The Diabolical Dr. Z (1966)

Original title: Miss Muerte

When somewhat mad neurologist Doctor Zimmer (Antonio Jiménez Escribano) explains his somewhat bizarre theories at a conference, he is laughed and scorned out of the room. Since he explains he has found the parts of the brain that control “good” and “evil”, as well as a way to stimulate or shut them down, so evil will be forever ended, some scepticism shouldn’t come as a surprise here. Still, the good Doctor promptly dies, cause of death: criticism (no, I don’t know how that works, either).

A couple of months later, Zimmer’s daughter and assistant Irma (Mabel Karr) fakes her death in a car accident – hitchhikers are so useful when you need a stand-in corpse – and proceeds with her plans to take revenge on the three scientists she specifically holds responsible for her father’s death. She already has a former killer (Guy Mairesse) suborned by her father’s SCIENCE and his mind controlled nurse as useful helpers, but she decides these men have to die in a more interesting manner.

Being a Jess Franco character, Irma finds herself inspired (and clearly a bit turned on) by the dance choreography of nightclub dancer Nadia (Estella Blain). It’s no wonder, for Nadia’s bit as “Miss Muerte” is all about seduction and murder by freakishly long fingernails, things that resonate with all of us, particularly when we’re planning vengeance. So Irma kidnaps Nadia, puts the mind-control whammy of her father’s SCIENCE on her, somehow poisons her nails, and sends her out to seduce and kill the scientists one by one.

The police, under leadership of a character played by director Jess Franco himself, seem rather confused by the whole thing, but Nadia’s boyfriend (Fernando Montes) – who also happens to be Irma’s short-term flirt and a neurologist himself – seems rather more capable, and certainly more motivated when it comes to uncovering the weird menace plot.

In 1966, Jess Franco was still a somewhat conventional filmmaker, putting some effort into making pulpy horror science fiction thrillers like this one with an audience in mind instead of ascending/descending completely into his world of personal obsessions and perversions. Which in turn means Franco could actually acquire decent budgets to work with. There’s a degree of slickness in Miss Muerte’s black and white photography Franco’s body of work would soon enough lose in favour of the languid, sometimes boring, idiosyncratic phantasmagoria his style would soon enough turn into.

Here, Franco seems to be at an absolute sweet spot between the old and the new. The – somewhat – higher budget inspires him to more concise storytelling, and his love for interesting/weird camera angles is here paired with some wonderful play with shadow and light that often creates as thick of an atmosphere of Franco-ness as his later, more difficult, work.

Many of Franco’s obsessions are there and accounted for: some of his favourite kinks, the nightclub scenes – though there’s no stripping and zooming on crotches here, in fact, very little zooming at all –, his very specific ideas about seduction, dominance and sado-masochism, and many a plot element we’ll encounter again and again in his films. Just here, these kinks seem still to be in service of the pulp horror plot instead of the other way around. From time to time, the film descends into delicious weirdness – the moment where Nadia seduces Howard Vernon’s neurologist character is incredible – but this weirdness still seems controlled.

In fact, Miss Muerte suggests a Franco might have been very effective in subsuming his personal weirdness, at least a little, to make more conventionally accessible yet still highly worthwhile genre movies. Being who I am, I am glad he let his freak flag fly rather sooner than later, but this does not make Miss Muerte any less of an interesting, fun bit of pulp horror.

Poison Ivy (1953)

Original title: La môme vert de gris

Casablanca, Morocco, still under French colonial occupation. A young lowlife is lethally hit with a bottle in a nightclub under somewhat woozy circumstances. Before he conks in an ambulance, he utters last words that suggest curiously intimate knowledge of the details of a US gold transport. The flics ask the FBI for help.

The FBI send their finest agent, Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine). Arriving undercover as some Texan weirdo, Caution tries to find out what the hell is going on, but his contacts tend to end up dead before they can, well, contact him, and the movie’s actual plot is as unclear to him as it is to the audience. At least he quickly realizes that the sister of the deceased lowlife, sexy femme fatale-ish nightclub singer Carlotta de la Rue (Dominique Wilms) and her associate Rudy Saltierra (Howard Vernon) are clearly involved in whatever there is to be involved in. So Lemmy aggressively flirts with women in a way that would get him cancelled right quick today (though I’d say a kick or three in the nether regions would be the better solution here), punches a lot of guys, shoots a couple or three, and eventually somehow finds out why he’s even in the country. Thwarting any evil plans really only needs the application of fists, bullets, and dubious smart remarks thereafter.

When last I wrote about a movie featuring France’s favourite American silver screen pulp hero Eddie Constantine, I was still a little confused by the man’s popularity in France. Having now hereby seen his first movie, and also the first one in which he plays Lemmy Caution, a character he is mostly going on to play even in movies that nominally don’t feature him, I’m not confused about that at all anymore. While Constantine certainly wasn’t a great thespian, he was a great Lemmy Caution, embodying the thuggish type of hard-boiled pulpy crime protagonist in the vein of Spillane’s Mike Hammer perfectly. Constantine really has the right dead glare in his eyes before Lemmy starts beating or shooting someone, suggesting a man who genuinely enjoys the violence and the mayhem that follows him, while thinking himself rather righteous. Constantine is also quite good shifting gears between the thuggish hardman facial expression and the supposedly charming smiles when he flirts. His eyes stay just as dead there, of course, which seems only correct for the type. Add to this ability to embody a certain type the actor’s willingness to throw himself into the physical elements of his chosen genre, and it’s no wonder at all anymore he became big in France.

Apart from Constantine’s fine performance as a pretty unpleasant yet very entertaining to watch man, Poison Ivy has more things to recommend it. Bernard Borderie’s direction may tend to the direct and the unsubtle, but he has a strong sense for movement and pacing, often utilizing cramped spaces (a budgetary thing, I presume) in moments of violence that make punch-outs feel a bit rawer and more intense than typical for this era. Borderie is also able to present spaces as actual spaces, an ability that’s a perfect fit for any kind of action sequence for it always makes things more dynamic. It also tends to lead to effective and meaningful framing and blocking. Just take the short scene in which Lemmy sits in a taxi and realizes he is being tailed. Unlike the typical rear-view mirror set-up, Borderie shoots through the windscreen of Lemmy’s taxi, positioning the characters so that we can see the tailing car through the back window of the taxi. It’s aggressively un-boring filmmaking.

This is of particular import in the world of pulpy hard-boiled crime, where ratiocination always happens via fist and gun. As Borderie films it, this special sort of ratiocination is a lot of fun, which goes for the whole of Poison Ivy.

La Fille De Dracula (1972)

Luisa Karlstein (Britt Nichols) returns to her ancestral home for a deathbed visit with her mother(?)/grandmother(?) (Carmen Carbonell). Before she dies, the old lady asks Luisa to take a look into "the crypt below the tower", to "see what it is that is killing her", and because the first count who is buried there was a vampire. No, I don't know what that's supposed to be good for either.

Dutifully, Luisa wanders off to the crypt, whereupon a coffin swings open and the first Count Karlstein (Howard Vernon in his most comfy role) - or, following the pre-movie text card, Count Dracula - stares long and hard at the girl and hisses.

Afterwards, Luisa renews(?)/begins(?) a love affair with her cousin(?)/childhood friend(?) Karine (Anne Libert), which results in a bit of sex and some biting with the vampire fangs Luisa grows from time to time.

While that has been going on (though the first murder seems to have taken place before Luisa even arrived), the nude female population of the nearby town has been decimated by a mysterious bloodsucking killer. Like the audience, investigating Inspector Ptuschko (Alberto Dalbes) has no clue what's going on. That doesn't hinder him from being a condescending smartass to everyone, nor from randomly naming people as the killer without having much evidence for his theories. Among the Inspector's suspects is the not-undead Count Karlstein (Daniel White).

The Karlsteins' secretary Jefferson (Jess Franco himself) seems to know what's up with his employers' family, but he needs a bit of time before he goes from incoherent ramblings about the supernatural into vampire hunter mode.

If you don't already enjoy the films of Spanish exploitation auteur and fan of close-ups of female pubic hair Jess Franco, La Fille De Dracula will probably not teach you how to do it, containing as it does all the flaws of a typical early 70s film by the director and not as many of their virtues as one would wish for as one of the uninitiated. Once you have fallen in love with Franco's ways of doing thing like I have, you learn to just ignore his films' idiosyncrasies, go with the flow, and hope for another shot of random, strange beauty.

La Fille isn't making life easy for its viewers. I'm used to Franco's disinterest in narrative subtleties like a dramatic arc, characterisation, or just making plain the relationships between the characters, but even I found myself getting impatient with this particular film from time to time - a real problem given that La Fille, like all of Franco's movies, is paced at a tempo one might call - depending on one's temperament - "languid" or "snail-like". I'm okay with long stretches of movie where nothing at all is happening, as long as they are filled with enough Franco-isms to keep me awake, but it's exactly the scenes containing Franco's special obsessions - lesbian vampire sex, longish cameos by himself, weird artsy night club striptease scenes, long shots of the faces of his actresses or just a reflection the director is fascinated in - that don't seem to have quite the power here they have in the director's other films.

I'm obviously entering a realm here where it becomes difficult to quantify why this particular film's lesbian sex feels less weird and effective as that in Franco's other movies, or why this ultra-lazy (we never witness him actually getting out of his coffin) Howard Vernon vampire is less impressive than the actor's usual performances, or why a long shot of the reflection of a living room in a piano seems not quite as fascinating as usual; "it just feels this way" is the only - and unsatisfactory - explanation I have.

That doesn't mean that La Fille De Dracula is a film completely without merit for the Franco fanatic - we're going to watch anything with the man's name on it in any case - it's just a film that (to me) is not as fascinating and hypnotic as the director's movies can be.

 

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Erotic Rites of Frankenstein (1971)

At the moment of their triumph, Doctor Frankenstein (Dennis Price) and his assistant Morpho (Jess Franco himself, shaggy as always), are attacked and killed by Melissa (Anne Libert). This cloaked and mostly naked woman was - as we will later learn - born from the unholy combination of bird's egg and human sperm, a fact that explains the feathers placed on strategic places of her body and her claws as well as the cries of bird imitation coming from the film's soundtrack whenever she gets excited. I don't know about the cat sounds, her blindness or her sexualized appetite for cannibalism, though. Is it still cannibalism if the perpetrator is a bird woman?

The bird woman and an unnamed assistant have come to steal the Doctor's freshly perfected monster (Fernando Bilbao, sporting a look, but unfortunately not an acting ability, relatively close to Universal's Karloff incarnation - painted silver) for their master, the reincarnated magnetist Cagliostro (Howard Vernon). Cagliostro plans to use the monster to abduct women whom he'll then use to get the raw parts for the creation of the perfect woman he needs to breed a master race that will destroy mankind. The monster is also the chosen father of the new race, by the way.

Fortunately, Frankenstein wasn't quite dead when Melissa left him, so he has ample time to ramble on and on about his monster, evil and so on, begging his friend Doctor Seward (Alberto Dalbes) to put things right again, without going into any details before finally really dying and leaving Seward rather puzzled.

The dead Frankenstein's tendency to ramble on and on is something his daughter Vera (Beatriz Savon) - also a remarkable expert in mad science - will learn to hate. Although she's able to revive her old man for short times with an electro-magnetic gadget, it takes more than one try to get more information about his enemy out of him than long-winded rambling about said enemy's evilness and madness (and that from a guy who invented a silver monster).

She should have spared herself the stress, because the monster abducts her soon enough.

A session of Melissa ranting semi-religious sounding explanations of "the master's" will and Cagliostro staring bug-eyed later, Vera is under his mesmeric control. Now the only thing that stands between mankind and a cult of undead created by Cagliostro (reaching from the Halloween-masked to the plastic skeleton to a guy with pointy ears) is Doctor Seward. Oh dear.

 

Too many people still dislike Jess Franco's films, find them boring and illogical and call him a hack. One could get angry about it, if not for the fact that those Franco distractors are too be pitied for the things they are missing.

The fun with Erotic Rites of Frankenstein already starts when you are trying to find out which cut of it you have in front of you. Is it the normal European version with quite a bit of nakedness? Or the Spanish version, having clothes inserted where none belongs, and gifted with the first foray of Lina Romay into Franco's world in form of some rather pointless interludes that don't seem to have anything to do with the main plot (whatever this means in this case)? Or the naughty version for the naughty French with the naughty pornographic bits? In my case, it's the main European version, which is also supposed to be the best one.

And an excellent one it most certainly is. It's beautiful to look at if you come to with an open mind and it's also full of the dream-logic that is at the core of Franco's best work and made as hypnotic as Vernon is supposed to be by Franco's singular and strange brand of eroticism. It often seems to me here as if even Franco's well-known method (or tic, if you are unkind) of suddenly letting his camera rest for a stretch of time on some inanimate object has little to do with him getting distracted, as is often said, but more with him sexualizing objects in the same way he is sexualizing people.

This mood is par for the course in Franco's body of work, as is the pointlessness of the plot or the strange, anti-naturalistic way the man lets his actors do their work (just watch Anne Libert's fantastic/completely unhinged performance!). What's not so typical for a Franco film is the surprising amount of silliness here - there's always something happening (even if what is happening does not necessarily make any sense) and it is never quite clear how much of it you are meant to take at face value. The script seems to stem from the same kind of pulp sensibility that can be found in Paul Naschy's work, just realized here in a much more creative (and let's be honest: not boring) way.

If it weren't as obscure as it is, I'd recommend Erotic Rites of Frankenstein as a fine introduction to Franco's work. It's a treat in any case.

 

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