beauty spots.

Antonio (Mayans), apparently an idle playboy of some kind, arrives home at his villa, bringing his latest squeeze Julia (Romay) to “meet his servants,” numbering both Fenul (Solar’s character) and Marta (Elisa Vella), who soon reveals to Julia that she is actually both Antonio’s long-term lover and kind-of adopted daughter.

(This bit of plotting is patently ridiculous, by the way - Marta claims that Antonio and his wife plucked her out of poverty on the Barbary Coast when she was a young girl, and that she has lived with them ever since… despite the fact that Vella’s features are closer to being East Asian than African, and that she is clearly around the same age as the other cast members! Franco’s full spectrum disdain for realism will be further discussed below.) (2)

“He raped me when I was twelve, and I’ve loved him ever since,” Marta casually states, a troubling assertion which very much sets the tone for much of what is to follow. And yes, in addition to his new girlfriend and his live-in slave girl, turns out that that insatiable rascal Antonio also has a wife to deal with - Martina, played by Rocío Freixas. And as it happens, she is being released from the clinic today, so she’ll be home in time for dinner. Great! (3)

As you’d reasonably expect of an ‘80s Franco joint, casual nudity, languid seductions and fevered tongue-waggling are soon the order of the day, but right from the outset, the sex here is dark, with Antonio reaching his first climax with Julia as he whispers of his plan to murder Martina and steal her (apparently considerable) fortune.

Of course, Antonio is also simultaneously conspiring with Marta to do away with Julia, but… needless to say, it all becomes a bit of a blur before long, especially once Marta brings out another round of her “special cocktails” (“it’s an old recipe, from my ancestors”). They seem to have quite an effect. And, at the end of the day, does it really matter who’s doing what to whom anyway, so long as everybody cums and somebody dies?

“Twenty minutes of plot, sixty minutes of sex” may be a common complaint whenever quote-unquote ‘mainstream’ film criticism tries to get to grips with with erotica/porn, but here Franco proves that in the right hands (so to speak), the sex itself can be both aesthetically and narratively compelling, even as it progresses at the strung out, tidal pace at which he prefers to weave his weird spell. After the initial set up, the narrative progresses (in both linear and emotional terms) almost entirely through the compulsive, obsessional sexual (and occasionally homicidal) behaviour of the characters within the villa.

And, we haven’t yet mentioned the film’s primary technical innovation - namely, the fact that, uniquely within his filmography, Franco chose to shoot much of ‘Gemidos de Placer’ as a series of extended, real time single takes, in the manner of Hitchcock’s ‘Rope’.

Zooming and refocusing mid-shot in order to save time and minimise camera set-ups had of course been Franco’s standard MO for many years at this point, but even so, the amount of rehearsal and pre-planning needed to keep his cast engaged and on-point, and his compositions varied and imaginative, across ten or twelve minutes of uncut screen time must have been considerable.

Belying the semi-improvisational, “shoot first, ask questions later” methodology with which Franco is generally assumed to have assembled his films, ‘Gemidos..’ in fact stands as a testament to the kind of hard graft he was prepared to put into even the most marginal, sparsely distributed projects, when inspiration struck.

Restricted to a fixed camera position, acting as his won operator as per usual, the director’s trusty zoom lens is of course running hot throughout, as he delves once more into his hypnotic, all-consuming pursuit of sexual abstraction. Though perhaps not as psychedelic as some other Franco projects, ‘Gemidos..’ certainly has its moments.

Ranging far and wide from his voyeur’s vantage point in the centre of the room, the director/camera man shoots the languorous depravity being enacted at his behest through distorting glass screens, swinging bead curtains and even the gauze of a Japanese print screen, at times transforming the villa’s gaudily prosaic holiday home furnishings into his patented brand disorientating avant garde freakery. By and large however, this particular outing feels more narcotic than psychotropic; more an addict’s exhausted reverie than a cosmic trip into the depths of the upholstery.

Nonetheless, anyone who’d still write Franco off as a lazy or slap-dash filmmaker should consider the effort which must have gone into planning the single, extended shot which comprises Marta’s violation, murder and the disposal of her body. From his fixed position at the top of the villa’s staircase, Franco covers all of the necessary action, scanning up and down to the stairs with perfect timing to catch characters as they move from room to room, zeroing in on faces and details as required - essentially using a technique first adopted as a cost-cutting exercise to mount a remarkable display of cinematic virtuosity.

It is one of the inherent ironies of the director’s eccentric approach to cinema however that appreciation of his technical achievement here will likely be lost on many first time viewers, as they instead try to deal with the unconvincing-bordering-on-non-existent ‘special effects’ through which Marta’s death is conveyed. Franco always of course favoured, shall we say, ‘emblematic’ make-up effects over any attempt at realism, but the practical difficulties of applying stage-blood to Elisa Vella’s body whilst a shot was actually in progress seems to have pretty much flummoxed him here.

The results prove so half-hearted that they fail to really serve their intended narrative purpose, leaving us temporarily uncertain what has actually occurred. Have they just cut her a bit? Is this part of some kinky game? Has she passed out or gone to sleep? Oh, no, wait -- here comes poor old Fenul to drag the body away. That’s… pretty dark.

In a sense though, perhaps it’s just as well that the presentation of this murder is so botched - the sheer callous cruelty of seeing a remorseless couple casually kill their devoted daughter/slave in a drugged up haze midway through a sex act would be so horrible as to be almost unwatchable, were it presented in a more realistic manner. Even by the twisted standards of a Jess Franco sex-drama, the extent to which Marta is treated as human garbage by the people she claims to love her feels truly vile. (The Marquis de Sade, who is generously assigned a story credit here, would no doubt have approved.)

Nymphomania may be a ubiquitous concept in erotica, but Franco is one of few filmmakers I’m aware of who manages to portray this much ballyhooed affliction, not as a mere fantasy of female promiscuity, but as something closer to what it would presumably boil down to in reality; as a kind of all-consuming sickness, an unscratchable itch, prompting an agony of ever more remote, unsatisfactory physical debasement and mental dysfunction.

Seeing Lina Romay writhing alone on a sofa in a darkened room, contorting her body in a truly alarming (even by her standards) auto-erotic fit, whilst a plaintive guitar melody is accompanied by Franco’s own eerie, wordless vocals on the soundtrack, is a weird and dissonant experience indeed. Rivalling the aforementioned ‘Lorna..’ and ‘Doriana..’ as one of Lina’s most extreme performances, her body language in ‘Gemidos..’ becomes increasingly monstrous and unnatural as the film progresses, further complicating its ostensible function as common-or-garden erotica.

Likewise, whilst it is obligatory for any remotely kinky erotic movie to have somebody banging on about the intertwined nature of pleasure and pain at some point, Franco here dares here to remind us that this relationship is a two-way street. Pain may become pleasurable, sure, whatever, but physical pleasure can also blur all too easily into pain, and by the final stretch of this film’s debauchery, the two states have become effectively indistinguishable, as the characters’ ever-more desperate coupling begins to seem less like personal gratification and more like some kind of compulsive self-mutilation.

For a while there in fact, it seems as if poor old Antonio is actually going to be fucked to death, as, exhausted after innumerable bouts of sexual congress, he painstakingly tries to rouse himself for one more go-round, as Lina, equally pale and far-gone, dutifully mounts him. Essentially presenting sex as self-destruction, it’s an expression of mania worthy of a Zulawski movie.

Though ‘Gemidos de Placer’ lacks the pulpy / fantastical accoutrements of Franco’s earlier tales of Sadean evil-doers – no red-tinted black masses, basements full of frozen lovers or cannibal feasts for these libertines – a more prosaic, more unsettling evil is revealed in Fenul’s mumbled voiceovers, which serve to drag the film firmly into the realm of horror.

Introducing a terrible flipside to Antonio and Martina’s strutting, elitist exhibitionism, he implies that one of his main roles within the villa is to dispose of the bodies, recalling an occasion on which his master and mistress apparently killed a young boy and pleasured themselves whilst smearing their with his blood (“..he was so little - they sliced his throat like a pig”).

“I don't like it when they become soggy and begin to dissolve… covered in flies..,” he muses at the film’s conclusion, implying a recurring pattern of sexually-motivated murder which these characters have been indulging in for…. who knows how long?

In view of this knowledge of course, Martina’s closing declaration that “unlimited debauchery awaits” following Antonio’s death sounds none too promising, either for the two surviving women, or for anyone else for that matter. How long will either of them last, and who else will suffer at their hands in the process, we’re forced to ask as they painfully maneuverer themselves once again into sixty-nine position for a desultory, exhausting final sex scene which - like so much in this uniquely grim inversion of softcore smut - feels more funereal than erotic.

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SCORECARD: 

 

Kink: 4/5 

Creepitude: 4/5 

Pulp Thrills: 2/5 

Altered States: 3/5 

Sight Seeing: 4/5 

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(1) If you missed it the first time around, please do check out the first (and thus far only, sadly) instalment of my Great Jess Franco Location Tour - primarily covering Calpe - here.

(2) Elisa Vella’s only other credits on IMDB comprise three other Franco films from the early/mid ‘80s, the best known being ‘Mansion of the Living Dead’ (also 1982).

(3) In addition to appearing in a number of Franco projects during 1982-3, Rocío Freixas appears to have been a regular fixture in lower tier Spanish exploitation and sex cinema between ’76 and the early ‘80s, capping off her career with an appearance in Jose A. Rodriguez’s no doubt uproarious El Erótico y Loco Túnel del Tiempo [‘The Wacky and Erotic Tunnel of Time’] in 1983.

FRANCO FILES: Los Blues de la Calle Pop (1983)

During my visit to Spain last year, prior to my pilgrimage to Calpe for the inaugural instalment in the (hopefully soon to be continued) Great Jess Franco Locations Tour, I was obliged to spend several days just down the coast in Benidorm – a town whose negative reputation couldn’t even begin to prepare me for the reality of its sheer, staggering awfulness.

A baking strip of wall-to-wall concrete and claustrophobic, decaying high rise hotels sucking the life out of a once idyllic beach front, Benidorm is populated largely by roving gangs of bloated, sun-burned British tourists, many of whom seem determined to live down to their nation’s very worst stereotypes by behaving in as thuggish and xenophobic a manner as they can get away with without attracting the attention of the town’s ever-present (and presumably long suffering) police patrols.

Along the front, bars seem to blast out Queen and Bryan Adams for about sixteen hours a day whilst serving microwaved pizzas and endless steins of watered down lager, whilst further back from the beach, the streets, distressingly, begin to resemble the dying centre of some economically deprived English town - full of familiar decaying chain stores, rubbish-strewn pavements and a vague sense of menace.

Deeper into what passes for Benidorm’s “pleasure quarter” meanwhile, in between Brit-owned faux-pubs proudly advertising the fact that no Spanish is spoken within, one can find beer-sodden strip joints, sex clubs and, I’m sure, vice-related enterprises of a less legal nature, all of an order so grimy and desperate that even Jess Franco himself might have thought twice before paying them a visit.

In view of these horrors, I have subsequently been delighted to discover ‘Los Blues de la Calle Pop’ (“The Blues of Pop Street”), an extremely strange little movie that Franco filmed in Benidorm in the midst of his early ‘80s Golden Films purple patch. (1) Herein, our hero rechristens the town “Shit City”, reimagining it in his own inimitable fashion as a kind of neo-noir dystopian wonderland of organised crime, rampaging punks and sweaty sexual violence.

Fitting roughly into the lineage of whimsical, ramshackle thrillers Franco had been occasionally banging out ever since La Muerte Silba un Blues in ’62, the inexplicably named ‘.. Calle Pop’ (wouldn’t “Shit City” have been a better title?) begins with a scene in which down at heel private eye Felipe Marlboro (Antonio Mayans) is hired by a sad-eyed young lady named “Mary Lucky” (played, with typical Franco weirdness, by a one-shot actress credited only as “Mary Sad”). She pleads poverty, but reluctantly agrees to pay Marlboro back with a bit of casual sex if he will travel to Shit City to locate her missing boyfriend, who goes by the name of “Macho Jim”.

Mary hands Mayans a picture of “Macho Jim”, and, in a rather bizarre visual gag, we see an insert shot of a Frank Frazetta-style barbarian illustration, prompting the observation that ol’ Jim certainly seems to live up to his name. Other shots of Frazetta artwork will proceed to pop up once or twice through the rest of the film, though whether they are intended as Godardian avant garde interjections or just weird attempts at humour, who knows.

Similarly, quite why the protagonist of this movie is named “Felipe Marlboro”, despite being essentially the same character as Franco’s frequently recurring private eye Al Periera, whom Mayans played on many occasions, is likely to remain a mystery for the ages.

In a further eccentric touch, stills of the Manhattan skyline are used to illustrate the opening credits sequence, over which the credits are scrawled in the form of blood-red children’s sprawl, accompanied by crude, stick-man illustrations, whilst a dusty old bossa-nova/fuzz-rock track blares in the background.

Arriving in ‘Shit City’, Marlboro of course has to stay at one of Benidorm’s very few actual cool-looking hotels (shot from high angle, its geometric outline briefly captures a touch of the sinister, futuristic vibe Franco brought to the ‘Grande-Motte’ complex in Lorna The Exorcist).

Whilst making himself at home, Felipe discovers that his neighbour in the hotel is some kind of loud-mouthed dominatrix type person who seems to have stepped straight out of Derek Jarman’s ‘Jubilee’, complete with hair like a poodle attacked with spray paint, studded leather jacket and a dog collar.

Though Marlboro declines her offer of casual sex, they still hang about together a bit, and as such, he subsequently finds himself in the hot seat when she is unceremoniously murdered by a gang of sadistic underworld heavies, catapulting our hero into a theoretically complex (but actually just boring and inconsequential) sub-‘Big Sleep’ style mystery with the elusive “Macho Jim” at its epicentre… or something.

(The movie’s primary antagonist, by the way, is an unhinged flamenco dancer who assaults his victims via aggressive dance moves, accompanied by snatches of canned music on the soundtrack and cries of “please, not the flamenco!”. Perhaps it’s a Spanish thing, I dunno, but speaking as a foreigner I must say I found this line of humour somewhat less than hysterical. Flamenco-guy’s main sidekick however is a moustached ‘70s long hair / aviator shades type dude, which I thought made for an amusing contrast.)

As I have stated in prior reviews, I feel that, to some extent, Jess Franco never really got the 1980s. Whilst he remained as prolific as ever through the first half of the decade, I just don’t think he was ever managed to exploit the aesthetic of the era as successfully as he had during the ‘60s and ‘70s - thus aligning himself with a long list of ‘60s veterans in all creative fields who hit the skids in a big way once 1980 rolled around.

But, this failure certainly wasn’t down to any lack of effort on Franco’s part, and, as my brief synopsis above implies, what we find ourselves looking at here is – brace yourselves – a Jess Franco movie full of punks.

Yes, the streets of Shit City are veritably overflowing with cockerel-haired, safety pin adorned, leather-clad miscreants, of whom the ill-fated dominatrix girl and “Macho Jim” (when he eventually makes an appearance) and but two, and indeed, Franco’s take on the punk sub-culture is just as off-beat as you might imagine.

Well, I say ‘off-beat’, but it’s really more just lazy, to be honest. The beliefs and tastes of the ‘punks’ are never addressed by the film, and basically it is easy to imagine that, when Franco found himself working on a story that featured a lot of ‘youth’ characters, he just asked “hey, uh, how are the kids dressing these days? It’s all this ‘punk’ thing, isn’t it?”, prompting whoever was responsible for the film’s make up and costumes gave him a big HELL YES and then go absolutely bananas with the idea.

Whoever was responsible, ‘Los Blues de la Calle Pop’s low rent urban warriors are certainly a sight to behold, verging on ‘Rollerblade’/‘Intrepidos Punks’ level ridiculousness at times. Much face paint is in evidence alongside the requisite overdose of hair-spray, whilst the female punks sport plastic-y looking chains and fragments of mismatched lingerie, whilst appearing to have taken a few lessons from the Betty Rubble school of DIY dress design.

My favourite male punk meanwhile is a guy who wears a black golf visor with “PUNK” written on it with correction fluid, combined with a homemade swastika patch, black leather driving gloves and a Phil Oakey-style face-covering forelock. I don’t know how much they paid him to walk around Benidorm dressed like this, but it wasn’t enough. (2)

Meanwhile however, there is not even the slightest hint of ‘new wave’ music to be found within ‘..Calle Pop’ – quite the contrary, in fact. Indeed, I’m sorry to report that most of the music used here is at best inappropriate, at worst singularly dreadful, consisting of a bunch of lumpen, cheesy big band jazz cues of the kind more traditionally used to enforce a ‘jaunty’ atmosphere in unspeakably Germanic sex comedies. (Hell, for all I know Franco might have picked up some tapes of this stuff whilst making an unspeakable German sex comedy.)

Wherever it originated from, this ‘wacky’ guff plays loudly and incessantly through much of the film, pretty much destroying any attempt to create a dystopian/neo-noir kind of ambience, and driving me to distraction in the process. (Seriously - it’s awful.)

We do at least get some brief respite from the trombone however when, in a delightful instance of only-in-a-Jess-Franco-film surrealism, it turns out that Shit City’s punk rockers like to congregate in a ‘piano bar’, where they listen intently as the director himself (playing a kind of loosely Film Noir inspired nightclub pianist/informer type character named “Jack Chesterfield”) lays down some gentle boogie-woogie and mellifluous lounge jazz for their delectation.

This being a Franco film of course, the ubiquitous punks are also dedicated strip club patrons, and it is here, needless to say, that we encounter Lina Romay – appearing in her ‘Candy Coster’ alter-ego – who essays the role of “Butterfly”, the latest in a long line of happy-go-lucky exotic dancers / sex workers portrayed by Romay in Franco’s films from the mid ‘70s through to the mid ‘80s.

Often, Lina’s nightclub scenes are highlights of the films in which they feature, with the couple’s unique voyeur/exhibitionist relationship firing on all cylinders (from my own reviews, Los Noche de los Sexos Abiertos, filmed the same year as this one, proves a pertinent example), but sadly, Franco’s mojo seems to have deserted him here, and the strip club routines are pretty dire.

Capturing Lina as she works her way through a listless, buttock-grinding routine that proves distinctly unflattering to her increasingly plump form, these typically lengthy digressions see her rolling around and gyrating rather clumsily on the grubby stage, basically resembling the kind of unedifying spectacle one might expect to see in an actual Benidorm strip club. Rendered even less enjoyable by the fact that she seems to be moving to a completely different beat from the mind-numbing easy listening cue heard in the finished film, I’m afraid this is definitely not a highlight of Ms Romay’s storied career in erotic cinema.

Actually, it is interesting to note that, for the most part, ‘Los Blues de la Calle Pop’ is entirely lacking in the kind of sexual content one would expect of an ‘80s Franco film. Though the storyline itself is full of unseemly business (prostitution, strip clubs, sexualised murders), someone involved in the production seems perhaps to have taken a last minute decision to pitch the film at a slightly different audience, and as such, nudity and on-screen sex is kept to a minimum (by Franco standards, at least). Despite being staggeringly sleazy in most other respects, the aforementioned nightclub scenes for instance don’t even see Lina taking her g-string off (which perhaps to some extent explains why both she and Jess seem so bored with the whole affair).

But then, late in the movie, Franco goes and blows the whole deal with a lengthy Mayans/Romay love scene, filmed as was often his want in this era entirely via near-abstract close-ups, including the sight of Mayans spending a great length of time sticking his chops into what I’m *fairly sure* must be an artificial bush (though with Lina, I wouldn’t count on it). Maybe they thought the censors wouldn’t mind if it was a fake one, or something? Who knows.

In light of this confused approach, it is difficult to figure out quite who this film was supposed to be aimed at, or indeed how it secured a release at all, given its DIY level production values and lack of any easily exploitable content. (3) As with most of Franco’s straight ‘thrillers’, casual viewers are liable to find ‘..Calle Pop’ an off-putting, meandering and generally infuriating experience, whilst its intentional comedy elements alternate between the hopelessly clumsy and the simply incomprehensible. The “youth movie” aspects that the film’s domestic VHS release gamely tried to play up meanwhile never really materialise, with the generally sleazy vibe further mitigating against this idea, so, without any real erotic material to fall back on, what does that leave us, beyond a barely releasable load of lackadaisical, in-jokey Franco hoo-hah?

Well, for dyed-in-the-wool Franco freaks such as myself of course, such barely releasable hoo-hah is very much our bread and butter, and in spite of everything, ‘Los Blues de la Calle Pop’ is actually a surprisingly engaging film on a purely visual level. As I discovered when returning to it to take some screenshots for this review, if you play it through with no sound or subtitles, it actually starts to look like pretty great in places.

Some scenes utilise rich, deliberate colour schemes (red walls and stained glass), picked out with what looks like it might have been quite decent cinematography before the ravages of VHS took hold. At various points in the film, different varieties of red filters are even used – sometimes to create an atmospheric ‘evening’ effect, and sometimes just for the sake of random weirdness (such as making a drab hotel lobby look like a photographic dark room).

In another characteristic Franco touch, ‘accidental’ camera blunders (over-saturated sunlight, lens flare, botched focus etc) are actively encouraged, and indeed exaggerated in the name of added visual interest. In particular, rainbow-coloured light halos, created by strong light sources shone directly into the camera, can be seen exploding all over the place like cost-free psychedelic effects.

At the other end of the technical spectrum meanwhile, a brief scene in Lina’s dressing room casually pulls off a nifty ‘infinite mirror’ effect, and a red-tinted final confrontation between the two leads is constructed with great skill and no small amount of style, paying effective tribute to the jagged framing and editing patterns of classic Film Noir. The film’s editing (credited to David Raposo) is actually very good throughout, meaning that, mystifyingly awful though it may be in many ways, ‘..Calle Pop’ at least never drags. (4)

Franco’s usual ADHD tendencies also see him splicing in static close-ups all kinds of posters and decorations adorning the bars and apartments in which the film is shot, some of which – including the Frazetta illustrations referenced above and a Victorian print of a train accident assigned the English caption “Oh Shit!” - seem to provide oblique commentary on the on-screen action. Between shots of Bogart, Marilyn, Led Zeppelin and Adam & The Ants, the cultural iconography of Benidorm circa 1983 is certainly well-explored here.

Locations are used reasonably well (I was particularly delighted to see an early ambush/fight sequence staged within the monolithic shopping mall that I ventured into to pick up some breakfast supplies during my stay), and the idea of reimagining Benidorm as a kind of floating, pulp fictional dystopia is an absolutely brilliant one, although sadly Franco doesn’t seem to have put a huge amount of effort into realising it on screen.

As usual in these Al Periera-type movies, he seems to have been more concerned with goofing on a few half-remembered scenes from whatever classic Hollywood crime movies were on his mind at the time, and, as usual, one suspects this was a lot more fun for the director than it is for his audience.

For first time in fact, we get a definite sense in ‘..Calle Pop’ of Franco getting old. Up to the mid-70s at least, his films felt at least somewhat in tune with the zeitgeist, comfortable in their own skin you might say, but here he demonstrates little interest in the contemporary characters and settings, instead subjecting his viewers to the squarest music imaginable whilst giving every indication of wishing to return to the glory days of his youth, taking in some black & white studio masterpiece in a darkened Madrid picture house.

One gets the feeling here that by this stage in his career Franco really just wanted to make his own ‘Kiss of Death’ or ‘The Big Combo’ or something… but, when you find yourself in Benidorm in 1983 with a few Pesetas in yr pocket and a cast & crew consisting mainly of local kids, you’ve got to adjust to your circumstances, and ‘..Calle Pop’ is the somewhat confused result – a massively self-indulgent work, complete with an overriding tone of camp self-awareness that would go on to shape the majority of the director’s dreaded post-1990 Shot-On-Video output.

For its sheer strangeness, for the chance to see Franco’s take on Benidorm, and for all the random, piano bar-frequenting punks, I confess I actually quite enjoyed ‘Le Blues de Calle Pop’ on its own terms, but at the same time, it is not a viewing experience I would necessarily recommend to many other human being. As should be abundantly clear by this point, we’re well into a “For Madmen Only” corner of Franco’s filmography here, so if you’re anything less than a tenth level adept of the great man’s canon, I’d advise approaching with caution.

…

(1) Despite being shot during the period in which Franco was primarily working for Golden Films, ‘..Calle Pop’ seems to have been shot without their intervention, with the credits assigning the production solely to Franco’s own Manacoa Films. Combine this with the lack of any credited producer and ‘..Calle Pop’s bottomless eccentricity, lack of easily exploitable genre elements and general obscurity all come into sharper focus.

(2)In tracking down and watching ‘Los Blues de la Calle Pop’, I have actually found myself fulfilling my long-standing ambition of discovering a film crawling with punks which was NOT included in Zack Carlson & Bryan Connolly’s otherwise encyclopaedic Destroy All Movies: The Complete Guide to Punks on Film. I wish I could take the opportunity to become probably about the 78th person to point out this oversight to the authors, but the book’s promotional website is long-dead by this stage, and it was out of print the last time I checked, so what can ya do?

(3)According to IMDB’s always eerily hyper-specific box office data, ‘Los Blues de la Calle Pop’ did actually enjoy a brief theatrical run in Spain, selling exactly 5,401 tickets and earning 1,291,425 Spanish Pesetas.

(4) An editorial assistant on a number of mainstream/arthouse films in Spain during the ‘70s (as well as the 1975 Exorcism knock-off “The Devil’s Exorcist” with Jack Taylor), Raposo seems to have moved toward (s)exploitation fare when he took on full ‘editor’ status in the early’80s, although I believe this film is his only credit for Franco.

Franco Files: Los Noche de los Sexos Abiertos / ‘Night of Open Sex’ (1983)

AKAs:  

As with many of Jess Franco’s early ‘80s productions under the ‘Golden Films’ banner, I believe this film only ever enjoyed a brief domestic release in Spain, and thus acquired no alternative / foreign release titles. The Spanish title is sometimes translated as "Night of Deviant Sex", but I'm unsure of the accuracy of this, so I'll go with the more literal (& less judgemental?) "Open Sex".

As graphic sexual content became an ever-more essential requisite for financing low budget filmmaking in Europe during the 1970s, any number of directors could be heard complaining about their artfully composed thrillers being ruined by gratuitous, producer-dictated sex scenes. Ever the outsider, Jess Franco by contrast is the only filmmaker I can think of who was more liable to ruin a perfectly good sex film by trying to turn it into a thriller, and with 1982’s ‘Los Noche de los Sexos Abiertos’, he offers an enjoyably loopy example of that particular tendency.

Although ‘Los Noche..’ has a reputation as a bit of a fan favourite amongst devotees of Franco’s ‘Golden Films’ period, it is nonetheless liable to prove a tough gig for viewers expecting one of the director’s more artistically-inclined sex/horror pictures. In fact, it’s a pretty ramshackle affair even by the standards of his run-of-the-mill sexploitation quickies, differentiated from its peers largely by means of the fact that its plot-line is so sketchy and confused, even by the standards of Franco’s usual lackadaisical story-telling, that events soon become almost head-spinningly surreal,.

If you can recalibrate your expectations accordingly however and just take ‘Los Noches..’ as it comes, there is much here to enjoy. It appears to have been a pretty free-spirited, improvisational production that caught everybody in a good mood, and, leavened with regular injections of pure sleaze and random weirdness, it probably constitutes one of the better post-1975 exemplars of the director’s light-hearted, “zany shenanigans” kind of mode.

As such, ‘Los Noches..’ begins in a similar vein to some of the the looser and more charming films Franco made for Erwin Deitrich in the ‘70s (if you’ve seen ‘Midnight Party’ or ‘Die Sklavinnen’ (both 1976), you’ll have a pretty good idea where this one is pitched), with Lina Romay once again slipping into her default persona as a wildly promiscuous exhibitionist night-club performer, who this around time plies her trade at a late night hang-out called the “Mandala”.

One of those extraordinary joints that could only ever exist in the mind of Jess Franco, the “Mandala” represents a shining vision of a voyeur’s tragically unobtainable paradise, wherein mixed crowds of healthy, fresh-faced young people congregate to goggle at elaborately choreographed live sex acts, the girls and boys exchanging rowdy remarks and sipping beer as casually as if they were at a disco or a drive-in movie.

This whole opening section is super-cool actually, showcasing a distinctively weird chrome & neon aesthetic that recalls the warped mylar n’ glitter sci-fi stylings of 1975’s ‘Shining Sex’ (itself an unlikely precursor to the alienated ‘80s psychedelia of Slava Tsukerman’s Liquid Sky (1982)), and this otherworldly vibe is only intensified by the smeared colours and visual fuzz of the VHS-sourced print viewed for this review. As disembodied, stocking-clad legs swing against abstract neon tubing on a black background accompanied by some kind of bizarre dance track that seems to mix a conga rhythm, acid house piano and sampled bird-tweets, Lina in rainbow print dress (that I’m sure I’ve seen in a few other movies) caresses the shining chrome chassis of a car and motorcycle, and Jess’s erotomaniac exploration of this new era’s enticing visual style becomes hallucinatory in the best possible way - a solid hit of primo Franco gear that succeeds in getting us nice and woozy for the cavalcade of seedy nonsense that follows.

(For even wilder Franco-goes-‘80s type thrills, a later nightclub sequence sees Lina arousing herself with a porno mag to the accompaniment of an alarmingly shrill new wave song that sounds like Spain’s answer to Plastic Bertrand… assuming that answer was “JAZZ-PROG MIDDLE EIGHT!”.)

Things take a slightly less jovial turn after the show, as Lina (let’s not even bother with a character name for her, shall we? – IT’S LINA) gets involved with a number of sinister characters whose motives (and indeed identities) initially remain obscure to us.

Accepting payment for a ‘job’ from a guy called Vicas, Lina accompanies him to a suburban house, where together they detain and torture a woman who is apparently the niece of someone known only as ‘The General’. All explanation vis-a-vis the reasons this is happening are basically left hanging, sacrificed in favour of a bracing bit of exploito-sleaze that sees the pair burning their victim’s vagina with what I assume to be some kind of heated curling tongs.

Grim stuff indeed, but don't worry folks – the combination of Franco’s characteristic failure to bother with any special effects and the actress’s corresponding failure to bother doing ‘pain’ render this incident far less of a shocker than it sounds on paper, despite the abundance of extreme close-ups. (As is repeatedly demonstrated in his post-1975 output, Franco was very much of the belief that there are NO narrative circumstances in which a gratuitous crotch zoom is inappropriate.)

Commanded by Vicas, Lina next pays a visit to ‘The General’ (who we are told is ‘wounded’), posing as the kidnapped niece in order to extract some mysterious ‘secrets’ from him before he pops his clogs. Suffice to say, ‘The General’ is a skinny guy who lives in a modest top floor apartment, so presumably he’s not supposed to be THAT General, in case you were wondering. (We will later learn that he is concealing the whereabouts of a stash of Nazi gold however… but it will take a while for you to figure that one on first viewing.)

You might be wondering why The General won’t notice that his visitor is in fact an entirely different person from his niece, but it’s ok – Uncle Jess is one step ahead of you there. It turns out you see that The General hasn’t seen his niece since she was a child. Sorted. Although, this might in turn lead us to wonder why Vicas & Lina thought the estranged niece might know her Uncle’s top secret secrets, and also why The General would entrust his treasure trove to a woman he’s never even met. Also, The General does have an adult photograph of his niece, which for some reason he asks Lina to complete by returning her stolen torn half of it to his possession, so presumably he already knows what she looks like…. but ENOUGH. When you find yourself wasting this many words nit-picking the plotting of a Jess Franco sex comedy, it’s time to move on.

After questioning Lina re: which side of the river she was born on in Istanbul, The General does eventually see through her ill-judged rouse, thus forcing her to immediately kill him, after which she makes off with some books from his library, within which some words which will reveal the the location of his treasure have apparently been underlined.

If you’re thinking that featuring a treasure-hoarding, Nazi-affiliated character named ‘The General’ who is suffering from non-specific ‘wounds’ and promptly dies would seem to carry some fairly obvious additional baggage for viewers in Spain in the early 1980s, well, you probably have a point. But if (Jess) Franco did indeed intend to add the slightest hint of satire or social commentary to ‘Los Noches..’, that opportunity was never followed through, and, like just about every other aspect of this film’s shamelessly nonsensical plotting, the whole “General” angle just melts away like butter in a frying pan.

Meanwhile, after Lina has completed her show at the Mandala the following evening, Antonio Mayans turns up playing one ‘Al Crosby’. Looking rather groovy in this instance with a swinger’s ‘tache, a nifty Hawaiian shirt and sucking on an ever-present half-smoked cheroot, Antonio wastes no time in sapping Lina with a gun butt and spiriting her away to (where else?) an Alicante sea-front hotel, where he ties her up, vigorously questions her about all that mystifying plot stuff I outlined above, and rapes her.

Apparently though, rape functions as a pretty good ice-breaker in the bizarro world of ‘Los Noche de los Sexos Abiertos’, as we cut immediately to the sight of Lina and Antonio chilling out in deck chairs post-coitus, having seemingly put aside their differences and become best buddies, ready to begin planning their next move vis-à-vis the recovery of the General’s treasure.

Further happy-go-lucky outrages ensue, as Crosby stabs Vicas at the Mandala, and Lina is kidnapped by a debauched, voyeuristic couple who are also after the secrets of the general’s books. A predictably sleazy interrogation / rescue scene ensues, before the remainder of the movie settles down into a comfortable pattern that sees Lina and Antonio alternately shagging and utilising mind-bogglingly invisible logic to decode the clues that will lead them to the gold (at several points, they heroically manage to do both at the same time).

Picking words seemingly at random from the books pilfered from The General, the pair end up with several lengthy strings of Dadaist nonsense (“night / to / open / sound / gold / between / thickness / pointing / at / music”, “what / descent / blood / hearts”, etc). Hiding out in the repurposed home of a Count (who, played by Franco himself, can occasionally be seen tied up in the next room where he shouts things like “Rascals! Communists! You can’t do this to a Count!”, etc), our heroes lounge about arbitrarily repeating this gobbledygook to each other for so long that the scene almost begins to resemble some kind of Dadaist parody or exercise in deliberate tedium, reaching a crescendo of absurdity when, after listlessly roaming just about everywhere else within reach, Franco’s bored camera gives up all pretense of artistry and just zooms straight in on Lina’s naked ass, as the meaningless recitations continue (“blood / the descent / blood”).

Through means that remain inscrutable to us mere mortals, Antonio uses these “clues” to pinpoint the location of the treasure to an area of the coast known locally as “the old god’s finger”, for which the couple immediately depart. There, over beautiful shots of white sunshine glimmering on the waters of the bay, they keep pointing at the books and incessantly repeating variations on “old and finger… the old finger… finger…old..”, as well as indulging in some banter about the fingers of female saints, the sense of which was clearly rather beyond the ken of the person who fan-subbed my copy of the film.

By this point, I’m fairly sure Franco was using this word-game malarkey for deliberate comic effect, creating weird audio/visual juxtapositions that almost resemble some goofball version of William Burroughs and Anthony Balch’s famed cut-up films (“lukewarm night of open sex… fingers pointing at the heart of the descent..” exclaims Antonio’s voiceover, as the camera scans down off a hotel balcony across a non-descript patch of scrubland), and this disorientating vibe only intensifies once Lina and Antonio use their intriguingly holistic methodology to finally pinpoint the location of The General’s gold, which, joy of joys, is concealed within the closest thing to a James Bond villain lair that a 1983 Jess Franco film could afford.

Whilst I think we’re supposed to believe that this complex is located inside a tower-like coastal rock formation, the interiors, if I’m not mistaken, are all filmed within the legendary Ricardo Bofill buildings near Calpe, as featured in ‘Countess Perverse’, She Killed in Ecstasy and numerous other Franco faves. Prominent use is made here of the blood-red, cubist lego-brick staircases that will be familiar to most Franco followers, shot in such a way as make them seem a vertiginous descent into some expressionistic subterranean nightmare.

That these ominous stairways lead only to a mod-ishly decorated sea view apartment (possibly a re-dressed version of some of the interiors seen a decade earlier in ‘She Killed in Ecstasy’ and Vampyros Lesbos, possibly not) may be seen as a disappointment by some viewers, but I’m sure you and I both know that mod-ishly decorated sea view apartments are where EVERYTHING leads as far as Jess Franco is concerned, so what the hey.

Suffice to say, this film’s closing act features Lina sitting down in hot pants to play Franz Liszt’s ‘Liebestraum’ on a pianoforte over-dubbed with a weird, drony synthesizer tone, blocks of wood wrapped in gold paper masquerading as gold bars, reverse cowgirl coitus interruptus and an entirely appropriate “shrug n’ a smile” happy ending that somehow succeeds in providing us with a satisfactory resolution to all this abject nonsense.

As far as ‘Los Noche de los Sexos Abiertos’s prospects as a thriller, a comedy and a piece of narrative cinema goes, that’s about your lot, which means it’s probably time to discuss the sexy stuff, which is plentiful, and, if-you-like-that-sort-of-thing, pretty good. Although heading towards the end of the era in which she took on these full-on erotic roles, ‘Los Noche..’ captures Lina at the peak of her wanton powers, and fans of her ‘70s work will need no further encouragement to check this one out, I’m sure.

Working at their preferred “hard soft” level of explicitness, Jess and Lina are certainly firing on all cylinders during the nightclub sequences in the first half of the film, with a lesbian encounter with an unidentified actress proving a particularly steamy highlight, accompanied by a delirious bit of Italian-style library music that could have come straight from the early ‘70s. Viewers watching in raincoat mode might be annoyed by Franco’s ridiculous habit of having his cast members simulate oral sex by waggling their tongues somewhere in the general vicinity of their partner’s undercarriage, but once again – such silliness is an established motif, and all part of the fun for the director’s fans.

One of the things that to my mind renders Franco’s sex films a lot more enjoyable than those of many of his contemporaries is his tendency to use performers who clearly enjoy acting out this sort of material on camera (Lina herself being the most prominent example of course), and to foster what to all appearances must have been a pretty comfortable atmosphere for them to strut their stuff within, giving his sex scenes an upbeat, inclusive sort of flavor that side-steps the alienating sense of exploitative coercion that so often afflicts cinematic smut (which is somewhat ironic given the strongly Sadean nature of the scenarios Franco often had his casts act out, but that’s a digression for another day).

This can very much be seen in ‘Los Noche..’ during the “private” sex scenes (mainly between Lina and Antonio) which are almost entirely played for laughs, and as such work very well in ribald sort of manner, with running jokes about Lina over-excitedly yelling “my Tarzan!” at her various partners, and about Antonio never taking off his beloved Hawaiian shirt. Somehow it all just seems so.. natural and good natured, it would be difficult for anyone other than a thorough-going prude to really object too strenuously.

Reading back through the plot synopsis above, some readers might well wish to question my repeated use of phrases like “light hearted” and “good natured” to describe a movie that is apparently filled with rape, Nazi-ism and genital torture, but what can I say… jaded from the harder exploitation pictures he’d been making in the late ‘70s, Franco somehow manages to present this potentially offensive material in such a casual, off-hand sort of manner that it just slips by without really making much impression at all.

Like the patently un-real gore effects that frequently turn up in his horror films, Franco-sleaze always has a theatrical, fantasy-land sort of quality about it – he knows he’s just sticking this stuff in to add a ‘shocking’, commercially saleable aspect to the production, and he knows that you know it too. He may enjoy the imagery of sadism, but he realises no one really wants to see realistic pain and suffering when they’re chilling with a blue movie, so what the hell, let’s just have some fun with it, y’know?

Such is the philosophy that defines much of Franco’s work at the end of the day, and, with ‘Los Noche de los Sexos Abiertos’, this easy-going goofery perhaps reaches its apex. Between the ‘really good ones’ and the‘really bad ones’ in his mammoth filmography lie the ‘fun ones’, and here we have a fine example of the way that even the most seemingly trivial items in the director’s catalogue can become deliriously enjoyable experiences, full of odd sparks of invention, random diversions and sheer lunacy that you will encounter nowhere else in cinema.

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Kink: 4/5
Creepitude: 1/5
Pulp Thrills: 2/5
Altered States: 3/5
Sight Seeing: 3/5

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FRANCO FILES: Macumba Sexual (1981)

AKA:
Amazingly, this appears to be a Jess Franco film only ever issued under one name.

Context:
Of the numerous films Franco made in the early ‘80s for Spain’s ‘Golden Films Internacional’, many seem to be pretty lightweight softcore flicks, leading me to speculate that they must have been somewhat taken aback when they threw on the reels for this one and discovered that their man had been inspired to deliver something wholly other on this excursion.

Content:
In narrative terms a straight rehash of the familiar ‘Vampyros Lesbos’ plot-line, ‘Macumba Sexual’ finds Canary Island-dwelling real estate agent Lina Romay (sporting a blonde wig in her “Candy Coster” alter-ego) being summoned to remote spot that’s either on the North African coast or a fairly large, sparsely inhabited desert island (it’s kind of unclear..?), where she finds herself falling under the psychic and sexual control of a possibly-undead African witch named, I’m afraid, Princess Obongo, played by infamous French sex/sleaze star Ajita Wilson.

Kink:
Although packed from start to finish with writhing naked bodies and orgasmic sex rites, including a few moments that are bordering on hardcore (I think the BBFC must have been sleeping on the job when they gave this an uncut ‘18’), ‘Macumba Sexual’ is not really the kind of thing that’s liable to get any well-adjusted individual ‘in the mood’, exactly.

Instead, it is one of a select handful of Franco films (his best ones, usually) in which sex is treated not just as fun and games, but as something far more dangerous and unsettling – as a means of attaining psychic domination over others, as a kind of hysterical compulsion, or a gateway by which dark forces might enter. Touching on all of these troubling notions to some extent, ‘Macumba Sexual’ is a pretty heavy trip through the darkest corners of Franco’s erotic imagination - not just a horror film with sex, or a sex film with horror, but a film in which the sex IS the horror.

Also, you get to see Antonio Mayans’ wang, and Lina walking around in some denim and lace-based outfits that present a significant challenge to the notion of ‘acceptable public apparel’. 4/5

Creepitude:
Presented by Franco as stifling, claustrophobic fever-dream where unchecked sexual dementia blurs into the menacing, repetitive trance of a folk-magick hex, the whole film has the feel of a series of hallucinations brought on by extreme heat and dehydration. The use of ‘sinister’ African imagery and fertility charms only occasionally borders on the goofy, and you can practically feel the deadening tropical heat oozing from the screen.

Often described as an “alleged transsexual”, whatever that’s supposed to imply, Ajita Wilson simply looks fucking terrifying here, and the blurry, sun-damaged footage of her striding through the sand of Lina’s dreams with her two drooling, dog-walking human slaves is truly the stuff of nightmares.

For any viewers still trying to hang on to the idea that they’re watching a conventional sex film even after all that business, the fearful mood is further enhanced by a soundtrack of droning electronic feedback and echoed faux-hoodoo vocal chants that is altogether more menacing than the kitschy fare that usually predominates in these kinda things, and Franco ups the ante further by busting out some impulsive moments of startlingly disorientating, near avant-garde filmmaking technique. 4/5

Pulp Thrills:
Nada. With the stylistic excesses of the ‘60s and ‘70s behind him, Jess is jamming econo here, and the film’s dark tone leaves little room for any genre-bending frivolity. Whether Princess Obongo’s assorted black magick fetishes and rites have any legitimacy beyond Franco’s warped imaginings and the handful of ropey props he picked up down the local tourist market is doubtful, but nonetheless the film’s magical/supernatural elements are played out in a surprisingly naturalistic and believable manner. 1/5

Altered States:
What…? Where am I? Did that just… happen? I don’t feel too good… there are sexy pictures in my mind, but they’re all kind of frightening. I think I’m going to go curl up in the corner, until it goes away. Can you open the windows, please? 5/5

Sight-seeing:
Of all the jarring modernist edifices and brutalist hotel blocks that Franco’s keen eye discovered knocking about in the Mediterranean during the ‘70s, the location used for Princess Obongo’s residence is definitely one of the most memorable – a complex of visionary Afro-futurist buildings overlooking a shimmering desert coastline, it lends an even more sinister and otherworldly quality to the events that transpire within. Elsewhere, long camel rides across the windswept desert, scruffy North African(?) harbour towns and footage of Lina travelling between islands on what appears to be an old fashioned sailing ship all combine to make ‘Macumba..’ feel somewhat like a holiday brochure put together by the Marquis DeSade. 5/5

Conclusion:
When Jess and the gang cruised out to some exotic locale to make a cheap porno in the late ‘70s/early ‘80s, most of the time they just came back with a cheap porno. But the fact that occasionally, when the stars were right, he could still knock out something as haunting and unhinged as ‘Macumba Sexual’ stands as a testament to the man’s unique talent, and as a welcome reminder of the reasons why some of us are driven to spend so much time to watching, reading and writing about his films, despite their often-pretty-questionable nature.