Undisputed King of European Exploitation Cinema
Jesus “Jess” Franco may not have been the greatest European filmmaker, but he was certainly the fastest, with almost 200 films to his name! Always made on the cheap, his films were often low on artistic value or production quality. But many Franco movies have developed a cult following who enjoyed his obsessions that he delved into again and again over many decades. His jazzy, fetishistic, psychedelic, surreal style has made him a legendary figure in cult cinema.
MISS MUERTE (DIABOLICAL DR. Z) [1966]
A revenge story where a woman (Mabel Karr) avenges her father’s death by using a local dancer with long poisonous fingernails. There is mind control and other plot contrivances, but forget about the story. This film is brimming with fetishistic style, most lively in jazzy dance performance scenes. The nightclub dancer is played by the French beauty Estella Blain. Franco uses her as a fetishistic doll and a femme fatale that lures in her prey into her deathly web of seduction.
This is the peak of Franco’s phase of b&w horror films shot in Spain. It has higher production quality than most of Franco’s later output. French producer Serge Silberman was also Luis Buñuel’s producer at the time and, thanks to him, Buñuel’s favorite screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere has joined the project. Silberman has also included Estella Blain in the cast, which played a big part in the film’s success. Franco’s mise-en-scene is at his surreal best, letting his imagination go wild on this one. At the film’s heart however is Estella Blain’s performance as Miss Death. She is “a nightmare creature coming from the darkest male fantasies” as cult film expert Pete Tombs describes. Yet behind her cold, deathly demeanor, you can see the soft, fragile woman yearning for affection. Blain had a tumultuous life and tragically ended her own life at the age of 51 on a New Year’s Eve.
VENUS IN FURS (PAROXISMUS) [1969]
A jazz trumpeter finds the corpse of a beautiful woman on the beach in Istanbul. A woman he seems to remember. He leaves for Rio and he tries to get his shit together. One day, a woman who looks exactly like the dead one he found walks into the nightclub he plays in. Maybe she has returned from the dead to take revenge on the wealthy sadists that caused her death? The plot description may remind you of David Lynch’s noir-horror classic Lost Highway, where the paranoid jazz musician (Bill Pullman) finds his wife’s corpse, then later in the movie a woman who looks just like her comes back later to haunt him. We don’t know if Lynch had seen Franco’s film before he made Lost Highway, yet the surreal, paranoid, erotic air of Venus in Furs can be found in Lynch’s dark and sexy vision.
Paroxismus is described by British Film Institute as “a sui-generis poetic fantasy heavily influenced by Franco’s love of jazz”. Though inspired by Masoch’s classic work of erotic literature, the plot has in fact nothing to do with the source novel. Still, Franco shares Masoch’s enchantment with women, cruel women in particular. “Femme fatale” is the main theme here, and the line between dream and reality is blurry in this story of a mystery woman. The cruel female is an object of worshipping, a Goddess. She is played by the Austrian actress Maria Rohm, a Franco regular, who was at the top of her beauty here. The great cult actor Klaus Kinski plays a sadist playboy.
Venus In Furs is available for streaming on Amazon Prime
EUGENIE (The Story of Her Journey Into Perversion) [1970]
Eugenie is an adaptation of Philosophy in the Bedroom by the infamous Marquis de Sade. Franco adapted another notorious work by de Sade before this film, but his Justine adaptation was a disappointment even though it had a cast full of stars, including Jack Palance and Klaus Kinski. But this time it’s done right. It concerns the ‘education’ of the virginal Eugenie by several libertines characters, and contains extensive passages of philosophy as well as detailed sexual experiences. Eugenie (Marie Liljedahl) is a naive young woman taken to an idyllic island where she will be initiated into a world of pleasure and pain with the guidance of the jet setter Madame St. Ange (Maria Rohm), her step-brother Mirvel (Jack Taylor) and the intimidating Dolmance (Christopher Lee). Eugenie discovers her own forbidden fantasies, finds herself in a mayhem of drugs, sadomasochism and evil.
The film is naturally much more tame compared to the original book, and the erotic scenes are tastefully done. The lead actress, the Swedish beauty Marie Liljedahl, is a hundred times better choice for the virginal heroine than the wooden Romina Powers playing Justine in the previous film. Liljedahl was already an international sex symbol before this film, thanks to her starring role -at only 17- in the hit erotic film Inga (1968). Maria Rohm, the beautiful Austrian star of Venus in Furs is quite gorgeous too as the Eugenie’s ‘teacher’. But the real star is surely the legendary British star Christopher Lee. It is a bit strange to see Sir Lee starring in a Sexploitation movie, and actually he claims he had no idea that it was going to be a softcore film: “it is true I was in a soft porn film, though I had no idea that was what it was when I agreed to the role. I was told it was about the Marquis de Sade. When I had left Spain after my part was shot, everyone in the cast had taken their clothes off!” It is true that Lee is never actually in the frame in any of the sexual scenes, but his narration scenes are later mixed together with the erotic shots. Eugenie was a lost film for about 3 decades, until its original negatives were found in 2001.
FOR COLLECTORS
THE DIABOLICAL DR. Z (MISS MUERTE)was first made available in English with Something Weird Video. Mondo Macabro made it more widely available with their 2003 DVD of the fully uncut version. But the 2018 release by REDEMPTION Films is the one to go for by collectors. Redemption’s 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.66:1 widescreen Blu-ray version was restored by GAUMONT, with both English and French audio tracks available, with optional English subtitles. There is an audio commentary track by cult-film expert Tim Lucas as well.
DIABOLICAL DR. Z (REDEMPTION BLU-RAY)
VENUS IN FURS was first released by REDEMPTION on DVD in 2014, but the more recent one is the BLUE UNDERGROUND DVD in 2016. You will find interviews with Jess Franco and his star Maria Rohm as extras.
VENUS IN FURS (BLUE UNDERGROUND DVD)
Eugenie… The Story Of Her Journey Into Perversion has the best treatment among the three films, with a 2023 Collector’s Edition Blu-ray release by BLUE UNDERGROUND. 4K Ultra HD 2-Disc Region-free edition features a Widescreen 2.40:1 transfer and various interviews and commentaries as extras.
EUGENIE (COLLECTOR’S EDITION 4K BLU-RAY)
A BOOK ON JESS FRANCO FILMS
For those who want to dig deeper into the work of Jess Franco, Stephen Thrower’s handsomely designed book Murderous Passions: The Delirious Cinema of Jesus Franco is highly recommended. It can be found on AMAZON or on MIT PRESS