Franco Files / October Horrors 2019 # 4: Dracula’s Daughter (Jess Franco, 1972)

The early 1970s found Jess Franco’s restless creative spirit riding high in terms of both profligacy and artistry, hitting a peak of productivity that he would never again match (although the purple patch which followed his return to Spain in the early 1980s came pretty close).

According to the information compiled by Stephen Thrower for his exhaustive Franco filmography [see the link to his book below], no less than ten Jess Franco films were completed or released during 1971, with eight more to follow in 1972, including some of the director’s best (and strangest) work – ‘A Virgin Among The Living Dead’ (at this point still bearing it’s intended title, ‘La Nuit de L’etoiles Filantes’), ‘The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein’, Les Demons and ‘Le Journal Intime d’une Nymphomane’, alongside a steady stream of more forgettable quote-unquote “mainstream” pictures like ‘The Vengeance of Dr Mabuse’, ‘Un Silencio De Tumba’ and ‘Devil’s Island Lovers’. Suffice to say, the images which unfolded before our hero’s retina across these few short years would have been enough to send lesser men screaming to the asylum (hopefully that one from Lorna the Exorcist in which nobody wears any pants).

Amidst this frantic whirlwind of cash-strapped cinematic alchemy, it’s unsurprising that a relatively low key venture like the generically titled ‘Dracula’s Daughter’ - shot right in the centre of this exhausting period, in the early months of ’72 - could easily be over-looked. Generally regarded by Francophiles as a slight entry in the great man’s explosive early ‘70s catalogue, this one has often been seen either as a scrappy after-thought to the far wilder pair of monster-based horror movies the director shot a few months earlier (the aforementioned ‘Erotic Rites..’ and Dracula: Prisoner of Frankenstein), or else as a poor relation to his more striking and sublime vampire-sex epics, the earlier Vampiros Lesbos and the later ‘Le Comtesse Noire’ / ‘Female Vampire’.

A dismissive review in Thrower’s definitive Murderous Passions: The Delirious Cinema of Jesús Franco a few years ago would seem to have sealed ‘Dracula’s Daughter’s fate as an also-ran, but, returning to it recently after a period in which I’ve largely been forced to go cold turkey on my Franco habit, I actually enjoyed it a great deal.

Viewed in quick succession with the lunatic works which surround it in the director’s catalogue, I can understand that ‘Dracula’s Daughter’ might fade into the background, but hitting it up cold still gave me a pretty dizzying high – like a drink from a crystal clear oasis amid the arid desert of films not made by everybody’s favourite perverted Iberian hobbit.

As Thrower’s review discusses at length, the quote-unquote ‘plot’ here is indeed a back-of-a-badly-shredded-napkin bunch of nonsense, leaving character relationships and emotions / motivations flimsy and mutable in the extreme, and reducing the inevitable, exposition-clogged ‘police investigation’ segments to a meaningless bore, with Franco once again re-heating the same tepid leftovers from The Awful Dr Orlof that he’d return to endlessly in his horror projects over the years, for some godforsaken reason. But, such was my happiness at returning to the Francoverse on this occasion, I welcomed even these scenes, whilst elsewhere, more ambient pleasures of Franco’s filmmaking were all present and correct.

Though they understandably tend to get over-shadowed by Soledad and Lina in fans’ affections, Britt Nichols (with an earthy, shop-soiled Jane Fonda kind of look) and Anne Libert (fresh off her equally dazed, acid-witch turn as Melissa the bird-woman in ‘Erotic Rites..’) are both exceptional Franco women, as oddly mysterious as they are self-evidently beautiful, and it’s great to see them both stepping up and doing their thing here, as a pair of dreamy-eyed cousins / lovers falling victim to the vampiric pull of the Karnstein mansion.

And as to the nature of that ‘thing’ they’re doing meanwhile, well, I won’t need to remind readers that Franco was a filmmaker who approached lesbian sex scenes with the same enthusiasm more conventional directors might reserve for a car chase or bank heist, and Nichols & Libert’s big number at the mid-point of ‘Dracula’s Daughter’ is a bravura sequence indeed, in spite of some rather plain photography.

Franco’s characteristic abstraction of the female body into fleshy fields of hill and valley is intercut here with footage of the director’s long-term friend and collaborator Daniel White playing the piano (the same one we see Howard Vernon tickling away on in ‘A Virgin Among The Living Dead’, I believe) with dramatic gusto, beneath glimmering crystal chandeliers. The composer’s lithe, drowsy explorations of suffocatingly romantic melodicism cast their spell as powerfully here as at any point in Franco’s cinema, helping transform this sequence into a pure, uncut dose of the director’s intoxicating artistry.

A later tryst between the two women, in which Nichols’ breasts rise in the foreground like mountains as Libert’s face writhes out of focus behind them and an incongruous ‘suspense’ cue plays on the soundtrack, is also remarkable for its sheer strangeness.

(White, incidentally, plays the role of the geriatric Count Karnstein in the film, and if you’re expecting an explanation of why a refugee from Sheridan LeFanu’s writing lives in Portugal and keeps Count Dracula in his basement, well… you’re watching to wrong movie here, frankly.)

‘Dracula’s Daughter’, like many films of this period, was filmed around the towns of Cascais and Sintra near Lisbon, in and around the same set of extraordinary buildings that lent their unique atmos to ‘A Virgin…’, ‘Erotic Rites..’ and ‘Les Demons’ amongst others, and they looking as startlingly otherworldy here as ever, particularly when Nichols and Libert take some long walks amid the tropical greenery.

Highlights elsewhere meanwhile include the way that the film pretty much opens with waves crashing upon some deserted beach, cutting to a crash zoom into an extreme close up of a female eyeball, followed by some trademark Franco in-camera weirdness as a woman stripping off for a bath in her hotel room fights to remain on-screen as reflections of the churning coastline, caught in some kind of balcony window that Jess appears to be shooting through, swamp the frame, to the accompaniment of a lugubrious dinner jazz cue. (She’ll soon be murdered by a roaming vamp we presume must be Count Dracula though, so no worries.)

Later on, I also enjoyed a staggeringly beautiful shot in which Libert strolls out across an ancient-looking stone balcony, observing the foggy coastal hills below; nothing special really, but something about the leisurely pace, the blinding sun shining across the water and Libert’s uncanny presence just struck me as a great little bit of Franco magic. (MENTAL NOTE: must book part # 2 of The Great Jess Franco Location Tour ASAP.)

Elsewhere, I also loved the Franco’s own role in ‘Dracula’s Daughter’, essaying the role of one “Cyril Jefferson”, Count Karnstein’s ‘secretary’ - a lank-haired, spaced out occult oddball who (in a distant nod perhaps to the plotting of Hammer’s 1958 ‘Dracula’) we eventually learn has taken the Karnstein job specifically in order to destroy the vampire menace. Prior to that however, he is happy just to infuriate Alberto Dalbe’s dour police inspector by turning up at random intervals to deliver unfathomable metaphysical pronouncements (“In the night the silence of death will surround us, interrupted from time to time by screams of horror; that’s the eternal law of mystery and terror”). Definitely one of the director’s best acting performances in a non-idiot role, and he even gets to wear a top hat in a few scenes, which is awesome.

Combined with the humid, wave-crashing atmospherics of Franco’s familiar coastal interzone, and the ceaseless chirping of sea-birds on the soundtrack, Cyril’s rolling stream of fervent blather (he even pontificates at one point about “the blood-drinking birds of death”, or somesuch) does a wonderful job of torpedoing Dalbe’s doomed attempt to hang on to some torn thread of rationality. He may persist with pottering about looking for alibis and forensic evidence, but we in the audience know it’s a lost cause – like us, he’s beyond Franco’s looking glass here, neck-deep in the primordial stew of this familiar holiday villa dreamworld.

On the horror side of things meanwhile, Howard Vernon may not have much to do as Dracula, but it’s still nice to see the old boy enjoying himself, in footage presumably shot simultaneously with ‘Dracula: Prisoner of Frankenstein’. He certainly has the same full-on boggling eyes / open-mouthed fangy grin thing going on here as he arises from his coffin in some dank basement, although Franco’s character seems to have stolen his top hat from the earlier film. (You could possibly argue that the use of wide angle(?) framing for these basement shots pays tribute to Karl Freund’s uncanny crypt tracking shots in Browning’s ‘Dracula’, but… it would be a push.)

Although The Count never gets a chance to get out and about in this one, he does at least get to roll around in his coffin with a kidnapped nightclub stripper whilst Nichols, as his ‘daughter’, nails down the lid - which was presumably a lot more fun than Christopher Lee was allowed in all those ‘Dracula’ sequels where Hammer insisted he spend his time skulking about in darkened basements.

In another example of Franco’s perplexing tendency to obsessively recreate the bad as well as good elements of his earlier films however, the lacklustre finale of ‘Dracula’s Daughter’ seems to echo that of his disastrous 1970 ‘Count Dracula’. Nonetheless, for what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure this is the first and only time I’ve ever seen Dracula dispatched by getting a stake between his eyes, and to be honest, if you’re still awake and sober enough to object by that point in proceedings, that’s your problem.

For some, ‘Dracula’s Daughter’ will seem like a gossamer thin veil of Franco mystique spread far too thin, betraying the exhaustion that his relentless early ‘70s schedule had led him to, and marking the point at which the thread of his “shoot first, ask questions later” approach (assembling new films out of footage stolen during shoots for other projects, essentially) finally snapped. For me here in 2019 though, it still served as a welcome reminder of the reasons why we (or at least, I ) have dedicated so much time and effort to following the star-dust trail of this man’s sensuous, mind-altering, defiantly irrational approach to filmmaking. (And, a few glasses of red wine probably helped too, TBH.)

As per Franco Files tradition, I’m obliged to conclude with a scorecard, and, after careful consideration, it looks as if ‘Dracula’s Daughter’ gets a straight run down the middle:

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

A creditable score.

FRANCO FILES: Dracula: Prisoner of Frankenstein(1972)

 

AKA:

‘Drácula contra Frankenstein’, ‘Die Nacht der offenen Särge’, ‘The Screaming Dead’.

Context:

Incredibly, there was a new Jess Franco film hitting cinemas about once a month during 1972-73 – an astounding work rate, even by the standards of the man who is quite possibly the most prolific feature film director of all-time. For some reason or other, Jess took time out during this period of peak productivity to bang out a couple of slightly uncharacteristic Frankenstein/Dracula ‘monster bash’ movies – whether on the behest of some producer, or just for a change of pace, who knows.

Of these, ‘The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein’ is usually held to be the most noteworthy – in fact it’s one of the wildest pictures Franco ever made - but I think ‘Dracula: Prisoner of Frankenstein’ also has its charms. A slightly more low key effort, its general vibe has a lot in common with the kind of tired, last gasp gothic horrors that independent producers in Europe still seemed to be making in defiance of all reason in the early ‘70s (think ‘Lady Frankenstein’, ‘Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks’, that sort of thing). But, Franco being Franco, he puts a uniquely strange and somnambulant spin on the material, resulting in a movie that is… certainly unlike anything else being offered up by the commercial film industry in 1972.

Content:

You know those scenes that sometimes turn up in ‘70s/’80s horror films, when the characters go to the cinema and watch a schlocky film-within-a-film monster movie (the unspoken implication being that of course OUR smart, modern horror film isn’t like one of those corny old flicks etc etc)..? Well basically, ‘Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein’ plays a lot like a real life, feature length version of the fake footage created for scenes like that. I can’t pretend to know much about how or why the film got made, but it seems like somebody just got on the blower to Franco and ordered a few reels of horror film, so he turned on the sausage machine and churned it out.

Largely plotless and featuring no real dialogue in the opening half hour (and precious little after that), ‘Prisoner of Frankenstein’ exists within that magic moment when the production of genre-based exploitation footage becomes so mindless and automatic that the results emerge as almost entirely abstract, bordering on avant garde. Kind of a zen-like ‘first thought / best thought’ meditation on the proliferation of horror movie imagery through popular culture, perhaps? Or alternatively, just imagine if some joker kept spiking Al Adamson’s coffee with ketamine and you’ll be thinking along the right lines.

In fairness, some kind of a storyline does begin to develop in the second half of the film, communicated largely via a post-production voiceover from Dennis Price’s Dr. Frankenstein. Although his conventional monster seems to be doing quite well for itself, the Baron seems to have an altogether more ambitious scheme in mind this time around. Announcing that he “now rules the great beyond”, Frankenstein has succeeded in attaining dominion over the spirit of Count Dracula (Howard Vernon) and another female vampire (Britt Nichols), intending them to head up a “new and bizarre army, an army of shadows” that he claims will allow “the great beyond” to “overpower the world”. So there ya go. Any questions?

Of this hypothetical army of darkness, the only other member who turns up – perhaps summoned by some gypsy magic, perhaps not – is the Wolfman, and unfortunately for the Baron, he seems largely concerned with just stirring up a ruckus, picking fights with the other monsters as the inevitable flaming torch wielding villagers led by vampire hunter Alberto Dalbes closes in.

Kink:

It’s possible that a stronger cut of this might been assembled for some markets, but there’s certainly very little hint of eroticism in the version I’m watching. A German language cabaret scene, and the subsequent kidnapping of the singer by the Monster, seem like a straight recap of ‘..Dr. Orlof’, with some similarly unsavoury “lady in lingerie tied to the operating table” jive following in turn, but it’s pretty mild stuff by ‘70s standards. Nichols certainly looks great as ‘un chica vampire’, and there’s a marginally kinky moment when Anne Libert (appearing as ‘Primera víctima de Drácula’) takes her leather boots off, but, uh… that’s about it? 1/5

Creepitude:

With any thread of narrative coherence banished to the same “great beyond” that Dr. Frankenstein keeps going on about, most of this film’s run time is spent drifting insensibly through a patchwork of certifiably creepy goings-on.

Bats both real (stock footage?) and laughably unreal (flopping about on strings, perhaps left over from 1970’s ‘Count Dracula’?) are much in evidence, and Howard Vernon seems to be popping up outside windows and doors all over town, white-faced, top-hatted and baring his fangs like some sort of Dracula/Orlof crossover, as intermittent bursts of lightning strike, and prolific Spanish actress Paca Gabaldón freaks out in what I think was her only role for Franco, rocking back and forth humming to herself and shrieking in a room full of by neo-primitive sunflower paintings and straw dollies… (an example of the common Franco motif of occasionally cutting to seemingly unconnected scenes of an unidentified woman experiencing some sort of mental breakdown, perhaps implying that she’s either dreaming the action on screen, or else a prior victim of its antagonists, cf: ‘Lorna the Exorcist’, ‘Nightmares Come At Night’). 

Grumpy looking Alberto Dalbes rides around endlessly in a coach, whipping his horses and looking determined, whilst Dennis Price favours a vintage motor car, in which he cruises around (sometimes with Vernon sharing the back seat) looking thoroughly suspicious in a fur-collared coat and fez. Back at the chateau, he’s got a superb collection of mad scientist gear on the go (lots of flashing lights!), and his own monster to play with (an endearingly dirt-cheap, rubber mask approximation of the Karlof monster, it’s a more traditional creation than ‘Erotic Rites..’ rather bizarre “bodybuilder painted silver” effort).

Probably the film’s strangest scene is the one in which Price resurrects Dracula by draining the blood of the kidnapped cabaret singer into a bell-jar containing a bat (a real one, alarmingly - seeing the poor blighter floundering around as they dribble ‘blood’ all over it is pretty uncomfortable), as lights flicker and the mad scientist machines whir away like happy hour at the Radiophonic Workshop. At the crucial moment, the doc hits the power switch, a fizzing coil overheats, and bat, bell-jar and everything suddenly disappears in a puff of smoke, leaving a fully sized, opera-caped Howard Vernon lying there! Top dollar horror flick craziness.

Soundtrack-wise, Bruno Nicolai’s score from ‘Justine’ is re-used wholesale here, but his bombastic, James Bernard-esque theme actually sounds a lot more comfortable and less irritating in this pulpy, ghoulish context. Elsewhere, a strange backdrop of exaggerated wind sounds, looped animal cries and disembodied melodic humming proves incredibly atmospheric, summoning that eerie, earthy atmosphere that characterises many of the best ‘70s Spanish horror films. 4/5

Pulp Thrills:

Well, let’s see: we’ve got Count Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster and the Wolfman running around, loads of pulsing, flickering mad scientist machinery, a hunchback assistant (named Morpho of course, this time portrayed by some hairy ginger guy), lines like “these two vampires will obey my orders and terror will prevail”, and a final monster bash showdown that aspires to the primitive chutz-pah of a Mexican luchadore movie. Pulp enough for you? 5/5

Altered States:

In the notes I scribbled down whilst re-watching this film to get some screen-grabs, I wrote that at times ‘..Prisoner of Frankenstein’ is “like some retarded version of one of Chris Marker’s travelogue films”. Perhaps not the most eloquent phrase I’ve ever penned, but I can’t think of a better way of communicate this film’s accidental avant garde stylings, as Franco spends his time shakily zooming in on dogs, cats, flocks of birds, window panes, street signs, candlesticks… I know it sounds mental to say this in view of the film’s subject matter, but it’s almost got a documentary/home movie kinda thing going on in places, as if Jess is simply capturing the minutiae of his surroundings for posterity, and monsters and vampires just keep getting in the way.

With almost every shot climaxing in some kind of weird, meandering zoom, zeroing in on some seemingly random detail, this is precisely the kind of slap-dash, zoom-heavy direction that Franco’s detractors have always ridiculed, but once you get used to the technique, it has its own idiosyncratic appeal. Breakin’ all the rules just for the sake of speed and laziness, it allows the film to run free alongside the director’s wavering attention, as his unpredictable camera movements imitate the way one’s eyes might shift back and forth across an unfamiliar scene. It may be the complete opposite of the well-planned, deliberate filmmaking that we’re all taught to respect and aspire to, but here we actually get to witness in real-time the process of the director noticing something or other, thinking “whoa, check that out”, and filling the screen with it, just because he feels like it. The effect is disorientating, and the constant disruption of on-screen space can be near intolerable at first, but the more of these films you watch, the more you’ll learn to love the woozy, displaced feeling that results.

The somnambulant pacing too is something that neophytes are just going to have to roll with if they want to remain conscious beyond the halfway point. Regardless of what transpires in them, Franco films are never exactly ‘fast-paced’ (Stephen Thrower has spoken of him filming according to his own “internal, metabolic tempo”, or something like that), and the way he lets scenes drag and wonder and drift into each other has a tendency to make any sense of logic or connection between the images disappear entirely. Once again here, he manages the unique feat of taking a film in which a huge number of things happen, but almost all of them fall out of the viewer’s mind immediately, leaving us with the impression that we’re stuck in a kind of trance-like, repetitive limbo, as the clock slooowly rolls by. In the best possible way, of course. 4/5

Sight-seeing:

Much of this film appears to be shot around a mist-shrouded hilltop castle overlooking a dilapidated little Spanish town full of narrow, maze-like streets, and, if some of the meandering landscape shots are to be believed,  I think this is actually a single location, rather than a composite of several places. Clearly a GREAT one-stop horror movie shooting destination, it lends the film a huge amount of ready-made atmosphere, and I’m surprised I haven’t seen such a distinctive locale popping up in more gothic horror movies.

Don’t take my word for it though – writing on imdb in November 2000, one ‘Maxorin-2’ commented that:

“This is the horror film with the best castle I've ever seen. It's better than all that castles of the Hammer. Trust me. It's bigger and darker. Very strange and interesting. I've visited it in Alicante, Spain, and it seemed to me that Dracula was walking around. If you want to be scared go on and watch it.”

Duly noted. 4/5

Conclusion:

An utterly disconnected piece of filmmaking, I think ‘Dracula: Prisoner of Frankenstein’ actually makes a good tool for the diagnosis of Franco Fever.

If you’re unafflicted by the malady, then the film’s complete lack of narrative drive or audience involvement, its lethargic pacing and inept, disorientating zooms, will likely prove insufferable, to the extent that you may find yourself furious that this aimless garbage is actually being offered to you as a piece of structured entertainment. And that’s fine. You’re better off that way. Just walk away, put something else in the DVD player. You’ve got a long and fulfilling life ahead of you.

For those of us who’ve already succumbed to the sickness though, it’s too late - this is pure nectar of the gods. Drink it in in all its pointless, zonked out glory, my brethren, and go to a happy place. I’ve watched it three times at the time of writing, and I’ll likely watch it again. In the Church of Franco, we can ALL rule the great beyond.

FRANCO FILES: The Demons (1972)

AKA: “Les Démons du Sexe”, “Die Nonnen von Clichy”, “She-Demons”, “The Sex Demons”, “Les Novices Perverses”.

Context:
Presumably produced for frequent early ‘70s Franco enabler Robert DeNesle (correct me if I’m wrong), and perhaps shot around the same time as ‘A Virgin Among The Living Dead’ if the shared cast and locations are anything to go by, the intention here seems to have been to cash in on the controversy surrounding Ken Russell’s ‘The Devils’ by knocking out a less alarming / less demanding softcore variant for the European sex film market. And, well, mission accomplished on that score at least, even if I’m not sure the end result is really a finest hour for anyone concerned.

Content:
Decidedly plot-heavy for a Franco effort from this era, the story here veers all over the place, spending much of the run-time spinning its wheels in paint-by-numbers nunsploitation/wrongly-accused-witch mode, before throwing in an unexpected (though sadly underdeveloped) swerve toward genuine supernatural shenanigans, a few scenes apparently torn straight from the script of 1968’s ‘Justine’ (possibly Franco’s worst movie to this date), some random historical intrigue involving William of Orange’s invasion of Britain in 1688, and a final reel diversion into one of the director’s beloved seduce-them-and-kill-them vengeance narratives (cf: ‘Miss Muerte’, ‘She Killed in Ecstasy’, ‘Venus in Furs’ and about a hundred others). So, make of that what you will, I guess.

Anne Libert and Britt Nichols are orphan sisters raised in a convent, one of them falsely accused of witchcraft whilst the other finds herself indoctrinated into some genuine witchcraft. Karen Field (Cave of the Living Dead, The Hunchback of Soho) and Alberto Dalbés (a grumpy looking fellow who turned up in no less than eight Franco movies between ’71 and ’73) are witchfinders, French/Turkish actor Cihangir Gaffari is “Lord Justice Jefferies”, and Howard Vernon turns up as an absent-minded astronomer secretly plotting the downfall of the king. A shifty crew, and no mistake.

Kink:
Although jam-packed with crowd-pleasing nudity and sex scenes, ‘The Demons’ is sadly somewhat lacking in Franco’s special sauce. He does get to indulge his peculiar fetish for nude women tied to X-shaped wooden frames (cf: ‘Necronomicon’, ‘Exorcism’), and for lust-crazed lesbian sex/death encounters (cf: every damn Franco film ever), with his trademark crotch-zoom is much in evidence. Somehow though, it all still comes across as kinda vanilla – rote b-movie sleaze stuff really, and even the occasional moments of flat-out craziness just too daft to really work. The Britt Nichols “Satanic rape” scene in particular is one of most ridiculous things I’ve seen in a while. Anne Libert certainly looks the part in her nominal lead role, but the somnambulant acting style she carries across from ‘Virgin..’ doesn’t really fly in this more dramatic role, and sparks are never quite kicked up the way they should be. 3/5

Creepitude:
Similarly, most of the horror elements here seem to have been thrown in as an afterthought. The obligatory torture scenes are fairly half-hearted, neither especially gruesome nor especially involving, and the way that Nichols’ character starts going around magically transforming people into laboratory skeletons towards the end of the film is a bit of LOL-worthy eurotrash guff on a par with the spectral gorilla-suit in ‘Orlof Against the Invisible Man’. You’ve gotta love it really. A brief scene in which Nichols visits to a blind witch in her lair is pretty tripped out (“three serpents guided you here, my child”), and proceedings do take on an agreeably berserk flavour from time to time, but flat direction and bland cinematography prevent the film from ever really accumulating much of an atmosphere. 2/5

Pulp Thrills:
Not much doing really, although if ‘70s era nun / witch trial type imagery floats your boat then naturally you’ll dig it quite a bit. 2/5

Altered States:
Above all, there is a distinct lack of *weirdness* to this film, despite the occasionally out-there subject matter. Technique-wise, it catches Jess on fairly drab and routine form, with only an awesome soundtrack and the temporal/geographic dislocation discussed below really lending it anything approaching an otherworldly feel. 2/5

Sight-seeing:
An accomplished musician, linguist, gourmet, pop culture obsessive and unstoppable autodidact, Franco’s formidable learning apparently didn’t stretch much to the study of history, and his attempts to conjure a periodic setting here are even more off-message than usual, as a story purportedly set in 17th century England delights in a dress-code that veers from the late middle ages to the 18th century, and features styles of architecture and décor that have never been seen on these shores in any era. Outside meanwhile, the olive trees of the English countryside are bathed in glorious Mediterranean sunshine, and Franco & Daniel White’s blinding soundtrack of fuzz-rock jams and flickknife flute-funk evokes that unmistakable post-Cromwellian atmosphere about as well as you’d expect. Not that I’m complaining, you understand – I’d far rather spend time in Jess Franco’s head than in some dour Merchant Ivory period drama, and the director’s heroic disregard for any kind of historical/geographic accuracy is actually one of the things I like best about this film. Elsewhere, the distinctive villa used in ‘A Virgin Among the Living Dead’ features prominently, as do some nice Spanish castles and such. 4/5

Conclusion:
As we shall learn as this survey progresses, period settings and literary source material often seem to have acted as kryptonite for Franco, causing him to rein in his eccentricities in search of a ‘slicker’, more ‘respectable’ style of filmmaking that actually ended up just as sloppy as his weirder, cheaper films, only far less enjoyable. Other films suffered far more severely from this malady than ‘The Demons’ (which certainly doesn’t purport to be slick or respectable by any stretch of the imagination), but it nonetheless seems to have fallen victim to it to a certain extent, as our man largely resists the urge to cut loose, instead turning in an efficient Euro-sleaze picture that only occasionally gets as wild as we might have hoped. Between all the sex and violence and intrigue and diabolism there is at least plenty going on, so if you’re in the mood for a bit of brainless, post-‘Mark of the Devil’ fun, this will probably do the trick, but it doesn’t really strike me as vintage Franco.