The Monk (1972)

The Monk is a movie I’ve been searching for for quite a while. I was delighted to find it on DVD. Not the greatest transfer perhaps but it is in the correct aspect ratio at least. This is a movie that definitely needs a full restoration and a Blu-Ray release. It was a Franco-Italian-German co-production shot in English.

It’s based on Matthew Gregory Lewis’s 1796 gothic novel of the same name. This is one of the most notorious most outrageous novels of all time. If you’re telling yourself that a novel written in 1796 couldn’t possibly still be shocking today then think again. The Monk still packs a punch.

It’s necessary to keep in mind that anti-Catholic bigotry was a major strain in English culture (both high culture and pop culture) from the 16th century right through to the 20th century. Anti-Catholicism was a common theme in the first wave of gothic fiction which lasted from 1764 up to around 1820. It found its most spectacular flowering in Lewis’s The Monk.

The gothic fiction of that early period invariably has hints of the supernatural but it almost always turns out that nothing was actually involved. The Monk is unusual in that it has overt and explicit supernatural elements.

This movie certainly has some horror an exploitation elements but it has some definite art-house credentials as well. The script was co-written by Luis Buñuel no less (with Jean-Claude Carrière).

In fact Buñuel had been hoping to film the novel since the 1950s.

For various reasons Buñuel lost interest in directing and the assignment was given to Greek director Ado Kyrou. The script by Buñuel and Carrière was retained.

The setting is presumably Spain, probably in the 17th century. Ambrosio (Franco Nero) is a monk renowned for his piety and wisdom, and especially for his passionate belief in the vital importance of chastity. Ambrosio is admired by all.

He is becoming a little worried about Brother John. Brother John is in fact a gorgeous young woman, Mathilde (Nathalie Delon), masquerading as a man. We will later discover that her motives are less than innocent. Even wearing a cowl nobody could possibly mistake Mathilde for a man. This might of course be a deliberate touch, perhaps an attempt to capture the somewhat outlandish feel of the early gothic novels with unlikely coincidences and implausible disguises.

Mathilde has no trouble seducing Ambrosio. He is wracked by guilt but he can’t give her up.

Mathilde has clearly awakened Ambrosio’s interest in women. He becomes obsessed with a young girl, Antonia. Antoni’s mother is very ill. Ambrosio offers her spiritual comfort but he’d like to offer Antonia comfort of a more carnal nature. By this time Ambrosio has surrendered to the pleasures of the flesh but with the added spice of lots and lots of guilt.

Mathilde tells the wretched monk that there is a way he can have Antonia. Mathilde has commerce with demons. She can summon a demon who will deliver Antonia into his hands. Ambrosio is horrified but his lusts have now taken control of him.

The wealthy and debauched and incredibly wicked Duke of Talamur (Nicol Williamson) also has an interest in Antonia. The Duke is a noted philanthropist. He is always looking for ways to help the unfortunate, especially if the unfortunate happen to be very young girls.

Needless to say these wicked goings-on attract the attention of the Inquisition. It seems that nothing can save Ambrosio.

The cast is fine. Franco Nero did this sort of thing well. On the subject of the blending of art and exploitation in this movie it’s worth noting that is star, Franco Nero, was an actor who shuttled happily back and forth between art movies and exploitation movies and popular commercial movies. Nathalie Delon as Mathilde is suitably wicked. Nicol Williamson oozes corruption and evil and uber-creepiness from every pore.

This movie really needed Buñuel at the helm. Ado Kyrou clearly has no feel for the material. The sleaze and trashiness is there in the source material and the movie doesn’t back away from admitting that shocking things are going on but the style is dull and too arty. With Buñuel unavailable it might perhaps have been better to pick a director with more of an exploitation movie sensibility. It would have been interesting to see Jess Franco let loose on this material. Alice Arno as Mathilde could have been awesome.

This movie came out the same year as Ken Russell’s The Devils. That’s the kind of approach The Monk needed. The Monk definitely needed some visual flamboyance and outrageousness.

The ending is cringe. The Monk just doesn’t make it. The 70s was the time when a great adaptation of the novel could have been made but this film represents a misfire and a lost opportunity.

It’s Nothing Mama, Just a Game (1974)

It’s Nothing Mama, Just a Game (AKA Beyond Erotica AKA Lola) is a Spanish-Venezuelan co-production and it’s crazy twisted eurosleaze. This is definitely not a giallo. It’s not supernatural horror but I would still class it as gothic horror.

Juan’s family owns a sugar plantation in Venezuela. To say that Juan (David Hemmings) is odd would be putting it mildly. He lives there with his mother (played by Alida Valli). She is every bit as crazy as he is, but in a different way. The plantation has been slowly going broke since the death of Juan’s father. Now they’re reliant on financial support from Juan’s uncle. The uncle despises Juan’s mother but he despises Juan even more. He is concerned that Juan may be not just useless but dangerously crazy.

We already know Juan is crazy after the opening scene in which he watches a pretty young woman named Lucia mauled to death by his dogs. Lucia had been the maid. Now she will have to be replaced. Lola (Andrea Rau) is the lucky girl.

Lola isn’t completely stupid or completely innocent. A man trying to get into her pants is something she can deal with. She is probably no naïve virgin. Her problem is that she has no idea at first that Juan is playing a much crazier game than that.

She is also over-confident.

Juan is not primarily motivated by sex but I don’t think he’s motivated by power either. He seems to be a man still stuck in his childhood, playing games of make-believe. The games do not seem to have a specific objective. The game is an end in itself. When he’s playing his games he can forget that the estate is failing and that he has contributed to the decline through his incompetence and childishness. He can feel that he is in control of his life, when in reality his life has been spiralling more and more out of control.

Lola does not want to play the game, but she ends up doing so. She even learns to enjoy doing so. Perhaps, even in a perverse way, it makes her feel more in control. On the surface she might be the submissive partner but in fact she has the real power. She starts to realise that she can end up calling the shots. She might now be a better game-player than Juan.

Juan’s uncle arrives. His aim is to sort things out and if Juan really does prove to be insane he intends to pull the financial plug on Juan and his mother. Juan is outmatched by his uncle but the uncle is outmatched by Lola.

Lola has something that gives her the whip hand over both men - the sexual power of women. She can make them dance to her tune. But if power always corrupts it corrupts Lola as well.

There’s some powerhouse acting here. David Hemmings is superb. He’s incredibly creepy and scary and evil but Hemmings also makes us realise that Juan is more of a deranged child than anything else. He makes the character chillingly believable.

Andrea Rau (from Daughters of Darkness) is equally good as Lola, a young woman who finds herself both repelled and fascinated by Juan. She is drawn into the game, and develops a bit of a taste for sexual kinkiness.

The bizarre relationship between Juan and Lola is something you probably wouldn’t get away with today. It would almost certainly be seen as dated and offensive and problematic, but in the 70s it was assumed that audiences for grown-up movies were in fact grown-ups and could deal with subject matter that was a bit confronting. One Spanish critic at the time compared this film to The Night Porter, and there is a certain affinity between the two films.

Alida Valli is excellent as well. The mother is possibly more evil than Juan since she has more awareness of the evil she is covering up.

It would be tempting to see this as yet another film attacking the decadence of the bourgeoisie but that’s a tedious and simplistic interpretation. This movie is more in the gothic mould of Poe - a story of familial decay and degeneracy. The flashbacks scattered throughout the story suggest that the decay and degeneracy were already well and truly evident in Juan’s father’s day. The decay and degeneracy are now blossoming in a truly unhealthy way.

I’m always dubious about attempts to over-explain character motivations by relating them to traumas in the past. That can lead so easily to half-baked Freudianism. This movie seems like it’s going to succumb to that temptation but it doesn’t really. The flashbacks just let us know that things have been getting crazy in this family for a very long time.

This is a very unwholesome family and their evil infects everybody with whom they come in contact. We know just enough about Lucia to assume that she had been drawn into Juan’s twisted games. Lola is certainly drawn into those games.

The men and women are equally twisted. To try to see this movie in feminist terms is to miss the point. Every member of the family and everybody who comes in contact with them is tainted by madness. Whether they’re male or female is irrelevant.

There’s a moderate amount of sex and nudity. There’s lots of kinkiness.

Mondo Macabro’s Blu-Ray looks terrific and there are plenty of extras.

Black Cobra (1976)

Although Black Cobra (AKA Black Cobra Woman AKA Eva Negra) is a Joe d’Amato movie starring Laura Gemser and although it has been marketed in the US as Emmanuelle and the Deadly Black Cobra this is not a Black Emanuelle movie. This is more of an erotic thriller.

Laura Gemser plays Eva and she’s introduced in a memorable fashion. She’s a night-club dancer. She does an erotic dance with a snake. Then we see her in a restaurant with a woman. There’s some heavy flirtation going on, although in fact it goes a bit further than that. Eva then goes home and has a sexual fantasy about the woman, intercut with a sexual fantasy about dancing with the snake. It’s a nice opening. We don’t know very much about Eva at this stage but there are enough hints to be intriguing.

She may be a lesbian, or bisexual, or a straight woman with a rich sexual fantasy life. Whichever category she falls into her sexuality has overtones of perversity, of a fascination with danger and death.

We are also introduced to Judas Carmichael (Jack Palance) and here also we learn just enough to get us interested. He is a very rich man with an obsession with snakes. He has a large collection of the reptiles. He is interested in the subject of fear. He manages to persuade Eva to visit him at home. She becomes frightened, for no obvious reason. Eva prides herself on knowing no fear. So we have two people who are interested in fear and courage. Judas in fact behaves like a perfect gentleman. He does not even attempt to kiss Eva. He does seem just a little odd - as if he is not quite comfortable with women. They are after all much more dangerous than snakes.

He makes Eva an offer. It amounts to buying her. Not for an hour or an evening, but buying her outright. She accepts, although we have already found out that she is already owned by a rich Chinese man. Judas apparently has made her a better offer. It’s an interestingly ambiguous offer. We never find out if they ever sleep together. Perhaps Judas has simply added her to his collection of beautiful deadly pets.

Judas’s brother Jules (Gabriele Tinti) is slightly disturbing in other more subtle ways. His feelings towards Judas seem to be tainted with resentment. We’re not quite sure how Jules feels about Eva but he is clearly not indifferent to her physical charms. Both Judas and Jules make us just a little uneasy.

And Eva gets herself a girlfriend. She begins an intense affair with Gerri (Michele Starck). She does admit that she loves Judas, in her own way. And she probably does, in her own way.

There’s plenty of potential here for betrayals and jealousies and sexual and emotional dramas.

There is of course the snake symbolism. We guess that one of these people will turn out to be a deadly serpent. Of course there are many venomous human serpents, so it could get more complicated.

I’ve never been a great admirer of Jack Palance as an actor but no-one could ever accuse him of being boring. In eurotrash movies he tended to be lots of fun and he could always be relied on to add a touch of menace, danger or craziness. In this movie he’s surprisingly good and surprisingly subtle. We have absolutely no idea if he’s going to be the hero, the victim or the villain and Palance keeps us in doubt.

Now let’s be honest. Laura Gemser was not cast in movies like this for her acting ability, which was somewhat limited. She was cast because what was wanted was firstly an exotic beauty who was totally uninhibited about taking her clothes off. Secondly, she had to be able to ooze steamy sexuality. And thirdly, since she was usually the heroine she had to be likeable. Miss Gemser qualified on all counts. As a bonus she is also a very elegant woman. This is a role that falls within her acting range and she’s fine.

D’Amato never forgets that he’s making an exploitation movie. An essential ingredient here is copious quantities of naked female flesh and that’s what he gives us. There’s a lot of female frontal nudity. If you’re going to have lots of nude scenes you might as well shoot them with a certain amount of style and that’s what D’Amato does. D’Amato started his career as a very respected cinematographer and he handles that role here as well as directing. It’s a good-looking movie. The exotic locations (and Hong Kong was definitely considered exotic at the time) were one of the film’s major selling points.

D’Amato obviously figured that if he was going to do an erotic thriller he might as well try to make it a well-crafted interesting one and he succeeds. This is a true erotic thriller, with the thriller plot driven entirely by erotic desires and obsessions. D’Amato wrote the screenplay and it’s effectively twisted with nicely ambiguous character motivations.

Some people hate the ending. I think it’s crazy but I like it. This is a European movie so don’t expect a Hollywood ending.

Black Cobra achieves everything it sets out to achieve. Exotic locations, kinky eroticism, murder driven by lust and jealousy. Jack Palance and Laura Gemser are fun to watch. Enjoyable movie, highly recommended.

The Spanish Blu-Ray offers an excellent transfer.

The Young Seducers (1971)

The Young Seducers (Blutjunge Verführerinnen) is a 1971 softcore erotic film written and directed by Erwin C. Dietrich.

Dietrich was a legendary Swiss film director, producer and entrepreneur. He achieved huge success with exploitation movies and later had significant mainstream success as a producer. His erotic movies might not be high art but Dietrich knew how to achieve a classy feel on very low budgets.

The Young Seducers really has no plot at all. A sex magazine is planning a new series of feature articles about young women who seduce men. The various staff writers toss around ideas based on cases they’ve heard about it and we see these scenarios played out. The movie is a series of very brief erotic vignettes.

There’s a girl who seduces an artist. He didn’t think women were an interesting subject to paint but this young lady changes his mind, and as a result he finally achieves success as a painter.

There’s a gas station that decides that rather than give away free gifts which people really don’t away they’ll offer their customers something they do want. While their cars are getting the full service the customers get the full service as well, from Angela. She might not show much enthusiasm but she’s undeniably efficient. She knows to get a man’s motor running. And the gas station starts selling an awful lot of fuel. Some guys find that they need to fill up every day.

There’s a girl who tries to blackmail her chemistry teacher into taking her to bed.

And another girl who is taking piano lessons and persuades her lady piano teacher that there are things that are more fun than tickling the ivories. They could take nude photos of each other. This gets them both a bit over-excited and you can imagine what happens next.

The next segment purports to be a retelling of the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale The Princess and the Pea although I don’t think Anderson would have recognised this version. A princess is riding the bus and thinks one of the male passengers might be a prince. What she needs to know is if he has a large pea. He assures her that he has an impressively large pea and proceeds to demonstrate this. While they’re riding the bus she’s riding his pea. This segment is at least an attempt to add a bit of humour.

In the next segment a young lady meets a Danish footballer in an electronics store. She’s there to buy a battery for her vibrator. Again there’s a vague attempt at humour. She finds that with a handsome muscle-bound Danish footballer who needs a vibrator?

Then we move to the world of the theatre. An actor playing Romeo is visited by a female fan wanting an autograph, but she wants more than an autograph.

Four athletes are looking for entertainment and they find a girl willing to oblige, in a barn. She dances for them and then offers them some real entertainment. They like a good workout, and so does she.

The framing story about the reporters takes a bit of a twist at the end. It turns out that they’ve been doing some in-depth in-the-field research.

It’s all just an excuse to get some very pretty actresses naked. And they’re very pretty indeed and one of them is Ingrid Steeger, something of a European sexploitation legend. And they’re very naked. There’s a great deal of frontal nudity.

It’s all much too silly and good-natured to be offensive, although I’m sure it would outrage plenty of people today.

There’s no substance at all to this movie but it doesn’t pretend to offer anything more than skin and a few laughs. This was a more innocent age, in which sex could be treated as fun. If you like European skin-flicks it’s recommended.

I’ve reviewed a couple of Dietrich’s other movies. In 1980 with Women of Inferno Island (AKA Caged Women AKA Gefangene Frauen) which starred Brigitte Lahaie he achieved something I would have considered impossible - he made a bright and breezy feelgood women-in-prison movie which I highly recommend. And Rolls-Royce Baby (1975, with Lina Romay) is stylish erotica.

The German Blu-Ray release looks very nice and offers the English-dubbed version with removable German subtitles as an option.

Castle of the Creeping Flesh (1968)

Adrian Hoven’s Castle of the Creeping Flesh (original title Im Schloß der blutigen Begierde) is a German eurohorror movie which falls into the gothic horror in a contemporary setting sub-category, with a bit of added weirdness.

We start with a party with a very high decadence factor. Baron Brack (Michel Lemoine) is trying to persuade Vera Lagrange (Janine Reynaud) to go to bed with him. He persuades her to accompany him to his isolated hunting lodge. She is more than willing. There is however some confusion, three other guests turn up at the ledge as well and Brack ends up at the lodge with Vera’s sister Elena Lagrange (Elvira Berndorff).

Elena has been extremely flirtatious but seems uncertain if she actually wants to sleep with Brack. They do have sex, and her feelings about this seem to be decidedly mixed to say the least.

Vera then turns up, along with Brack’s fiancée Marion, Marion’s brother Georg and Elena’s fiancé Roger.

Elena mounts her horse and disappears into the night. The woods are not safe so the others set off to find her. They discover that she has ended up at the castle of the Earl of Saxon (Howard Vernon), a man with a reputation as unfriendly recluse and an eccentric. The Earl is a doctor and he has been conducting medical experiments with a colleague of sorts. The Earl has his own mad scientist laboratory.

The Earl is upset since his only child, his beloved daughter, was raped and murdered three days earlier. The Earl intends to take steps as a result, and those steps can best be described as bizarre. His daughter is dead but he hopes to ensure that this is only temporary.

The whole party of rich idle decadents ends up at the castle where they receive a warmer welcome than one might expect.

Then things start to become gradually more weird. The party of decadents hears the grim family legend. A few centuries earlier an ancestor of the present Earl also had a beautiful innocent daughter who was raped and murdered. She was betrayed, the ancestor took his revenge and was later beheaded. The family curse dates from that time.

That ancient story will be repeated, by life-size marionettes.

It will be repeated again, in Vera’s dream. If it’s a dream. It might be repeated yet again.

The castle seems to be a place where past and present, legend and fact, dream and reality, all intersect and bleed into each other. Vera has a strange violent dream but does the dream come from her own overheated erotic imagination or from the castle itself? To what extent is it a dream?

There is also considerable doubt about the extent of the Earl’s grip on reality.

Events may be building towards a tragic climax, assuming that anything that happens in the castle is real.

I always say that any movie can only be improved by the inclusion of a guy in a gorilla suit. This movie demonstrates that a guy in a bear suit can work just as well. You might be wondering what a bear is doing in this movie. Once you see the movie, you’ll still be wondering.

There’s surprisingly (for 1968) a lot of gore, in the form of surgical scenes. There’s a moderate amount of topless nudity and some sex and some rape all of which caused major censorship problems and the film was heavily cut at the time.

Howard Vernon is always fun to watch. Michel Lemoine is suitably oily as the sleazy Baron Brack. Janine Reynaud gives another of her extraordinary mesmerising performances.

Castle of the Creeping Flesh was written and directed by Adrian Hoven (best-known for Mark of the Devil) but there is a Jess Franco connection. Franco apparently made some contribution to the writing of this film and Hoven had made several appearances as an actor in Franco movies such as Necronomicon - Geträumte Sünden (AKA Succubus, 1968), Two Undercover Angels (AKA Rote Lippen AKA Sadisterotica) and Kiss Me, Monster (1969). And Janine Reynaud appeared in all three of those films.

It might be a little clunky at times but Castle of the Creeping Flesh has enough weirdness and ambiguity and sleaze to satisfy eurohorror fans and it’s highly recommended.

The Labyrinth of Sex (1969)

The Labyrinth of Sex AKA Nel labirinto del sesso (Psichidion), is I guess a kind of mondo movie, albeit less manic than the classic mondo movies. I have always been mystified by the enormous popularity that mondo movies enjoyed in the 60s.

The Labyrinth of Sex was directed by Alfonso Brescia so you expect some WTF moments. You have to wait a while but eventually Brescia does deliver some.

We get a voiceover from an eminent psychiatrist specialising in sexual problems, or rather from an actor pretending very unconvincingly to be a psychiatrist. The subject is sexual deviations. It’s all intended to be terribly shocking. It would certainly have been shocking in the early 60s but by 1969? Well, maybe.

Naturally we get some half-baked Freudianism and lots of crazy pseudoscience and psychobabble, all explained in a suitably portentous manner. Sex is not something to be regarded as fun. It’s something to be agonised over. In that respect the film has a disturbingly 21st century feel. If it feels good it’s bad for you.

Inevitably we get a segment on a nymphomaniac. Whatever happened to nymphomaniacs? They were everywhere in those days. Even cold showers don’t help this girl. Eventually she resorts to groping a man in a movie theatre.

There’s also voyeurism, and exhibitionism as well.

Then things start to get seriously weird. We’re introduced to a lonely man who has solved his problem by making his own woman in kit form. Not from body parts, but from parts of store mannequins and all sorts of bits and pieces. He does it as a kind of mystical ritual with candles. This segment is totally nuts but effectively disturbing.

We get most of the sexual deviations you’d expect in such a movie.

We get lesbians of course. The movie’s views on lesbians are not “dated” (as people like to say nowadays). Nobody in all of history ever thought about lesbians the way this movie does. It’s not even a male fantasy of what lesbians are like. It’s just totally wild and wacky and I have no idea where such ideas could have come from. By this time the movie is getting more and more weird.

And naturally we get a segment on sadomasochism. You won’t be surprised to learn that it’s all Mummy and Daddy’s fault.

There are moments in this movie that would be more at home in a horror movie.

The highlight is the segment with a man and a woman hooked up with hundreds of electrodes having sex in laboratory conditions. This is science! This segment has an unsettling cyberpunk kind of vibe which I actually liked a lot.

If the whole movie had been as oddball and off-kilter as this segment and the some-assembly-required girl segment this could have been a fun movie. Sadly the rest of the movie ends up being rather dull.

I don’t think I can really recommend this one but the great thing about those Something Weird double and triple-headers is that they could throw in odd movies which would never be worth releasing on their own.

The Labyrinth of Sex was released on a Something Weird double-header DVD paired with The Wild, Wild World of Jayne Mansfield (which I haven’t yet watched). The Labyrinth of Sex gets an acceptable transfer.

Extras include trailers and two short films. The first is Parisian Rendezvous which seems like a kind of 60s love story with some psychedelic freak-out discotheque scenes. Then comes the ending with I guarantee you won’t see coming. The second shot is a nudie loop supposedly featuring Marilyn Monroe but of course it isn’t her. I believe it’s Playboy Playmate Arline Hunter. Miss Hunter is certainly remarkable well-developed in the bust department and she sheds all her clothes and then drinks a Coke. Kind of amusing if you enjoy those old b&w loops.

Amorous Sisters (Julchen und Jettchen, 1982)

Julchen und Jettchen (retitled Amorous Sisters in the U.S.) is a 1982 sex comedy produced, directed and co-written by Erwin C. Dietrich. For some bizarre reason it was released in Britain as Come Play with Me 3 although it has not the slightest connection with Come Play with Me or Come Play with Me 2.

The Swiss producer Erwin C. Dietrich was one of the legendary figures in European exploitation cinema for decades. He directed a lot of movies including numerous softcore erotic films. His best-known directorial effort is probably the very stylish Rolls-Royce Baby (1975) starring Lina Romay.

Julchen und Jettchen is set in an exclusive girls’ school in Switzerland.

Julchen (Brigitte Lahaie) and Jettchen (Flore Sollier) are sisters and both are students at the school. In the English dub they are renamed Jenny and Juliet respectively. It seems to be a very small school. In fact there seem to be only seven pupils and one teacher. And the only subject on the curriculum seems to be sex education. Luckily it’s a subject in which the girls have a keen interest. They know the theory but they’re anxious for some practical experience.

They practise a lot on their own, and with each other. They are fast learners. And they don't mind doing their homework.

There really is virtually no main plot. There is a kind of sub-plot about a body builder and his wife (in which Julchen und Jettchen eventually become involved). The movie is a series of brief episodes very loosely connected.

The girls’ progress in class is accelerated by the unexpected opportunity to observe live specimens, both male and female. They have a day out in the countryside. They sneak a man into their dorm. Their teacher, Mademoiselle Blanche (Barbara Moose), being dedicated to her job, brushes up on her own practical skills. This is not just satisfactory from Mademoiselle Blanche’s point of view, it provides considerable entertainment for her pupils who are observing these events with a great deal of scholarly interest.

The body builder spends hours training every day. His body is in peak physical condition. His muscles function like precision machines. Except for one particular muscle, which happens to be the muscle in which his wife is most interested. Apparently that muscle ceased to function some time ago, much to the wife’s disappointment. Eventually, in an unforeseen way, Julchen und Jettchen will come to the rescue and restore marital bliss.

There is an astounding amount of nudity, mostly but not exclusively female. The female nudity is very explicit. There’s lots of sex, including numerous sapphic couplings. The sex scenes are moderately graphic. If that sort of thing bothers you then this movie is not for you. If it appeals to you then you’ve hit the mother lode.

The acting is perfectly adequate. The women are very attractive and they’re also charming and likeable. Brigitte Lahaie is of course the film’s biggest drawcard.

If you’re going to make a movie with no plot but with acres of nudity the question arises - can you make it cinematically interesting as well? The answer in this case is yes. The solution adopted is to find clever, inventive and amusing reasons for the young ladies to shed their clothes and to shoot the sex scene in slightly offbeat and unusual ways that you’re not expecting. And Dietrich was technically proficient and in his unassuming way reasonably stylish. This is classy well-crafted erotica.

This movie is refreshingly free of the sniggering quality one sometimes encounters in British and American movies of this type. It’s also mercifully free of social messaging. It does not attempt to examine the human condition. It has no artistic statements to make. It’s a lighthearted comic erotic movie that has zero pretensions to being anything else and it’s totally unembarrassed and unapologetic about it. And it’s very good-natured. These are nice people. You don’t want anything bad to happen to them, and nothing bad does happen. Nobody gets punished for having sexual desires.

The naked butterfly hunt is a definite highlight. As everyone knows if you’re going to hunt butterflies you must first remove all your clothing. And it’s shot in slow-motion. It makes no sense but it has an oddly lyrical feel.

There’s picturesque scenery, which doesn’t hurt.

The only fair way to judge a movie is to ask whether it achieves what it set out to achieve. Dietrich set out to make a fun happy amusing very sexy movie. This film achieves those objectives admirably and therefore has to be regarded as a complete success. It’s not Citizen Kane but it’s a very good movie of its genre and if you enjoy that genre it’s highly recommended.

Julchen und Jettchen is now available on Blu-Ray. My copy was a bonus DVD included with Jess Franco’s Die Sklavinnen (1977). The only connection between these two movies is that both were produced by Erwin C. Dietrich. Apart from that they’re a million miles away in tone and approach (although they’re both good in their very different ways).

I’ve also reviewed the Erwin C. Dietrich-directed Rolls-Royce Baby (1975) which is also a very good movie of its type.

Count Dracula’s Great Love (1973)

Count Dracula’s Great Love is a 1973 Spanish gothic horror movie starring Paul Naschy. It starts off giving the impression that it’s going to be a by-the-numbers Dracula movie but then takes some very surprising turns. Javier Aguirre was the director and co-writer. The original idea seems to have been Naschy’s. Naschy co-wrote the screenplay. It’s now available in a superb Blu-Ray presentation from Vinegar Syndrome.

The setting is the late 19th century. It seems to be exactly the sort of setting and time period you’d expect in a stock-standard Dracula movie.

It begins with five young people, a man and four women, in a carriage near the Borgo Pass. The man, Imre, points out that they are near the spot where Jonathan Harker and Van Helsing had their final encounter with Dracula. Imre believes that Dracula was real.

You may be a little surprised that anyone in the late 19th century would allow four very pretty young unmarried girls to go traveling without a chaperone, accompanied only by a young man. Especially given the budding romance between Imre and one of the girls, Marlene.

The carriage meets with a minor accident, and the coachman meets with a fatal accident. Luckily the five young people are passing Dr Marlow’s sanatorium. Dr Marlow (Paul Naschy) insists that they take advantage of his hospitality until their carriage can be repaired.

One of the girls, Karen (Haydée Politoff), finds a book in Dr Marlow’s library. It is Van Helsing’s memoirs. Van Helsing tells of a legend that Dracula needs to find a true virgin. If he has normal (non-vampiric) sex with her his powers will be fully restored. Karen is horrified but excited.

The viewer is not going to be the least bit surprised that there are vampires wandering about the sanatorium. It doesn’t take long for the first of the girls to be recruited into the ranks of the Undead.

Dr Marlow is a dedicated scientist and physician and a kind charming man. The girls are reassured by his presence.

We get the kind of stuff we expect in a vampire movie, until we start to realise that there’s something else going on. When we find out why Dracula needs a virgin we realise just how radically this movie is going to depart from the conventions of the vampire movie.

These departures are so interesting that I’m not going to give any more hints about the way the plot will develop.

This was an incredibly interesting time for the vampire movie. Film-makers like Jess Franco (in Vampyros Lesbos in 1970), Jean Rollin (in movies like The Nude Vampire in 1970 and Requiem for a Vampire in 1971), Stephanie Rothman (in The Velvet Vampire in 1971) and José Larraz (in Vampyres in 1974) were taking the vampire film Ito all sorts of new directions. It’s clear that Naschy and Aguirre were part of that trend. Their approach was however a little different - they made a vampire film that looked totally conventional but was very different thematically.

What Naschy and Aguirre give us is not just a Dracula who is capable of love, but a Dracula for whom love becomes the primary motivation. On the audio commentary Naschy makes the point, quite correctly, that the ideas that excited people about Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 Dracula were all present in Count Dracula’s Great Love nearly twenty years earlier. Those ideas are developed differently, but the basic concepts are the same.

Naschy of course is best-known for his many movies about a troubled sympathetic werewolf. Here he’s offering us a vampire with both moral and emotional complexity.

Naschy’s movies do tend to have very high trashiness and sleaze levels. Personally I like trashy sleazy movies so that doesn’t bother me. It’s fascinating here to see trashiness and sleaze combined with clever ideas and also combined with a deep respect for the traditional horror movie.

Aguirre and Naschy were very careful to include all of the traditional gothic horror visual elements. They were going to take the story in unexpected directions but they wanted it to be a gothic horror movie. Naschy believed very strongly in respecting the conventions of the genre.

Count Dracula’s Great Love manages to be intelligent, emotionally nuanced, clever, provocative, trashy and sleazy all at once. And it works on all those levels.

This movie has been available for years on DVD in truly wretched transfers. Vinegar Syndrome recently released it on Blu-Ray (the uncut “unclothed” version) and it now looks terrific. The Blu-Ray includes an excellent commentary track with Paul Naschy and Javier Aguirre.

The Vinegar Syndrome release provides a good opportunity to reassess a movie that has in the past been rather disparaged. It’s a fine movie that really does deserve a reassessment. Highly recommended.

Hot Nights of Linda (1975)

Hot Nights of Linda is a steamy sexually overheated 1975 offering from Jess Franco.

Marie-France (Alice Arno) takes a job looking after the two daughters of a wealthy recluse, writer Paul Radeck (Paul Muller). He’s a writer, so he is therefore a man who deals in fictions. His daughter Linda is an invalid and never speaks. The other daughter is Olivia (Lina Romay). She’s actually his niece and adopted daughter.

There’s a disturbing atmosphere in the luxurious modernist ocean-front Radeck villa (a typical Jess Franco location which the director utilises with his customary flair for getting the best use out of a location). Radeck is a troubled man. He does not seem to have recovered from the death of his wife. It’s not clear why Linda is an invalid but Marie-France does suspect that the problem might be psychosomatic.

Olivia is a strange girl. No-one played sexually obsessed mad girls better than Lina Romay so she’s perfectly cast. Olivia confides in Marie-France, up to a point. Olivia is troubled by a nightmare. It’s the same nightmare every night. It’s a sexual fantasy nightmare. What she doesn’t tell Marie-France is that she remembers seeing a murder. But of course Olivia is mad, so we can’t be sure if this is a genuine memory or a distorted memory, or a delusion or part of a twisted sexual fantasy.

Olivia is a virgin. She masturbates constantly. She clearly has some sexual issues and equally clearly these are a major factor in her madness.

The Radeck villa is under surveillance by a sleazy cop and a young female photo-journalist (played by Catherine Lafferier). Apparently Paul Radeck is suspected of killing his wife. The detective and the photo-journalist take lots of photos, mostly nude photos of female members of the Radeck household, so there’s a definite voyeurism theme here.

Things get crazier. The three members of the Radeck family may all be mad, but they’re not necessarily all mad. And if they’re all mad they’re mad in different ways, although we can’t help feeling that in all three cases there’s a sexual basis to the madness.

Eurocult movies of this era often exist in several different cuts often with different titles. It can be bewildering and that’s especially the case with this movie. Franco claimed that at least ten different cuts of this movie (with ten different titles!) were in circulation at various times, some of which featured hardcore footage.

My main problem with this movie is the ending, which I hated. But according to Lina Romay this was not the ending they originally shot or intended. The ending of the English-dubbed version on the Severin Blu-Ray was added later by the producers and was totally contrary to Jess Franco’s intentions.

The existence of multiple cuts frustrates some eurocult fans but in a weird postmodern way it’s kind of cool. In those case where more than one cut survives you can watch very different versions of the same movie and choose the one you like.

What makes this movie fascinating is that there are at least three different versions that were shot by, and approved by, Franco. Including the hardcore cut in which Lina appears. And some of these versions have totally different endings, which is very postmodern.

There’s plenty of eroticism, all of it unhealthy.

Hot Nights of Linda is a Jess Franco movie that gets a bit overlooked, largely because it was made at a time when he was making so many movies, and so many of those movies are considered Franco classics. Hot Nights of Linda is however important in being a movie Franco conceived entirely as a starring vehicle for Lina Romay. She’s in top form and she owns this movie completely. Maybe not among the very best Franco movies but very much worth seeing, and highly recommended.

Severin have released this movie in a DVD/Blu-Ray combo pack. The transfer allegedly comes from a 35mm print discovered in a Barcelona bordello, which is just such a wonderfully Jess Franco thing that one would like to believe it’s true. The combo pack also includes the French hardcore version on a separate disc.

Linda (1981)

Linda is a 1981 Jess Franco Spanish-German co-production that has a few surprises in store. It seems like it’s going to be a full-on orgy of sleaze but that’s not how it plays out.

Sheila (Raquel Evans) owns and operates a major hotel on a small Mediterranean island. Her boyfriend Ron (Antonio Mayans) manages the hotel for her. Ron is two-timing Sheila with one of the employees, Betsy (Ursula Buchfellner). Sheila knows how to take her revenge. Sheila has another business on the island, Rio Amore. This is a very high-class brothel. The girls cater for all tastes. Sheila forces Betsy to work as one of the girls in the brothel, where she is subjected to various indignities and tortures. Sheila does not want to kill Betsy. Humiliating her is much more satisfying, and serves the double purpose of teaching Ron to be a good boy in future.

Betsy’s kid sister Linda (Katja Bienert) attends a convent school in Switzerland. She’s about to arrive on the island for a holiday. The nuns warn her that she will have to try hard to retain her virtue in the outside world. Linda however has no intention of retaining her virtue. In fact she has a steamy bedroom frolic with one of the other girls before packing her bags for her holiday. She’s tried women and now she’s keen to try men.

Ron would like to rescue Betsy but he’s scared of Sheila and he wants to keep his job. Sheila is a very possessive vengeful woman.

Ron doesn’t know what has happened to Betsy but he knows Linda is about to arrive so he goes to the airport to pick her up.

You know what’s going to happen. Poor innocent Linda is going to be drawn into the decadent debauched world of Rio Amore. But that’s not what happens at all. Linda meets a really nice boy. They fall in love. The movie has two totally separate plot strands and the Linda plot strand is a tender sensitive love story. Yes really.

The Betsy plot strand doesn’t play out quite as expected either.

This is a movie that constantly seems to be on the verge of tipping over the edge into real nastiness but it doesn’t really happen.

That’s not to say that this is not a sleazy movie. There’s an astounding amount of nudity and a lot of sex. There’s kinkiness. There’s torture. There’s sex slavery. But weirdly it somehow manages to avoid that real nastiness. The torture scenes turn out to be very tame. The sex is strictly softcore. The violence is quite restrained and it doesn’t escalate to anything like the levels you might anticipate.

You could almost say this is a lighthearted feelgood movie about sex slavery and torture. That sounds weird, but that’s how it turns out.

And the main focus is on the love story. In fact two love stories. And they’re both genuinely romantic love stories involving nice people. It’s a “lovers walking hand-in-hand on the beach” movie and it’s a “true love will triumph” movie.

This is definitely Franco Lite. Which is not a bad thing. It’s an erotic movie that celebrates eroticism as a good thing. Even the kinkiness is mostly hinted at, or it’s done in a lyrical rather than grimy way.

There are orgy scenes but they don’t get overly explicit. There’s certainly an atmosphere of decadence and that’s Franco’s focus, rather than graphic sex. And he achieves the decadent feel very effectively.

It’s obviously a very low-budget production but Franco manages to make it visually quite impressive. The glass cage in which Betsy is imprisoned is a nice touch and would have cost almost nothing.

Franco loved erotically charged nightclub scenes with a hint of kink and the floor shows Sheila provides for her clients serve much the same purpose in this film.

The highlight of the movie is the very arch performance by Raquel Evans as Sheila. She spends a lot of time naked and while her sex scenes are not overly graphic she manages to generate plenty of sexual heat. She totally and effortlessly dominates the movie.

Linda isn’t top-tier Franco but its mix of romance and low-key sleaze is rather engaging. Recommended for Franco fans.

Linda had a DVD release which is still available.