Death Packs a Suitcase (1972)

Death Packs a Suitcase (Der Todesrächer von Soho) is a 1972 krimi directed by Jess Franco. The krimis were adapted from the novels of Edgar Wallace which were massively popular in Germany,

The krimi genre kicked off in 1959 and in the 60s it was one of the mainstays of the German film industry. Rialto Studio made more than thirty of these movies. When rival studio CCC decided they wanted to get into the act they had a problem. They didn’t have the rights to Wallace’s novels. They solved that problem very cleverly by buying the rights to the novels of Wallace’s son Bryan Edgar Wallace who was at the time a successful thriller writer. CCC really only wanted the right to use the titles and the author’s name and their adaptations had little in common with the books. In this case, almost nothing in common.

The setting is London and one of the great things about the krimis is that they’re set in England but it’s an imaginary England based mostly on old British movies and detective novels.

There’s been a series of murders. In each case the victim finds his suitcase mysteriously packed. This is a tactic designed to terrify the victim - he knows he is now next on the murder list.

The murder weapon is a knife, thrown with uncanny accuracy.

Inspector Ruppert Redford of Scotland Yard (Fred Williams) gets some advice from his friend, the famous crime writer Charles Barton (Horst Tappert) and Barton plays a major part in the events to come.

Dr Bladmore (played by krimi legend Siegfried Schürenberg) always seems to be at hand when the murders take place.

There are several glamorous women and we cannot be sure which ones will turn out to be dangerous and treacherous but we’re confident that at least one will fall into that category.

This being a krimi there’s a comic relief character. In the 60s such a role would have been played by Eddi Arendt but in this case we have Luis Morris as news photographer Andy Pickwick and the good news is that he is genuinely amusing, he isn’t annoying and he has an actual plot function.

The plot is convoluted but don’t let that worry you. The krimi genre is like the giallo - what matters is that the plot should be outrageous and twisted. Despite what some people will tell you this movie’s plot does make sense.

The brisk pacing helps.

Franco made a whole bunch of lighthearted fun crime/adventure/spy romps in the late 60s and early 70s. You can call them Franco Lite but it’s something he enjoyed and he did have a flair for it.

This is, quite seriously, a visually dazzling movie. There’s hardly a scene that is shot in a dull conventional manner. Franco is constantly looking for ways to make things look interesting, with clever use of the wide-angle lens and camera angles (and especially low-angle shots) that make sets look slightly distorted and menacing and claustrophobic.

This does not come across as gimmicky - it’s a very valid and effective approach in a krimi. Krimis were heavily style-oriented and this is a very stylish movie.

Outdoor shots look misty and hazy which is of course what a German audience would think England looks like and it adds a slightly spooky vibe which works.

Fred Williams makes a likeable charismatic hero. The cast members are pretty good overall.

Death Packs a Suitcase is a very pleasant surprise. This is top-tier Franco and it’s hugely enjoyable. Highly recommended.

The Kino Lorber Blu-Ray release is excellent. Incidentally the 4:3 aspect ratio is correct: that’s how the movie was shot.

I’ve reviewed Bryan Edgar Wallace’s Death Packs a Suitcase. And I’ve reviewed lots of krimis. The Red Circle (Der rote Kreis, 1960) is a fine early example. Another late krimi worth seeing is Umberto Lenzi’s Seven Blood-Stained Orchids (1972), a kind of krimi/giallo hybrid.

Female Vampire (1973)

Jess Franco’s Female Vampire, released in 1973, presents a few problems for a reviewer. It’s one of his most famous films, it’s enthusiastically admired by most (although not all) of his fans and it’s one of my favourites among his films. It is also very extreme in a number of ways. If you’re new to the world of Jess Franco this is most definitely not the movie with which you should start. This one is for advanced students only.

This was a Franco-Belgian co-production and it not only exists in several radically different cuts, it was intended right from the start to be released in several very different versions. It’s not just a matter of different titles. These versions are so different as to almost constitute separate films. The version that matters is the French cut with the title La comtesse noire and in English-speaking markets entitled Female Vampire.

Franco had already eliminated most of the established vampire lore in Vampyros Lesbos, stripping the vampire myth down to its essential. It features a vampire who is an immortal creature who feeds on human blood and uses hypnotic powers to ensnare her victims. With Female Vampire Franco goes further. This vampire kills by draining the victim’s life force during sex. This is a reasonable idea given that vampirism has always been about sex. Franco just makes this explicit.

There is a plot but it’s minimalist to say the least. The Countess Irina Karlstein (Lina Romay) is a vampire, the last of her family line of vampires.

She does not want to kill but she must. She must kill to survive, and to satisfy her erotic cravings. She cannot stop herself. She is trapped. Having disposed of several recent victims she falls in love with a poet, Baron Von Rathony (Jack Taylor). She has no desire to kill him but she cannot see a way of avoiding doing so. That’s it for the plot.

But this is not a plot-driven movie - it’s all about mood and about the forces driving Irina.

This is not one of those Franco movies in which dreams and reality intersect, but Irina goes through her life in a kind of trance state. The forces that drive her allow her to have little awareness of anything else. She is entirely disconnected from human society (her muteness emphasises this).

Irina’s only connection with people is through her seduction and then destruction of them. Part of her tragedy is that she craves real emotional connections. There is still enough human-ness in her, enough of the woman, that she craves love but when she finds love with a man can she love him without destroying him?

Now for the extreme elements I mentioned earlier. These have nothing to do with violence. There is no gore. We not see a drop of blood. There is however a lot of quite explicit sex and an immense amount of very explicit nudity. These do serve a purpose. Irina is overwhelmed by her desires. There is the need to hunt. She hates doing so but it’s a matter of survival. And there are her uncontrollable erotic desires. The hunger for the life forces that she must devour and the hunger for sex occupy her every waking moment.

She seduces her victims by means of hypnotic powers so that they are similarly consumed by desire for her. The nudity emphasises that Irina is unaware of anything other than her physical cravings. The nudity does get the point across.

There is also the stylistic excess. The emphasis is all on mood. It does not in any way look or feel like a movie that is interested in reflecting straightforward reality.

While there is no sense that we are simply watching a dream Irina is so cut off from human society that her existence has a slightly dream-like quality. She is aware of her alienation from human society and from everyday reality. And the movie does have a misty dream-like non-real ambience. We’re seeing things from Irina’s point of view. Which means we’re not seeing things from a human point of view. Franco obviously wants us to feel that this is not quite reality in a straightforward way.

If we saw the world from the point of view of a leopard it would not look like our concept of reality and I don’t think any movie has more effectively conveyed the idea of the vampire as a predator driven entirely by instinct. But with the complication that she has a kind of dual nature, a vampire nature and a woman’s nature.

While La comtesse noire is a more interesting title perhaps Female Vampire is not such a bad title - she is a very female vampire.

There’s plenty of symbolism - the kite, lots of birds, the flapping bird hood ornament on Irina’s car, mist, etc. It’s not complex symbolism but it works.

La comtesse noire is even further removed from our conventional expectations of the vampire movie than Vampyros Lesbos. It’s closer in feel than any of Franco’s other movies to Jean Rollin’s vampire fever dreams. I love this movie but it is an uncompromisingly unconventional vampire movie. If you can accept that and if you’re not put off by a blending of extreme eroticism and artiness then it’s highly recommended.

The Vengeance of Dr Mabuse (1972)

Jess Franco’s The Vengeance of Dr Mabuse, released in 1972, was the last Dr Mabuse film. Purists might argue that it’s not a proper Dr Mabuse film but considering the vast differences between the three Fritz Lang Mabuse movies (made over a period of almost 40 years) and the 1960s CCC Mabuse films there really isn’t any such thing as a proper Mabuse film. It was never a rigidly structured franchise. Franco’s movie has a Mabuse vibe and that’s good enough for me.

This movie exists in two different versions. The Kino Cult Blu-Ray offers us the longer German cut, released with the title Dr. M schlägt zu. The much shorter Spanish cut included most of the same footage but totally rearranged.

The movie was shot in Germany and Spain but is set in the United States, somewhere close to the Mexican border.

Even more than most Franco films this is a movie that it going to bring out all the smarmy sneering snarkiness in reviewers with mainstream tastes. The Vengeance of Dr Mabuse is so far removed from conventional Hollywood filmmaking as to inhabit an entirely different cinematic galaxy.

As usual Franco had no money, and as usual he didn’t care. He wanted to create a particular feel in this film and he does just that and does it brilliantly. Everything is too cramped. Scenes look like they were shot inside closets. The framing is too tight. The camera is too close. He uses fisheye lenses when he shouldn’t. Everything is weirdly off-balance. Then there’s the red tint to everything.

Everything is wrong, and it’s all absolutely deliberate. The result is a feeling of paranoia and madness spinning out of control. Franco isn’t interested in being polished - he wants that swirling maelstrom of craziness feel. And it works.

And this is a fine example of one of Franco’s greatest assets as a director - the ability to find bizarre locations that work perfectly and that allow striking disturbing visuals without spending any money at all.

Jack Taylor is odd casting as Mabuse but he’s terrific - he’s a total madman who has no idea just how insane and doomed to failure his madcap scheme is. He’s never specifically referred to as Mabuse, but the German title Dr. M schlägt zu makes it fairly obvious that he is Dr Mabuse. And apparently in the Spanish version he is definitely stated to be Dr Mabuse.

What his scheme is doesn’t matter. It’s a total McGuffin.

Having Mabuse in America, and having him come up against a laidback cowboy sheriff (played in a nicely subtle tongue-in-cheek way by Fred Willliams) adds to the nuttiness.

And there’s the monster, Andros, one of several references to Franco’s early Dr Orloff movies. And yes, there’s a Professor Orloff in this one.

There’s a sinister sexy sadistic kinky female. There’s a stripper. There’s the cowboy sheriff’s girlfriend. There are kidnappings, and murders, and break-ins at secure facilities. The plot makes no real sense, and that’s a good thing. What matters is that things are crazy and they get crazier and everybody is paranoid and they get more paranoid. Dr M and his crew have completely control of events.

And of course there’s a kinky nightclub dancing scene.

It’s quite fitting that the final Dr Mabuse movies should have been made by Jess Franco, given that Fritz Lang was an admirer of Franco’s work.

The Vengeance of Dr Mabuse is not quite like any other Jess Franco movie except that it’s weird and offbeat. Which of course means it’s very Jess Franco indeed. He could make movies that were weird and offbeat in lots of different ways. In this case there’s an odd mistiness to everything and the brutalist architecture is perfect for a Dr Mabuse movie.

I enjoyed this one. Highly recommended.

The Kino Cult Blu-Ray looks nice and there’s an audio commentary by Nathaniel Thompson and Troy Howarth.

Vampyros Lesbos (1970)

If you’re a eurocult fan you’ve seen Jess Franco’s Vampyros Lesbos. And given that it was one of the first Jess Franco movies to be available on DVD way back early in the DVD era, and one of the first European erotic horror movies available on DVD at that time. There’s a good chance that this movie was your first exposure to Franco’s cinematic world. It was my first Franco movie and my first European erotic horror movie.

So it’s easy to take it for granted. But watching it now for the first time in many years I’m struck by just how startling it must have been at the time. That opening sequence! This is not how you begin a vampire movie. First off we know that we are not in central Europe or England in the 19th century. We are in Turkey. And the setting is contemporary.

The avant-garde music is most emphatically not what you expect in a vampire movie.

The erotic elements are also there front and centre right from the start. We get frontal nudity 60 seconds into the movie.

And then we find we are watching a night-club act. Of course there’s an erotic night-club act in most of Franco’s movies but in 1970 it wasn’t standard practice in horror movies.

And we are in seriously arty territory. This was the most arty period in Franco’s career. Necronomicon - Geträumte Sünden (AKA Succubus, 1968) is full-blown surrealism with wild narrative experiments. This was a movie that numbered Fritz Lang among its admirers. Paroxismus (AKA Venus in Furs, 1969) is equally avant-garde. At this time Franco had reasonably serious art-house credentials.

It’s so long since I last saw this movie that I had forgotten that unlike most lesbian vampire movies this is not an adaptation of Sheridan le Fanu’s Carmilla. It’s an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. And while there are some changes it is very recognisably and very consciously an adaptation of Dracula, at least to begin with.

Linda Westinghouse (Ewa Strömberg) works in a lawyer’s office. She is sent on a journey to the remote home of a Hungarian countess, Countess Nadine Carody (Soledad Miranda), who needs some legal document attended to. The Countess is a vampire. In fact the legal documents relate to an estate left to her by Count Dracula. So Linda at this stage is clearly a stand-in for Jonathan Harker. The Countess begins her seduction of Linda, at which point Linda obviously becomes a stand-in for Lucy Westenra (or Mina Harker).

Linda ends up in the care of Dr Seward (Dennis Price) who is clearly a combination of Dr Seward and Van Helsing. Dr Seward his under his care a mad girl named Agra (Heidrun Kussin) who is obsessed with the Countess Carody. Agra is obviously the Renfield character.

At this time period European directors like Harry Kümel (in Daughters of Darkness), José Larraz (in Vampyres) and Jean Rollin (in movies like The Nude Vampire and Shiver of the Vampire) were radically reinventing the vampire movie. Franco appears to be doing that as well but he isn’t really. He is drastically streamlining the vampire myth, jettisoning the non-essential elements of vampire, but he isn’t going to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The Countess Carody does not sleep in a coffin, she lives in a modernist beach house rather than a castle, she has no feelings one way or the other about garlic and she adores sunbathing.

But all the essential elements are there. She is an immortal creature who feeds on human blood. She has hypnotic powers. She is quite unequivocally a vampire.

So we have major elements of Stoker’s novel established and then Franco starts playing around with them. This is a movie of stylistic excess and as with Succubus the more we see the more we feel that maybe we’re moving in a dreamscape. And we get more touches of surrealism. We know we’re dealing with dreams part of the time. That’s made explicit. But where do the dreams end and where does reality start? And Franco included cool cabaret scenes not just because they were cool. They emphasise that we’re watching a performance. We’re watching the Countess playing a vampire on stage.

Soledad Miranda is mesmerising. She dominates the movie from start to finish.

There are no shadows, no night scenes. Everything is bathed in glorious sunshine. That’s ow Nadine likes it. A girl has to work on her tan, even if she is a vampire. Franco is going out of his way to avoid gothic horror clichés. But it doesn’t feel gimmicky. Soledad Miranda actually has the ability to convince us that she really is a sun-worshipping vampire. This movie is also a great example of Franco’s genius for finding strange but perfect locations.

Vampyros Lesbos is one of the most important movies in Franco’s filmography. This is Franco at his best. Very highly recommended.

The Severin Blu-Ray offers the German cut, Franco’s preferred cut. The Spanish cut was apparently quite different. The most important extra is a perceptive video essay by Stephen Thrower.

The Other Side of the Mirror (1973)

The Other Side of the Mirror (Al otro lado del espejo) is an odd Jess Franco movie. What’s odd about it is the lack of weird crazy elements. It’s very low-key and very restrained. This is one of those cases when it’s almost impossible not to use the very clichéd term slowburn. This one burns very slowly indeed.

It starts out giving the appearance of being a straightforward domestic melodrama. Not a psycho-sexual melodrama, but just a very ordinary story about a young woman dealing with rather ordinary problems. Even when something fairly startling happens there’s nothing bizarre about it.

Ana (Emma Cohen) lives on the island of Madeira with her father, a very respectable archaeologist (played by Howard Vernon). He’s a widower. Ana is his only child. They seem quite close, but not in a weird way. When Ana announces that she is getting married her father seems a bit upset but that’s normal and understandable. It will obviously be rather lonely living in a big house alone after his daughter moves out.

The first very subtle sign of oddness is her father’s reaction to her impending marriage. He hangs himself. It’s a shocking to do but there’s nothing inherently bizarre about it. A man in his position might well feel that without his daughter his life will be empty and meaningless. He has built his life around her. Which may not be healthy if taken to excess but again it’s the sort of thing that does happen.

We have already had indications that even before Ana’s marriage announcement her father was bored by life. Boredom is a key theme that runs throughout this movie.

Ana leaves Madeira, moves to a big city and builds a new life as a jazz singer. There’s a burgeoning love affair between Ana and jazz musician Bill (Robert Woods). Ana seems to be reluctant to let things move too quickly.

Everything about this movie is very subtle. We just get tiny clues that something might be amiss. Ana has dreams. We assume they’re just dreams. Things that happen in her dreams happen in real life. Whether her dreams predict the future or whether something stranger is going on remains ambiguous.

She begins another love affair, with theatrical producer Miguel (Ramiro Oliveros).

She ends up back on Madeira. She hangs out with a circle of idle rich people.

Carla (Françoise Brion) and Pipo (Philippe Lemaire) have an open marriage. Maybe it’s becoming a bit too open for Carla’s liking. Maybe the middle-aged Pipo is a bit too interested in Ana. This little circle also includes Tina (Alice Arno).

Several murders occur. This is starting to feel like a giallo. There’s certainly an atmosphere of decadence.

There are however hints that there is something else happening. Perhaps Ana is psychologically haunted by her past. Or perhaps she is being literally haunted. Perhaps her father is reaching out for her from the grave. At the end we find out if there is really a supernatural element at work.

What’s really interesting is the very low level of erotic content and the almost total absence of any kind of sexual perversity. There is no indication of any incestuous relationship between Ana and her father. There is not even any indication of incestuous desires on the part of either father or daughter.

At this point we need to address the question of the multiple versions of this movie. The Other Side of the Mirror was a Franco-Spanish co-production. There were three different versions released - The Spanish, French and Italian versions. What’s really fascinating is that the French version was an entirely different cut with a lot of extra material, with one of the main characters eliminated and an additional main character (played by Lina Romay) added, although utilising about three-quarters of the original Spanish film. This French version, Le miroir obscène, was apparently so different that it was in effect a totally different movie dealing with totally different themes. But the extra material was apparently all shot by Franco.

And apparently the Italian release is yet another rather different cut.

Censorship was still fairly strict in Spain and the Mondo Macabro Blu-Ray offers only the Spanish cut. One might suspect that, given the much looser censorship in France, the French version might develop a theme of father-daughter incest that Franco could not address in the Spanish version. But apparently the French version switches the focus entirely away from the father and onto Ana’s relationship with her sister (in the Spanish version she has no sister).

So my suspicion is that Franco did not see the father-daughter relationship as incestuous at all. The real link between Ana and her father is boredom, and a mutual fear of abandonment. They both feel lonely and disconnected from other people, and adrift.

It’s also possible that this movie is one of Franco’s occasional attempts to do something more mainstream. It got rave reviews from Spanish critics.

Given Franco’s obsessive love for jazz it’s likely that the idea of doing a totally different arrangement of the same basic material to create a kind of improvised variation would have appealed to him immensely.

The Other Side of the Mirror is an oddity in Franco’s filmography but it is an interesting oddity. Recommended.

It’s perhaps worth noting than in 1970 Alain Robbe-Grillet had done more or less the same thing, using mostly the same footage edited in a different way to create two totally different movies, Eden and After (1970) and N. Took the Dice (1971).

Night of Open Sex (1983)

Night of Open Sex (La noche de los sexos abiertos) is a 1983 Jess Franco movie that springs a few surprises. It’s not quite what it initially appears to be.

This is one of the movies Jess Franco made for Golden Films. This was both the worst and the best part of his career. It was his worst period in the sense that Golden Films turned out to be totally incompetent when it came to securing foreign distribution for his movies. These movies remained entirely unseen and unknown outside of Spain.

On the other hand it was his happiest period because Golden Films offered him an unprecedented level of creative control. He could do absolutely anything he wanted to do. And nothing mattered more to Franco than creative control.

Even when Franco’s cult following later started to build these movies continued to be almost totally unseen and unknown to his fans outside of Spain. This finally started to change some years back and these movies are now available, in subtitled form (they were never dubbed into English) and in remarkably good transfers, on DVD and Blu-Ray.

Their initially very poor reputation among eurocult fans has gradually grown but they are still far too often overlooked.

Night of Open Sex introduces us to erotic dancer Moira (Lina Romay). Through the rather sleazy Vickers (Miguel Ángel Aristu) she has become mixed up in some sort of espionage plot. Her job is to take the place of another girl, Tina Klaus (Juana de la Morena), and deliver a secret message to the General. Vickers has kidnapped Tina and she has been forced to reveal the plan concerning the message.

Al Crosby (Antonio Mayans) appears on the scene. The name suggests that he is going to be another variation on the Al Pereira character who pops up in so many Franco films, usually in the guise of a hardboiled private eye.

Whatever deal is going down, Al wants in on it. He wants Moira to accept him as a partner.

He also wants to sleep with Moira. He has to be very forcefully persuasive at first but Moira seems delighted with the outcome.

Al and Moira have a problem. They have the message but it’s in code and they have no idea what it’s all about. Al figures there’s money involved.

There’s still the problem of Vickers, and there’s another couple who want a piece of this action. There’s plenty of potential here for violence and double-crosses.

It all leads up to a totally unexpected ending which I absolutely loved.

There’s a staggering amount of sex and nudity. Lina Romay is nude for the majority of the film’s running time and you won’t be surprised to see a lot of shots of the most intimate parts of her anatomy. The other actresses spend a lot of time naked as well. The sex scenes are softcore but very raunchy.

The highlight of any Franco movie is likely to be the nightclub act scenes and Moira’s act has to be seen to be believed. When you’ve seen it you still won’t believe it. The things she does with those magazines. And the car. She’s a very imaginative lady.

At some point in this movie you’re going to have one of those “I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more Toto” moments. It’s not that anything supernatural or paranormal or science fictional, or impossible, happens. You just know that this is not reality. Maybe part of it is reality. Or maybe none of it. You start to realise that the plot is following dream logic rather than ordinary logic. Characters suddenly do wildly unexpected out-of-character things. It’s clear that this is not a flaw in the script. This is intentional. Uncle Jess is playing with our heads.

Stephen Thrower has suggested that the entire movie is an extended sexual fantasy (or series of sexual fantasies). I think he’s probably spot on. It’s a sexual fantasy rather than a dream or a hallucination or an exercise in surrealism.

Which raises lots of interesting questions. Are we supposed to believe that these people have any actual existence? Is this Jess Franco’s sexual fantasy which he’s inviting us to share? Is it to any extent Moira’s fantasy? And given the close collaboration between Franco and Lina Romay and the fact there was apparently quite a bit of improvising going on, are there any elements that might be Lina’s fantasy? Or a fantasy shared by Jess and Lina?

There is one genuinely shocking scene, but of course if this really is supposed to be taken as a fantasy then that scene becomes much less disturbing. Other mildly disturbing scenes become not disturbing at all.

The sex scenes are very passionate but they’re also just a little jokey. They’re mostly good-natured. You have to love the way Moira starts yelling “Oh Tarzan” as her sexual frenzy increases and in one encounter she gives an actual Tarzan jungle call when she comes. It’s one of the things that is so engaging about this movie - these sudden goofy moments.

The final sex scene is priceless. It may be the culmination of Franco’s career as a filmmaker. It’s not that it’s graphic, it isn’t, but the context is delightfully surprising.

Night of Open Sex is crazy, but it’s crazy in a subtle way. The craziness creeps up on the viewer. I liked it a lot. Highly recommended.

Severin have provided a great transfer with some very desirable extras. As always the pick of the extras is Stephen Thrower’s perceptive video essay.

The House of Lost Women (1983)

The House of Lost Women (La casa de las mujeres perdidas) was released in 1983 and belongs to Jess Franco’s Golden Films period. With Golden Films he was working on micro-budgets and as an added problem they proved to be spectacularly incompetent when it came to securing distribution outside Spain. On the other hand Golden Films gave him total creative freedom. Franco loved working for them. If he had total freedom he simply didn’t care how little money he had to work with. In this case he’s come up with a script that requires nothing more than a camera and a handful of good actors and as so often he’s also found a perfect location.

The House of Lost Women stars Lina Romay (who as so often at this period is billed as Candy Coster).

As with most Franco films of this era assigning The House of Lost Women to a genre is a bit of a challenge. It’s an erotic movie, but Franco’s erotic movies were not like other people’s. And describing it as an erotic movie is likely to give a false impression. It deals with sex, but it’s unsettling rather than arousing.

Mario Pontecorvo (Antonio Mayans) is an Argentinian actor who now lives on a tiny Spanish island with his family. Mario was forced to leave Argentina after some unpleasantness with the authorities there, unpleasantness relating to his sexual activities with a young woman. Mario is rather vague on this subject.

Mario lives on the island with his wife Dulcinea (Carmen Carrión) and his two daughters by a previous marriage. Paulova (Asunción Calero) has the body of a woman but the mind of a very small child. Desdémona (Lina Romay) is another matter.

Desdémona is the central character and provides voiceover narration.

This is one strange disturbed family. Mario seems to live in the past, dreaming of his past triumphs as an actor. He is entirely unable to satisfy Dulcinea’s sexual needs. Dulcinea is as a result crawling the walls. She has a few other issues as well, including a taste for sexual sadism.

Desdémona’s problem is that she is a virgin. She would very much like to change that situation. Given that there are no men on the island other than her father that’s a bit of a challenge for her. She has considered the possibility that her father might be able to solve the problem for her but her attempts at seduction fail and he rebuffs her approaches. Desdémona spends most of her time pleasuring herself but she desperately craves a man.

Then Tony Curtis arrives on the island. No, not that Tony Curtis. This is a young man who claims to be a hunter. As you might expect both Desdémona and Dulcinea are very excited by his arrival. You might also expect that Desdémona won’t remain a virgin much longer, and you’d be right.

The Pontecorvo family was wildly dysfunctional to begin with but this new arrival makes things dangerously unstable.

This is a classic setup for an erotic thriller or a murder mystery but that’s not at all what Franco is interested in giving us. It’s more of a psycho-sexual melodrama but heavily laced with black comedy. This is a rather amusing movie at times but it’s also at other times quite bleak. We don’t expect things to end well but Franco is not going to give us the bloodbath ending that we might have anticipated.

There’s some crazy humour in this film. Desdémona always has the TV on and while various sexual shenanigans are going on we hear a series of bizarre TV commercials in the background, and the TV station is clearly supposed to be broadcasting Dallas but this is Jess Franco’s crazed idea of Dallas. Surprisingly this stuff is actually quite amusing. It also adds an extra touch of weirdness. This is not the real world. This is Jess Franco World.

Antonio Mayans gives a very impressive performance as Mario. Mario lives in a strange world of fantasy with only the most tenuous grip on reality. It would be wrong to describe him as either villain or a victim. He’s more of a non-participant in life. He doesn’t really wish ill upon others because he’s hardly even aware of their existence.

Asunción Calero is frighteningly childlike and disturbing as Paulova. Carmen Carrión is chilling as Dulcinea.

At first we assume that we’re going to see Lina Romay once again as a sexually obsessed mad girl but as the story unfolds we start to question this. Perhaps Desdémona isn’t mad at all. She’s certainly sexually frustrated but she’s also desperate for love and she’s very bored and very lonely. She seems mad and sometimes her behaviour is unsettling but that’s because she’s in such a mad environment. Desdémona is more of a lost girl than a mad girl. It’s a subtle and poignant performance by Romay.

The House of Lost Women dates from a period at which Franco felt under no compulsion whatsoever to conform to any genre expectations. This is a story idea that appealed to him so he made the movie. The more I see of Franco’s 80s work the more of these odd neglected gems I find. Highly recommended.

Severin’s Blu-Ray (they’ve released this as a DVD as well) includes some very worthwhile extras. The audio essay by Robert Monell is good and as usual Stephen Thrower’s appreciation of the film is informative and perceptive.

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.

Black Boots, Leather Whip (1983)

Black Boots, Leather Whip (Botas negras, látigo de cuero) is one of the many movies Jess Franco made featuring private eye Al Pereira.

Al (Antonio Mayans) is about to leave town in a hurry. He owes a lot of money to some guys and they’re not guys who are very understanding about such things. Just as he’s about to leave Lina (Lina Romay) shows up and offers him a really simple job. All he has to do is go to the auto junkyard and retrieve her purse from the boot of a wrecked Dodge. For that he’ll get five thousand dollars.

It seems simple but two guys with guns turn up at the wrong moment. The two guys end up dead.

Al doesn’t look like a tough guy but obviously he is. We find out later that he’s an ex-cop with an unsavoury criminal record.

Lina manages to persuade Al that she didn’t set him up. She pays him his money and then since she has half an hour to kill she suggests they have sex. Which they do.

They decide to see each other again. Lina does a kinky nightclub act in the Whip of Leather, a club owned by her husband.

It’s not an ideal marriage since her husband Daniel isn’t interested in girls.

Daniel is part of a criminal gang involved in the usual rackets such as prostitution and drugs. If anything were to happen to any member of the gang that person’s share would be divided among the survivors. If Daniel were to be the last survivor Lina would be his heiress. If something were then to happen to Daniel Lina would get everything. Lina thinks this would be a good thing. If Al agrees to kill all the members of the gang he and Lina can go away together, with all that money.

That’s the plot and the first thing that will occur to Franco fans is that it’s a very straightforward conventional plot for a Franco movie. There is none of the dreamlike quality or the blurring of the line between fantasy and reality that you get in his best movies. This movie is almost aggressively grounded in reality.

It’s also a movie that has obvious affinities with film noir. The plot is pure film noir. Stylistically Franco is going for a neo-noir vibe - it’s a film noir story but he makes no attempt to capture the classic film noir visual style. This is film noir with an 80s visual sensibility.

This is not actually all that startling. Franco made a couple of good noirish crime films early in his career - Rififi in the City (1963) and Death Whistles the Blues (1964). They’re not only very competent exercises in film noir, they also have a very Franco-esque jazz-fuelled vibe.

It’s very odd to come across a Franco movie that doesn’t feature strange and interesting locations but Black Boots, Leather Whip is rather dull in this respect. Which may have been deliberate - it’s likely that he was aiming for a very stark very gritty look. The kind of weird fanciful bizarre architecture that Franco loved would have been a distraction. The movie was shot in Malaga but Franco is aiming for a mean hostile urban feel. He does pull off one very nifty noirish scene in a corridor - it’s simply done but very noir.

The problem is that although Franco understood film noir he wasn’t especially adept at suspense or action. There are scenes that needed a more effective building of suspense. The action scenes are competent but not exactly inspired. And the pacing is on the slow side.

What it does have is an interesting protagonist. We learn what we need to know about Al Pereira right at the start. He’s capable of brutal casual violence. He’s entirely immoral. He’s impulse-driven, particularly in regard to sex. Antonio Mayans’ performance is impressive.

Franco tells us what we need to know about Lina just as economically. She is scheming and ruthless. She is totally pragmatic when it comes to sex. She wants to be rich. She has one weapon she can use and that weapon is sex but in her hands it’s a very potent weapon. She is the femme fatale and Lina Romay does a fine job although perhaps her character needed just a bit more of a backstory.

While Franco was clearly going for film noir in commercial terms this movie (had it been made for a company that actually bothered to promote it) would have been marketed as an erotic thriller and there is a huge amount of sex. Franco does however manage to ensure that the sex scenes do advance the plot and do add to our knowledge of the characters’ motivations.

This was made during Franco’s period with Golden Films. They gave him total creative control but unfortunately when it came to distribution they were totally incompetent. Franco got to make the movies he wanted to make the way he wanted to make them but very few people got to see them.

I’m not sure this movie is a total success but it is an interesting neo-noir with an extraordinarily nihilistic flavour and it’s fun seeing Lina Romay do the femme fatale thing. This is a Franco obscurity, but an intriguing one. Recommended.

Severin have released Black Boots, Leather Whip on both Blu-Ray and DVD in a nice-looking transfer with some worthwhile extras.