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.

------------------------ 

SCORECARD: 

 

Kink: 4/5 

Creepitude: 4/5 

Pulp Thrills: 2/5 

Altered States: 3/5 

Sight Seeing: 4/5 

-------------------------

(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.

------------------------

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

-------------------------

Franco Files:Tender & Perverse Emanuelle (1973)

AKA: ‘Des Frissons sur la Peau’ (‘The Shiver of Fear’, France), ‘Le Chemin Solitaire’ (‘The Solitary Way’, France?), ‘El Ultimo Escalofrío’ (‘The Final Chill’, Spain), ‘French Emanuelle’ (UK), ‘Sicarius: Febbre di Sesso’ (‘Sicarius: Sex Fever’, Italy).

In several interviews conducted for DVD releases of his films, Jess Franco expressed a strong dislike for the work of ‘Emmanuelle’ director Just Jaeckin, claiming (if I recall correctly) that Jaeckin’s erotic films were cold, soulless affairs in which the director arranged his female cast like shop window dummies – in contract, presumably, to Franco’s own somewhat earthier and more emotionally engaged approach to dirty movie-making.

As such, one imagines Franco must have been less than thrilled at the prospect of making movies with ‘Emanuelle’ (one ‘m’, you’ll note, to avoid legal action) in the title, as seemingly became obligatory for all purveyors of euro-smut in the decade following the success of Jaeckin’s film. Perhaps we could read a certain black humour into the fact that this, Jess’s first ‘Emanuelle’ cash-in, features the titular character (here played by Norma Kastel) falling to her death from a clifftop balcony within the opening half hour, after which the movie becomes a flashback-heavy investigation into her murder… although, that reading of events is rather torpedoed by the fact that this film was actually shot BEFORE Jaeckin’s 'Emmanuelle', and was first screened in France in 1973, under the title ‘Des Frissons sur la Peau’.(1)

As has been mentioned in these pages before, Franco was pretty much on fire through the years 1972-74, producing an absolutely staggering quantity of work, much of it amongst his very best, the director working so fast that his films from this period almost seem like the result of cellular multiplication, with themes, locations, casts, costumes and script ideas all blurring into one another to create a sprawling sea of cinema that arguably represents the creative peak of Franco’s career.

Perhaps shot sometime between ‘La Comtesse Noire’ (Female Vampire) and ‘Les Nuits Brûlantes de Linda’ (Hot Nights of Linda), if the clues provided by locations, cast members and hairstyling are anything to go by, ‘Tender & Perverse Emanuelle’ (or whatever you want to call it) certainly isn’t amongst Franco’s best efforts from this period, but it nonetheless absorbs enough of the good stuff from the films surrounding it on his CV to make it a keeper for his ever-growing cult of devotees.

Like Lorna the Exorcist, ‘Tender & Perverse..’ begins with a contextless but intoxicating lesbian love scene, featuring an extended version of some footage that memorably appeared in the aforementioned ‘Hot Nights..’, featuring Lina Romay and a partner blowing cigarette smoke around a moodily lit, red-hued night club void, before (in this version) getting down to some serious softcore business. As the cry of Lina’s orgasm echoes over a swift cutaway to a clifftop shot of waves crashing against the shoreline far below, we know we’re in safe hands.

After this promising opening though, there is an unavoidable feeling of shoddiness to the way the rather slapdash melodrama / murder mystery plotline unfolds, not helped by one of the worst English dubs ever inflicted upon a Franco film. Regrettably for the dubbers, who seem to be making it up as they go along, there are a great many dialogue scenes and much procedural faffing about, making me wonder whether the French or Spanish versions might have featured a somewhat more compelling storyline than we get here - a distinct possibility, but I wouldn’t count on it based on the tedium that often resulted when Franco tried to make straight thrillers during the ‘70s. (See The Devil Came From Akasava for but one example.)

In places, Franco toys with the idea of expanding the murder mystery angle into full-on giallo territory – a hastily shot scene in which a woman playing piano in a bar is attacked via a garrote-wielding killer POV shot prefigures the slasher hi-jinks of Bloody Moon – but he never really follows this stylistic twist far enough to merit much interest.

‘Tender & Perverse..’s Citizen Kane-derived flashback structure recalls Franco’s excellent ‘Sinner’ (’73), but whereas that film was skillfully and deliberately constructed, the juxtaposition of scenes here seems fairly random, with flashbacks and sub-plots often feeling like flimsy excuses to mesh together a bunch of unconnected footage and sex scenes that one suspects could even have been shot for other projects.

Whereas the sex in most of Franco’s early ‘70s erotic films fits in quite naturally, feeling very much in keeping with the nature of the characters and the drift of the story, here it veers more toward the path taken by clumsier practitioners of the genre, with characters often seeming to get it on with each other at random intervals, for no terribly compelling reason. Not quite “the director blows the whistle and off they go” territory, but closer to such than Franco films of this vintage normally venture.

Whilst the resulting scenes are explicit enough to ensure that the film probably remained unseen outside of ‘specialist’ cinemas – sometimes playing the cheeky trick of adding anonymous insert shots to more chaste footage of the film’s lead actors - they are also sufficiently short and thinly spread out amongst straight crime/thriller footage that the movie would likely arouse nothing except frustration amongst the patrons of such establishments, raising the question of precisely what kind of contemporary audience the film could possibly have hoped to attract, even if it was an effective thriller (which for anyone other than us brain-scrabbled Franco devotees, it almost certainly isn’t).(2)

Cast-wise, Kastel herself is no great shakes as the ostensible lead, whilst as her husband, played by Spanish exploitation mainstay Alberto Dalbes, spends the whole picture just looking alternately bored and grumpy – an aura Dalbes continued to cultivate through his entire film career, insofar as I can tell.

More welcome is the presence of the ever-wonderful Jack Taylor, here looking at his very best, matching up his ‘Female Vampire’ mustache with some exquisitely classy threads to create the perfect exemplar of a dashing ‘70s gentleman. I don’t recall whether or not I’ve taken time here in the past to wax lyrical re: Jack Taylor, but needless to say - from his deep, soulful eyes and natural sense of style to the strange sense of innocence he seems able to bring even to roles in the very sleaziest movies, he is tops as far as I’m concerned, and it’s always a pleasure to spend time in his company.

It's also always a pleasure of course to spend time with Lina Romay, who here adopts a bit of a beatnik look for her first in-character scene as Jack’s wife / Dalbes’ sister, wearing shades and what appears to be a black nylon body-stocking. Through most of the rest of the film, she opts for a pair of fetching, thick-framed granny glasses, and, whilst the appalling dubbing makes it difficult to really get much of an angle on her performance, it is nice to see her in a slightly more subdued, naturalistic role than was usual in this era, wearing little make up and shunning the frenzied weirdness that characterized her appearances in ‘Comtesse..’, ‘Lorna..’ and ‘..Linda’, even though she remains the instigator of much of the film’s gratuitous hanky-panky.

Amongst the other familiar Franco faces popping up here, we’ve got rotund French comedian ‘Bigotini’ (who added inexplicable comic relief to ‘Hot Nights..’ and ‘73’s ‘Plaisir à Trios’) playing a rare straight role as a cop, and Antonio Mayans, who became Franco’s go-to male lead and general right hand man from the mid ‘70s right through to the director’s death in 2013, making what I believe may be his very first Francoverse appearance, as a minor character rejoicing under the perfect punk name of "Richard Scary".(3)

Meanwhile, the movie’s obligatory night-spot, ‘Yvonne’s Bar’, doesn’t have quite the same je ne sais quoi as the psychedelic dives of other Franco flicks, despite the application of some extremely blurry, freaked out camerawork, but it can at least boast Alice Arno (who appeared in almost every film I’ve thus far mentioned in the review) working behind the bar, so that’s ok.

In addition to a quintessential Franco cast, ‘Tender & Perverse..’ also benefits from the use of some quintessential Franco locations – some of them probably so familiar to the director’s fans by this stage that we’re quite liable to get confused and begin to believe we visited them during childhood or something. From the towering Alicante skyline to that familiar harbour with the big rock that Franco always films with exactly the same pan shot, it’s all here, whilst the clifftop villa with the red-tiled roof in which most of the action in ‘Hot Nights..’ took place stands in here as Kastel and Dalbes’ pad.

For all that it fails as both a thriller and a sex movie, ‘Tender & Perverse..’ does at least hit the spot as a pure Jess Franco movie, making extensive use of some of Jess’s favourite in-camera techniques to evoke a sense of drifting, dreamlike unreality. Focus is treated as optional  luxury throughout, and the aforementioned bar/night club scenes in particular degenerate almost completely into a psychedelic mess of fuzzy, over-saturated  wide-angle blurring.

For many other scenes, the lens seems to be smeared with more Vaseline than can possibly be sensible, whilst ‘Emanuelle’s solitary wanderings early in the film are enlivened by the same kind of extreme over-exposure that graced Janine Reynaud’s journey through the streets of Lisbon in Necronomicon, giving the scenes a kind of intense, unearthly glow, as, in some moments, she and her husband seem to disappear entirely into a sea of pure, blinding white.

This dreamlike, distorted atmos is only enhanced by Daniel White’s characteristically lugubrious piano score, the woozy tones of which seem to be launching a calculated assault against the audience’s attention span. White’s music for Franco’s films is certainly an acquired taste, that’s for sure - whilst some may claim it achieves a similar ambient sublimity to Badalamenti’s score for Twin Peaks, others may simply find it soporific and banal. I can’t decide where I stand on it really – it probably depends on how far after midnight it is, and how much I've had to drink. Count me as being on the fence for the moment, and maybe I’ll give you an opinion once I wake up, because the combination of White tinkling the ivories, the English dubbers spouting a load of improvised bullshit about dreams and nightmares and Franco playing hell with the focus knob has got me drifting off toward sleepy-time pretty damn quick….

Rest assured though, my dreams will be happy ones. Whilst most aficionados probably wouldn’t place ‘Tender & Perverse Emanuelle’ even within the top 25 horror-tinged erotic thrillers Jess Franco signed (one of) his name(s) to over the years, I nonetheless found it very enjoyable way to break the married life-imposed Franco abstinence that I have heroically undertaken over the past nine months or so. Whilst far from top drawer, it is still a picture that successfully invokes all of the most distinctive characteristics of the great man’s work, leading to a cinematic experience that, love it or hate it, couldn’t possibly have been created by any other human being – which certainly counts for something.

With Stephen Thrower’s long-awaited book finally arriving very soon (touch wood), a ticket to a whole evening dedicated to Mr. Thrower’s thoughts on Franco in my pocket and exciting new blu-rays on the way soon from both Kino/Redemption and Severin, it looks like I could be falling off the wagon for a good long while this time, perhaps following Emanuelle off that cliff into the shimmering Iberian waters below, as Lina moans distantly somewhere in the intermittently dubbed background. Bon voyage!

------------------------

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

-------------------------

(1) From what I can gather, the ‘Emanuelle’ hook was only added when the film was dubbed into English, and even then, the dubbing “artists” (I use the term loosely in this case) seem unsure, as the title character’s name changes back and forth between Emanuelle and the script’s original Barbara from scene to scene. (The fact the English title card misses the ‘e’ off ‘perverse’ also suggests things were done in a hurry.)

(2) Of course we only need point toward ‘Lorna the Exorcist’ or ‘A Virgin Among The Living Dead’ to demonstrate how little of a fuck Franco gave about satisfying audience / producer expectations in the early ‘70s, but the lack of commercial potential seems particularly glaring in the case of a film like this ‘Tender & Perverse..’, which seems more like a misguided genre exercise, largely lacking the singular vision and crazed artistry of the aforementioned projects.

(3) ‘Bigotini’, we should note in passing, possesses a truly intimidating soup-strainer moustache that puts Taylor’s in the shade. In fact, all in all, ‘Tender & Perverse Emanuelle’ must rank as one of the most moustache-heavy films in Franco’s catalogue, with almost every male cast member luxuriating in designer facial hair of one kind of another. Scenes in which Bigotini and another moustachioed cop take in Jack and Dables for questioning actually approach some kind of ‘70s mustache critical mass…. all it would have taken is an additional picture of Maurizio Merli pinned to the wall, and the consequences for the time-space continuum could have been unthinkable.

Franco Files: Lorna the Exorcist (1974)

AKA:

‘Les Possédées du Diable’, ‘Caresses de Chattes’, ‘Les Possédées du Démon’ [all titles used in France?], ‘Exorcism’ [Norway], ‘Sexy Diabolic Story’ [Italy], ‘Linda’ [U.S.A.], ‘Kleine Feeksen Maken Veel Heibel’ [‘Little Vixens Make a Lot of Fuss’(!), Belgium]

Context:

For my money, Jess Franco’s artistic (if not commercial) peak as a filmmaker came in the early ‘70s, around the time he began making extremely low budget movies for French producer Robert deNesle.(1) I can’t pretend to know much about deNesle, or Franco’s working relationship with him, but I can at least state my belief that many of the films that resulted – as highlighted by Mondo Macabro’s recent DVD releases of ‘Sinner’, ‘Countess Perverse’, ‘Plaisir à Trois’ aka ‘How To Seduce A Virgin’, and ‘Lorna the Exorcist’ – are very good indeed.(2)

As such, it is high time we got around to looking at some of them in this review strand. On a personal note, it was my initial viewing of 1974’s ‘Lorna The Exorcist’ that first convinced me that, more than just being some zany Euro-trash guy, Jess Franco at his best is a cinematic artist well worth paying attention to, with no disclaimers and quotation marks needed. So, this is one I’ve been building up to for a while, I guess.

One of Franco’s darkest and most troubling films, ‘Lorna..’ apparently proved just as unapproachable for ‘70s distributors and audiences as it does for 21st century reviewers, leading to what is probably one of the more convoluted and unfortunate release histories in a filmography full of convoluted and unfortunate release histories. Intermittently ignored, shortened, recut, redubbed, retitled and shopped around Europe and the USA in various states of disrepair through the remainder of the ‘70s, it was perhaps most widely seen in a truncated version that cut sections of the original film together with unrelated hardcore sex scenes.

As a result, Mondo Macabro’s heroic restoration of what they claim is the closest possible approximation of Franco’s original cut of the film splices together material taken from a multitude of prints and audio sources, leading to a viewing experience that is sometimes choppy, ragged and damaged… but would we really want it any other way? Looking like a film that's only barely escaped from some lost, night-haunted dungeon of euro-smut dementia, the resurrected ‘Lorna..’ is an absolute masterpiece of crazed, marginal cinema, and I bow before MM for bringing it to us in its (more-or-less) complete form.

Content:

First thing to note, in case you were wondering, is that ‘Lorna the Exorcist’ features no exorcists and no exorcisms (although by god, the characters could certainly do with some by the halfway point). Actually, the film’s most widely used title is a misnomer several times over, given that Lorna is the name of the supernatural presence whose influence a would-be exorcist would be called upon to get rid of, but you know how it is – European cinema was so exorcist-mad in the wake of Friedkin’s original, I’m sure deNesle could probably have just pulled out an old gladiator movie or something, called it “Hey Hey It’s Exorcist Time!” and still made money, so let’s just be glad he got behind this film instead, regardless of what he called it.

In brief then, ‘Lorna The Exorcist’ concerns the Faustian pact made by a weak-willed businessman (Guy Delorme) with the titular Lorna Green (Pamela Stanford), a mysterious woman whom he meets and indulges in a one-night stand with whilst trying to earn some dough in a seafront casino.(3) We don’t learn all this until a flashback sequence midway through the film, but the basic gist of their agreement is that Lorna’s magic will ensure his wealth and success in the coming years… but that his first born daughter belongs to her.(4)

Nineteen years later, the man is living in moneyed splendour with his wife (Jacqueline Laurent), and his daughter Linda, who, conceived around the time of his dalliance with Lorna, has now grown up into the shapely form of Lina Romay. (Hope you’ve got all those L names straight.)

With Lorna long-forgotten, the family are planning a holiday to celebrate Linda’s 18th birthday, when Dad unexpectedly gets a call. The time has come for Lorna to claim what is hers, and she commands that the family return to the site of the father’s original bargain/seduction to make the delivery. Unable to refuse, but limply determined to try to do something to save his daughter once they get there, Dad changes their travel plans accordingly, and the scene is set for a very unhappy holiday indeed.

Kink & Creepitude:

In looking at this particular film, I decided that the only possible option was to combine these two categories, simply because the ‘sex’ and ‘horror’ elements within ‘Lorna..’ are so thoroughly intertwined that attempting to examine them separately would be an impossible task.

Several times in earlier reviews (cf: Macumba Sexual, Doriana Gray), I have touched upon Jess Franco’s unique conception of the ‘sex horror’ film. At the risk of repeating myself, Franco's basic approach is to side-step the more common practice of simply throwing sex into a horror framework (or vice versa), and to instead make films in which the sex *becomes* the horror, and in which horror arises from the sex, pulling the (assumedly hetero-male) viewer’s libido into strange and frightening new places in the process – a goal that I think ‘Lorna..’ realises more powerfully than any other film he ever made.

Before the horror gets underway however, the film does at least begin in conventionally ‘sexy’ fashion. Right from the opening moments (after a rather generic credits sequence that indulges Franco’s love of random foliage footage), we’ve got Pamela Stanford kissing a full length mirror and rubbing herself through diaphanous gown before reclining, legs spread, on a bed as Lina appears, similarly under-clothed, at her French windows. So far, all this is plotless, contextless – for all we know, we could just be watching some old porno loop, but nonetheless, it is somehow completely entrancing, even when stretched across the better part of ten minutes.

The haunting, cyclical electric guitar melody and ‘floating’ camerawork, the eerie slo-mo drift of the women’s movements and Stanford’s frankly mental make-up & wig all contribute to a thoroughly oneiric experience that’s more akin to a Jonas Mekas/Jack Smith style experimental short than yr average softcore bump n’ grind, forcing even the most sceptical of viewers to admit that a skilled filmmaker, fully engaged with the material, is behind the camera here… even as he finally gives in to the urge to hit the zoom and zero in on somebody’s beaver every thirty seconds.(5)

So far then, we’re basically just watching an unusually well-made porn film, but nonetheless, there is a strange ritualistic feel to this opening dream sequence that prefigures the horrible abuses of the sexual urge (both the characters’ and the viewers’) that will follow through the next ninety minutes, as ‘Lorna..’s sexual content gradually drops this conventional/comforting vibe completely and begins more to resemble some kind of transgressive art-porn assault-film, taking jaded Euro-sleaze fans way outside their preferred comfort zone with a fevered intensity and sense of suffocating WRONG-ness that rarely lets up.

Strangely, our first hint that there is something a bit more unsettling than usual going on here comes via an inexplicable sub-plot that features Franco himself playing a doctor in a rather cramped looking lunatic asylum (make of that what you will), treating a writhing mad woman with an aversion to pants. Presented with no overt connection to rest of the story, this character/set-up is of course a reoccurring motif in Franco’s films (see Dracula: Prisoner of Frankenstein, for example).

On one level, the inclusion of a hospitalised mad-woman can be seen as a cheap way to raise an “is it all in her mind..?” type psycho-psychedelic dilemma, or just as a bit of bonus titillation or random space-filling weirdness, but the disturbing significance of this archetype within the endlessly self-referential ebb and flow of Franco’s work was fully uncovered a few years later in ‘Doriana Gray’, and that film’s big reveal is perhaps prefigured here as the actress – whom we might most sensibly assume to be one of Lorna’s prior ‘victims’ - goes about her freaked out writhing in a manner far too fractured and agonised to rouse anything other than deep uneasiness in the viewer in spite of her gratuitous nudity, as her hysteria seems to build in parallel with the film’s main plot - her psychic connection to Lorna or Linda (or both) presumably cueing her in to events as they transpire.

From here, we’ll bypass a lot of story set-up stuff and another, slightly more sinister, dream (OR IS IT?) coupling between Lorna and Linda, clearly setting the scene for the latter’s psychic domination by the former, and move on to what is probably one of the most shocking and bizarre moments in Franco’s entire filmography – the bit best referred to simply as the “literal case of the crabs” scene, wherein Lorna’s vengeful black magic bestows a terrible fate upon Linda’s biological mother.

A pretty pivotal scene in the movie, this is where the gloves really come off, so to speak. A total WTF by anyone’s standards, it’s just… I mean … crabs?! What? Why, in god’s name, Jess, why? What the hell were you thinking? Ok, so insert shots of some other poor lady’s vagina are clearly used for the close-ups, and there are no shots of the crabs, um, emerging or anything (thank god), but still, JESUS F-ING CHRIST JESS, what are you trying to do to us here..?

Grotesque as it is though, this madness does actually make perfect sense within Franco’s own cosmology. As Stephen Thrower perceptively points out in an interview included on the Mondo Macabro DVD, female genitalia is of course the relentless focus of Franco’s camera - the absolute centre of the sexual impulse that dominates his films. So to show this part of the body visibly contaminated by evil, inhabited by monsters… what more of a completely literal demonstration of the director’s sex = horror nightmare trip could you ask for..?

And after that, well… up to this point, we were simply watching another oddball Franco sex film, but after the crabs, there is a feeling that ANYTHING could happen, and, like any good horror director, Franco ruthlessly tightens the screws (no pun intended). Pre-crabs, the relationships within the family only seemed *slightly* strange, and the Linda/Lina seductions still had the potential to play as easy-going, soft-porn fun, but, post-crabs, all bets are off, and things quickly begin to become almost unbearably uncomfortable and fucked up.

Frankly, the idea of a family trapped in a cramped hotel room under heavy psychic assault from some sort of omniscient witch would be a frightening enough idea even without all the sexual ickyness, but Franco’s real genius in the last half hour of this film is the way he really goes all out on the sex/horror project, filling every moment with horror that is sexy, and sex that is horrific, refusing to allow viewers any kind of either/or get-out clause.

Perhaps on a pure, lizard brain level, the remaining Linda / Lorna scenes, or the sight of Linda writhing naked in front of her father, might be considered as sexy as anything in a more conventional erotic movie, but the way the director rampages fearlessly across usually unbreakable taboos here, pulling notions of familial dysfunction, mental illness and psychic cruelty into these emotionally excruciating sexual encounters is both daring and genuinely frightening. Attraction and repulsion, sex-drive and death-drive, fear and desire, animal lust vs. moral imperitive - these are the dualities at the core of every horror film, surely, and here Jess Franco sets out to explore them with a sledgehammer.

As Lorna begins insisting that she is Linda’s mother as she appears out of nowhere to seduce and/or abuse her ‘daughter’, both suckling and bloodily deflowering her shortly after the poor girl has witnessed the traumatic primal image of her biological mother writhing naked in unspeakable pain, and as we see Linda, utter madness in her eyes, offering herself spread-legged to her doomed father, well…. we’ve gone so far beyond the comfort zone of the kind of ‘raincoat brigade’ audience this film was ostensibly made for by this point, it’s a wonder Europe’s more sensitive perverts weren’t fleeing from the cinemas in tears.

Not in any way a vision of a ‘cool’ or aspirational witch, Pamela Stanford’s Lorna eventually looks flat-out insane as she looms over Linda, waiting to possess her soul. Her strength arising only from the brutality of her attack and the defencelessness of her victims, she is a desperate and twisted creature, looking like a vampire long deprived of blood, or a near-death Warhol circle junkie… kind of rat-like and almost physically falling apart beneath her OTT glam-rock make up as she frantically pushes herself into the fresh mind and body of the poor Linda.

“I am sterile, like all who come from beyond..”, Lorna declares at one point; such a striking and chilling line of dialogue. Despite obsessively pursuing sex, and feeding off the sexual subjugation of her victims, she can gain no satisfaction or relief whatsoever from it, and it is the horror inspired by the resulting emptiness that drives her to madness – a black-hearted judgement on the meaninglessness of abusive/pathological sexual behaviour perhaps, and a similar condition to that which afflicts many of the supernatural denizens of Franco’s sex-horror films, from ‘Female Vampire’ to ‘Doriana Gray’ and beyond.

5/5

Pulp Thrills:

Even with all of the above going on, Franco always had such a great feel for way-out modernist furnishings and peculiar pop-art visuals (see ‘sight-seeing’, below), and in particular, Lorna’s space age bachelor pad is absolutely amazing. It looks like any self-respecting ‘60s Euro-spy protagonist’s dream-home, and when Howard Vernon himself stomps in, playing a cameo as some kind of Morpho-like minion (inexplicably named Maurizius in the script, but fans will know he’s a Morpho really) and wallops Guy Delorme in the face with a spiky sea-shell…. well, that’s some kinda pulp movie heaven, right there.

Regarding the film’s more extreme sexual content, Pete Tombs in the notes accompanying the Mondo Macabro DVD draws a connection with the blood-curdling excesses of the numerous porno-horror fumetti that were popular in Europe at around the time this movie was made – not something that had occurred to me, but I can definitely see where he’s coming from vis-a-vis the constant, gratuitous nudity and surreal, puerile gross-ness often on display here.

3/5

Altered States:

As I hope has been made clear in the preceding sections of this review, ‘Lorna The Exorcist’ conveys a heavy, authentically nightmarish atmosphere at almost all times. Lorna’s ambiguous relationship to reality (is she a witch, an evil spirit, a ghost..?) and her sudden appearances and dreadful acts, together with the otherworldly angles and gleaming glass walls of the looming holiday complex and the “I can’t believe this is happening” disbelief expressed by the trapped and persecuted family all combine to take ‘Lorna The Exorcist’ way-out-there way quickly, as Franco manages to thoroughly trash our sense of reality, even whilst firmly rooted in a budget-conscious world of real-life location-shooting with minimal use of lighting, visual tricks or special effects.

This being a Franco film though, we’ve got to have at least some ‘down time’, and the most significant departure from the oppressive, claustrophobic atmosphere that dominates the rest of the films is – hey hey - the disco scene! I mean, you didn’t think Jess Franco was going to make a soul-destroying sex-horror film without one of those did you?

Clearly shot on the fly at a real discothèque with little in the way of pre-planning or staging, this sequence has a brutally drab, realist vibe to it that is completely at odds with the kind of glorious stylisation Franco usually brought to such scenarios. Filmed largely in fixed camera long-shot, it is hideously embarrassing for all concerned, and flat-out hilarious in places, revealing Lin(d)a & co. to be one weird family unit. Despite their uptight demeanour upon entering ‘the club’, the family immediately take a table and order scotch (“bring the bottle, it’s cheaper that way” (!)), before father, mother and daughter immediately get up and hit the dancefloor, nervously frugging to overdubbed library jazz amid the crowd of teenagers. Damnedest thing I ever saw, and the combination of Lina’s utterly misguided one-piece outfit (I won’t even try to describe it) and the artless, home movie feel of the scene just pushes it over the edge. A portrait of family life, Jess Franco style? I sure hope so.(6)

The stilted awkwardness of this sequence seems to characterise all of the movie’s sporadic attempt to have its characters interact with the ‘real’ world (check out the bit where Guy Delorme phones up the hotel concierge and basically says something like “could you send a doctor please, my wife has died, oh and by the way, I need a gun..” as if that was somehow normal behaviour), and ironically these lapses succeed in making the film feel even weirder, creating a sharp division between those imprisoned by Lorna’s malign influence, and those who are simply oblivious to it.

Like the film itself, André Bénichou’s music score takes a simple & cost-effective premise (solo electric guitar) and gradually renders it totally twisted, as the spidery, hypnotic melody that accompanies much of the film is gradually filtered through a woozy swamp of effects units (delay, wah-wah, distortion etc.) until it becomes completely unrecognisable, lending a horrible feeling of dread to the film’s more unwholesome sequences. Definitely one of the most distinctive and experimental scores ever commissioned for a Franco film.

4/5

Sight-seeing:

The scene that introduces us to the family takes place in very grand, palatial interior that I’m SURE I remember seeing elsewhere in the Franco canon (‘Sinner?’, ‘Doriana’?). After that though, the majority of ‘Lorna..’ takes place in the purpose built ‘new city’ of La Grande-Motte, established in the late 1960s by architect Jean Balladur in the Languedoc-Roussillon region in the South of France.

A jaw-dropping feat of near-fantastical modernist architecture, La Grande-Motte is a weird, package tour utopia, an artificial harbour dominated by ziggurat style pyramid-hotels incorporating towering, geometrically patterned walls of overlapping glass & steel. The perfect setting for a Jess Franco film in other words, and, inventively used by the director, it’s disorientating shapes and surfaces serve to give the ‘Lorna..’ an almost sci-fi feel a times (very much recalling Godard’s similar use of pre-existing architecture in ‘Alphaville’).

The positioning of ancient gothic horrors within this kind of futurist, post-war European landscape is of course a trait that runs through many of Franco’s films, and here place and theme seem to gel perfectly. More than ever, the location becomes a conscious part of the story, and the mid-film flashback sequence directly ties Lorna’s apparent ‘haunting’ of this holiday complex to the actual construction of the buildings within it. As her Faustian seduction of Linda’s father plays out, we cut away to shots of cranes and building crews, literally constructing the maze within which the characters are later trapped.

Lorna’s laconic voiceover describes the new development as “a doomed attempt to create something from the solitude”, raising the eerie notion that her spirit could have been roaming this uninhabited coastal hinterland since time immemorial, until the weird curves of newly constructed buildings once again allowed her to attain new, equally ‘modern’ physical form, returning once more to terrorise and feed off the living.

4/5

Conclusion:

Lina, Linda, Lorna…. what does it all mean? And then he gives his ex-wife the credit for writing the ‘script’!(7) What was going through Jess Franco’s mind when he made this thing? Probably best not think too hard on the matter, if we want to get out of here alive. As with so many makers of mind-destroying, idiosyncratic art, chances are he didn’t think about it at all. I bet he just scribbled down a few ideas, set out with his cast and camera, did it, sent the reels back to the producer, went off to make the next one.

He’d already been through the same process dozens of times by this point, so who knows what strange stars were aligned for this one, but what emerged is I think possibly the best film he ever made: a horrifyingly visceral, uncompromising and utterly absorbing outpouring of freakish, Freudian nightmare. ‘Terrible’ in the literal, old fashioned sense of the word, it is a feverish anti-masterpiece in which the director’s usual b-movie fun and games become entirely possessed by the kind of dreadful, inexplicable power that is only hinted at in most of his other films.

Whilst ‘Lorna..’ still offers up all the kitschy good times fans might expect of an early ‘70s Franco production – gratuitous sex, weird architecture, psychedelic Mediterranean holiday vibes, ridiculous disco excursions, Pamela Stafford plastering on her make-up like house-paint, Howard Vernon bashing someone in the face with a seashell – it also captures a moment in which the maestro completely transcended his legend, producing a film whose unglued intensity pushes it more into the realm of Andrzej Zulawski’s ‘Possession’ or Walarian Borowczyk’s ‘Dr Jekyll et les Femmes’.

Aptly summed up by Thrower as “a film of profound unhealthiness”, ‘Lorna..’ is the kind of movie that all those ‘cinema of transgression’ goofballs from the ‘80s and ‘90s WISH they could have made, and it deserves to be seen as a cornerstone of any study of the kind of ‘sex-horror’ films that dare to take that label at face value.

(1) Non-Francophone readers may like to note that deNesle’s name is apparently pronounced DA-NELL, rather than DE-NESEL or somesuch – knowledge that may save you from ridicule the next time you are called upon to publically debate the merits of early ‘70s French soft-porn producers. Working as a producer since 1950, it appears deNesle had occasional brushes with respectability via projects like George Franju’s ‘Judex’ (1963), but his general output prior to hooking up with Franco can probably be more aptly represented by such titles as ‘Girl Merchants’ (1957), ‘The Night They Killed Rasputin’ (1960) and ‘Sadistic Hallucinations’ (1969). Check out his CV on IMDB – it’s a hoot.

(2)In fairness, there are a number of other, as-yet-unseen-by-me Franco / deNesle joints that we might assume to be of somewhat lesser quality - ‘Robinson and his Tempestuous Slaves’, ‘Celestine, an All-Around Maid’ and ‘The Lustful Amazons’ for instance - but I’m not writing any of them off until I’ve actually seen them.

(3) I probably won’t need to remind readers well-versed in Francology that Lorna Green was also the name of Janine Reynaud’s character in Necronomicon. Although their back stories are quite different, I suppose we could maybe *just about* accept the notion that this is a return appearance by the same character… the initial Lorna’s unquiet spirit still roaming about the Mediterranean coast after completing her initial spate of vengeance, sating her appetite with new victims, perhaps..? The idea’s there if you wanna run with it.

(4) Having not seen this film for a while before revisiting it for this review, I could have sworn that Jack Taylor played the role of the father… funny how the mind plays tricks on you (particularly when you keep force-feeding it Jess Franco films). To be honest, I kind of wish it was Jack Taylor. I like Jack Taylor.

(5) At this stage, Franco was still usually shooting softcore, but often pushing things to the very edge of hardcore, and whilst I have no particular desire to see explicit sex on screen, the rather silly close-ups here of the ladies waggling their tongues mere millimetres from each other’s pubes sort of make you wish he’d crossed the line and just got on with it.

(6) Whilst we’re on the subject of crap bits in the film, it’s also worth noting that the flashback sequence illustrating Lorna’s initial meeting with Lorna’s father is undermined by an absolutely interminable casino scene that just goes on and on, to no very clear purpose.

(7) Though I believe the couple were estranged by this point in the wake of Lina, Franco’s wife Nicole Guettard continued to work with him throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s, often credited as a co-writer or “script supervisor” (what a job that must have been). So her appearance here isn’t entirely unexpected, but still… picking up the sole writing credit under her rarely used “Nicole Franco” name, on a film that focuses heavily on dysfunctional family relationships..? I can’t speak for the writing talents or proclivities of the former Mrs Franco, but I find it hard to believe anyone other than Jess wrote a word of this movie (assuming anyone ever wrote it down at all), and I can’t help suspecting there’s some kind of weird or cruel joke going on there somewhere, but it’s not my place to speculate. Trying to make sense of the credits on Jess Franco films is often a bit like trying to decode a cold war spy cypher or something, so who knows.