A randomly comprehensive survey of extraordinary movie experiences from the art house to the grindhouse, featuring the good, the bad, the ugly, but not the boring or the banal.
Once you become a horror man -- an actor typecast as a menace in scary movies, there are certain roles that come your way inevitably. One of those is the red herring. It didn't take Howard Vernon long to get there; he played Max von Klaus for the late Jess Franco in the same year that Franco had directed him in the title role of The Awful Dr. Orloff. It's as if Franco knew he would type the man with the burning gaze. Klaus hinges on the expectation that we'll be spooked by the mere sight of Vernon and suspect him of the worst. Franco uses a nice gimmick to distance the audience from the actor and the character he plays. We first see him as a static image: a snapshot at police headquarters or a painted portrait on the wall of his home. Franco confronts us with the image of Howard Vernon the newly-minted horror star before showing us the man Max Von Klaus. Later, a girl staying at the house is spooked in the middle of the night. She runs through the halls only to stop short, startled, at the site of the painting. Only then does Max himself appear to ask what's the matter.
What's the matter in town is that murder has revived the legend of the accursed Baron von Klaus of 500 years ago, a sadist before the word was coined to describe him. An angry father cursed this Baron for torturing his daughter, and the townsfolk tell that the villain disappeared in the swamps but did not die. Suspicion alights on Max inevitably, although Franco is careful to give us several other suspicious characters.
The problem for Max is that his alibi for the time of one of the murders stinks. As he protests, he'd probably come up with a better alibi had he actually done the crime, but his real problem, we learn, is that he actually does have a secret to keep. Only one person, the one for whose sake he's keeping the secret, can reveal it to free him, perhaps not without cost. All of this makes Max more than a red herring. He actually becomes a sympathetic character, if not quite the hero of the picture. Franco's compassionate handling of the material seems atypical; even his fans might concede that this is a rare Franco film with a heart.
Filmed in a wider aspect ration than Orloff, Klaus is a more classically composed if perhaps slightly less personal film from Franco. There's actually less sadism to it than the English language title suggests, though there is one scene with a topless victim, filmed almost tastefully, chained to the ceiling of a dungeon. Cinematographer Godofredo Pacheco gives the old-time urban and forest locations plenty of expansive, expressionist atmosphere. The story is simple stuff, but the visuals make it worth looking at, and if not one of his best, it may be one of Franco's most likable films.
In a flashback, the late Jess Franco's troubled heroine Anna (Diana Lorys) recounts her time working in a "second-rate" strip club in Zagreb. It's unclear whether she means merely a second-rate strip club or a second-rate club for Zagreb -- then still a Communist city -- but by any standard it's a pretty poor affair and a minimal set. The interesting thing about the flashback is Anna's recollection of her boss's advice to strippers. Stretch your act out as long as you can, he told her; if you make it last, it excites the customer more. For the boss that means the customers will buy more drinks. But presuming that you can't buy booze in European movie theaters, what's Franco's excuse?
Superficially, it sounds like a rationalization for Franco's use of the strip act as filler as he struggles to get his feature to acceptable length. But there may be a statement of artistic principle or purpose here as well, not to mention a bit of autobiographical confession. As Lorys went through her motions, watched by and watching Cynthia, the film's femme fatale (Colette Jacobine), I had an vision of Jess Franco sitting in a strip club, watching just such a protracted performance, and fantasizing about the stripper. Not just about screwing her or watching her screw another man or woman, but about an entire imagined life of appropriately exotic adventures. Dancers figure so prominently in his films that something like this has to have been going on. There's a masturbatory circularity to it all if fantasizing about strippers led him to write and direct fantasies interrupted by long, sometimes seemingly pointless strip club scenes. They may have been practical to him as time fillers and necessary titillation for the audience, but pointless? Perhaps not.
Of all the strip clubs in all the Communist world, Anna has to choose this one so she can fall under Cynthia's sway. Seduced, betrayed and hypnotized, she's meant to be the fall girl after Cynthia bumps off her co-conspirators in a jewel robbery. In this film the plot is more of an annoyance than the filller. For Franco fans the real interest is the generational transition from Lorys, the heroine of The Awful Dr. Orloff, to Soledad Miranda, who has a small role as the impatient moll of one of the jewel robbers. The film's real subject, if it really can be said to have one, is Franco's fascination with the female form, draped and undraped. He can make Lorys wrapping herself into a sari one of the movie's true highlights. There's a fine line separating the tedious from the hypnotic, and at any given moment Franco can be found on either side. This picture is already a long way down from Orloff, but Franco's career was a roller coaster ride with ups as well as more downs to come. He kept on working as often as he could, hoping to make the experience last as long as possible. I can't call myself a real fan, but for those who followed him all the way, making it last seems to have worked the spell Franco wanted. It has sparked a fantasy not easily shaken off. Some may say it's the fantasy that Franco was a great filmmaker, but it really could be anything. If you can't just walk away from his movies you may never fully leave them behind.
Fifty years on, I'm sure I'm not the first observer to ask what the point is of having a minion do your kidnapping for you when you have to go with him on his errands. Why have a minion if he can't take care of business while you do your all-important experimentation in the comfort of your own lair? Instead, Dr. Orloff (Howard Vernon) has to hang around outside the homes of beautiful young so he can guide his minion, Morpho (Ricardo Valle) through the streets by tapping on the cobblestones with his cane. Morpho's very prominent eyes appear to be of no use to him, so how much use can he be for the doctor, who went to the trouble of faking Morpho's death by execution, in his former capacity as a prison doctor, just so Morpho could be his minion? Maybe Orloff fears that the targeted women could beat him up. Yet he's quite capable of slipping one a mickey when it's convenient, but on the other hand he's not observant enough to notice when the victim, having noticed the obvious ploy, doesn't bother drinking the stuff. Most likely Orloff knows his limitations, some of the time.
Orloff would become a magic word (as would Morpho) in the universe of Jess Franco, who made his first international success writing and directing Gritos en la noche and would litter many subsequent movies with Orloffs and Morphos the way spaghetti western producers littered the Old West with Djangos. For Franco it was a gimmick and a fetish at the same time; that's why exploitation cinema fascinates us. With The Awful Dr. Orloff (so named, I presume, for its U.S. pairing with The Horrible Dr. Hitchcock) Franco aspires to place his personal stamp on familiar archetypes. The basic story is old news but also very recent. Orloff needs to experiment on his lovely young victims to cure his disfigured daughter. It had to take tremendous self-confidence in one's own personal vision to tell such a story so soon after Georges Franju had told it in Eyes Without a Face (1959) and Giorgio Ferroni had in Mill of the Stone Women (1960). The idea goes back further, of course, at least as far as Wallace Fox's The Corpse Vanishes (1942), though in that Monogram epic Bela Lugosi -- whose contemptuous attitude toward minions is echoed in Orloff's treatment of Morpho -- is trying to cure his wife rather than his daughter. So the idea is nothing new, and it was up to Franco to make it fresh.
While Franco benefits from the black-and-white cinematography of Godofredo Pacheco, it's the music he uses that really distinguishes Orloff from the field. Despite the Belle Epoque setting, the score by Jose Pagan and Antonio Ramirez Angel is discordantly modern and eclectic, heavy on percussion but also haunted with weird whistling effects. It would make you take notice even if Franco wasn't doing his job. His own special contribution, I suppose, is a modern infusion of fetishism and just plain sleaze. For those countries that would tolerate them, he includes a handful of topless shots of captive women. Scenes of women chained and behind bars are the most obvious signs (apart from the villain names) that this otherwise antique-looking item is a Jess Franco film. He may not truly have come into his own until he began working regularly in color, but his personal touch is already present here.
Typical of Franco also, I suppose, is the transcendence of hackneyed plotting by evocative imagery. As in many future films, Orloff takes place in a world of idiot cops and reporters. Conversations at police headquarters are often the low points of Franco films, and Orloff sets the tone by giving us a dense hero in Inspector Tanner (Conrado San Martin). Franco milks the final reel for suspense by highlighting Tanner's stupidity. His girlfriend (Diana Lorys) has set herself up as bait for the kidnapper/killer, seen through Orloff's attempt to slip her a mickey, and pretended to pass out so she can be taken to his lair. She has hastily written Tanner a note explaining her ploy and sent a messenger to deliver it. To Franco's credit, he gives Tanner a reason to ignore the note. All through the picture, idiots and crazy people have been plaguing him with false clues and fake confessions. When a messenger hands him the note without saying who it's from, he assumes it's another crank at work. It's not until he's about to go to bed that night that he bothers reading it and finally rushes to the rescue. Fortunately the girl is not so competent that Tanner has nothing to do. In the end the damsel has to be in distress; that's part of the ritual. You could call this mockery of stupid authority figures or just stupid writing. But there's something undeniably compelling about the imagery, even if little is original in it. Like his peers (Jean Rollin, Paul Naschy and his collaborators) Franco understood the captivating power of gothic imagery and animating gothic ideas, obviously being captivated by them himself. Even the absurd Morpho, who looks like a hybrid of Christopher Lee's Dracula and his Frankenstein Monster, plus fake eyeballs, is indisputably compelling. You can't take your eyes off him, even if only because you keep expecting the actor to crash into furniture or trip and fall. He's creepy in the old manner of the dehumanized horrors of such films as White Zombie or Island of Lost Souls. His handicaps make him ludicrous as a minion, but something like him needs to be in such a film. And this sort of story has already been done so many times that what once may have been dismissed as mere mechanical or mercenary reproduction arguably acquires an unconscious compulsive logic. For a Franco fan, especially, Orloff can seem like a film that has to exist, or can't help existing. For a more objective auteurist, the film's true subject may be the need, simultaneously commercial and psychological, to tell the story, or our need to have the story told over again.
Postscript: Jess Franco has died at age 82 following a stroke suffered last week. Follow this link for this blog's reviews of Franco films, with more likely to come in the near future.
Wendigo didn't know that Lina Romay had died until I told him, but he knew the name when I said it. He'd first seen her in the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland, but got to know her better, he's not ashamed to admit, in the pages of Celebrity Sleuth and Celebrity Skin. Because the latter two magazines were fairly informative about their subjects' careers, he had some awareness of the late actress's work and her relationship with Jess Franco, but he doesn't recall seeing any of Romay's films before I showed him Franco's Female Vampire last weekend. He was more familiar with it under the alternate title The Bare Breasted Countess and had a good idea of what he was in for -- but it didn't help much. Wendigo's a Franco skeptic -- he thinks poorly of his Count Dracula, for instance, -- but was willing to give the cult auteur another shot.
We cheated: this is a shot from Erotikill, an alternate version of Female Vampire.
Romay plays Countess Irina von Karlstein, last of an accursed line and vacationing in Portugal. The mute Irina is more like a succubus than a vampire in the current sense of the word, -- except in the alternate Erotikill version -- but Wendigo notes that vampires in pre-modern folklore were not exclusively blood-drinkers, and that a succubus is really just a kind of vampire, or vice versa. In Irina's case, it's succubus with an emphasis on suck. She drains your life force through oral sex -- but she's increasingly unhappy with her plight. The big problem seems to be that her sex partners die
before she can be satisfied.
Here's Romay in a mood more typical of the Female Vampire version.
Seeking satisfaction, she can't stop preying on people, or humping her bed, or fellating her bedpost. Recklessly, she drains the masseur of the hotel she's staying in, as well as a reporter sent to interview her notorious aristocratic self. Courting danger, she briefly turns vigilante vampire to break up some sort of torture-snuff ring before falling hard for a morbid poet (Jack Taylor) who wants her to take him "beyond the mists." This isn't just a poetic metaphor; after Irina kills the reporter, we see her escort the bare-breasted victim literally beyond the mists and into a magical forest from which she never returns.
Interview with the Female Vampire, and its sequel
Irina can only show the way but can't follow until the poet's example awakens the idea that she could will her own death. But maybe she won't have to go to that trouble, since the dedicated Dr. Roberts ("Jess Franck"), advised by the inevitable (for Franco) "Dr. Orloff," is determined to track down a vampire perpetrator of recent murders despite the skepticism of the local police. Will the intrepid occult investigator overcome Irina's equally-mute manservant in time to confront the countess in her Kool-aid filled bathtub -- because there's no way Franco's telling us that's blood -- before more people die or Wendigo falls asleep?...
There's your story, but Franco's real subject is ennui -- terminal dissatisfaction despite all efforts. In Wendigo's opinion, that choice of subject inherently limits the film's appeal, because even if Franco succeeds in creating empathy in the audience, their shared ennui would only leave them indifferent to Irina's fate or anyone else's. He might get away with it if Female Vampire were more successful on an artistic level, but Wendigo felt that Franco succeeded only sporadically in creating the right mood. He manages it best in the purely pictorial scenes when Romay wanders through the woods. There are other odd or arguably surreal moments that impressed or amused him. He was tickled by the way Romay would start to flap her arms like bat wings as if about to transform, only to have Franco cut to the flapping bat-winged hood ornament of a limousine as Irina delivers her self-pitying internal
monologues.
I bought a vampire limousine
But there's too much going on in the movie, and not enough, to maintain the tone. The movie suffers, in Wendigo's view, whenever it returns to Dr. Roberts and his desultory investigations. These scenes have a perfunctory quality -- Franco himself is lifeless in the vampire-hunter role -- and the English dubbing we subjected ourselves to was awful. But the real problem is Franco's all-too-obvious desire to film his girlfriend screwing and masturbating. To a certain extent you need these scenes to drive home the theme -- lack of satisfaction is one of the few themes capable of artistic realization in porn -- but Franco doesn't know when to quit. The sex and masturbation scenes just go on and on, far longer than necessary to make any point Franco can think of. They contributed to my own feeling that something like Female Vampire could never really have what we think of as a "director's cut" -- a definitive version of Franco's vision from which nothing can be cut. My hunch is that he thought almost everything he shot was provisional or expendable -- and the history of variants running between 70 and 110 minutes seems to bear me out. This may be the perfect case of a film being less than the sum of its parts. The way Wendigo sees it, Franco failed by succeeding. Female Vampire does inspire the ennui it describes. It leaves one drained and indifferent -- or at least that's how Wendigo felt.
While we watched, I suggested that this could be Franco's imitation of a Jean Rollin film, and Wendigo is willing to agree to a degree. Wendigo likes Rollin better because the Frenchman was capable of seeing magic in practically any setting or any object, while Franco, in my friend's opinion, has all the magical sensibility of a Polaroid camera. He has some sense of style, but Wendigo senses an essential absence of ideas or real imagination that limits Franco as a cinematic fantasist. His nice Portuguese location goes largely to waste, for instance, while he spends precious time in Romay's bedroom. We also compared Franco unfavorably to fellow Spaniard Paul Naschy -- you can tell the difference when you consider the awful scenes with Franco as Dr. Roberts. Naschy was a true believer in material like this, but Franco is clearly just going through the motions. Those scenes are just excuses to cast himself and get a Dr. Orloff into the movie -- and all the scenes could easily be cut without harming the story.
Jean-Pierre Bouyxou as "Dr. Orloff" looks up -- to show that he's blind,
while "Jess Franck" (left) looks on.
Wendigo hasn't seen much Franco, and hasn't seen anything that he's liked yet -- though he's curious to see the shorter, blood-oriented Erotikill version of this film. I've seen some that I've liked so I'm still willing to cut Franco some slack, but I can understand Wendigo's frustration. His admiration for Lina Romay's attributes remains undiminished however, and we agree that there is new poignancy now in the final moments when the countess, no longer bare breasted and possibly redeemed, finally walks on her own through the mist into posterity. Like the countess, Lina Romay herself now belongs to the ages.
Jazz musician Jimmy Logan seems to be recovering from a bad trip -- he digs his trumpet out of the sand and can't remember why he buried it -- when a body washes up on a beach to launch him on an even worse trip. Jimmy recognizes the body and can even guess why she's dead. He witnessed the gang-rape of Wanda Reed (Maria Rohm) by three decadent characters in Istanbul -- but apparently did nothing. It's not clear whether people know generally that Wanda is dead. At least no one but Jimmy bats an eye when she turns up, live as life, in Rio during the Carnival. One of her tormentors is also there, but he ends up dead. In fact, Wanda has somehow loved or at least stimulated him to death (hence the movie's alternate title). She'll repeat that trick elsewhere on the globe, somehow following Jimmy as he goes from gig to gig like her spotter, to take out a bisexual woman (Margaret Lee) and Ahmet (Klaus Kinski), who either has a turban fetish or is supposed to be a Turkish man. Wanda's mysterious movements pretty much kill Jimmy's interracial buzz with nightclub singer Rita (Barbara McNair), but obsessions are like that. And when all's said and done Jimmy's back on the beach playing a personal requiem for Wanda, only to see a body wash up on the beach. So is it one of those movies where the hapless hero has to repeat the story over and over for eternity? No, because this time the body is different, and the difference is twist enough for this picture.
Ladies and gentlemen, James Darren on trumpet and Jess Franco at the keyboard.
I'm tempted to shrug my shoulders and say, "Well, that's Jess Franco for you," but Paroxismus is actually one of the Spanish director's more accessible movies. What I mean is that, despite its impenetrable story, which bears no relation to the Sacher-Masoch novel it's sometimes named for, it's mostly free of Franco's signature idiosyncrasies and personal mythology. While we do get one of his favorite motifs, a singer writhing on her back, there's no "Dr. Orloff" or "Morpho" running around, at least in the English-language version. Venus in Furs takes us to a very strange place, but it isn't Jess Franco's personal world. Franco just makes it compellingly colorful and musical, if also a bit campy and sensual at the same time.
Above, Maria Rohm puts the moves on Margaret Lee. Below, Klaus Kinski contemplates his ill-fated one-man show about the Prophet Muhammad.
The movie actually sustains an air of genuine supernatural mystery until the ending leaves the story making almost no sense whatsoever. As I said, it's unclear how many people know that Wanda is dead, and it's even less clear whether anyone's investigating her apparently unnatural demise. The story as told may be possible only in the absence of a criminal justice system. But given what we can assume finally to be Jimmy's special perspective, can we really be sure that Wanda is dead. On the other hand, what we learn about Jimmy makes his relationship with Rita hard to explain -- except if we assume that his interpretation of his final vision is unreliable. For that matter, the entire film may be nothing but Jimmy's jazzy delirium on the beach, his fantasy of supernatural vengeance substituting for the steps he was apparently incapable of taking to secure justice for Wanda. At its trippy heart, Paroxismus may simply be a guilt trip.
If you're willing to do the interpretive work on your own, you could well appreciate Franco's film as an impressionistic puzzle, a set of variations on an ultimately hidden theme. But you could just as easily dismiss Paroxismus as reels of incoherent pretension, redeemed or not by visual flair and period flavor. It seems appropriate, somehow, that this movie is ultimately whatever each viewer makes of it.
Forty years after Tod Browning's seminal film, Dracula needed no introduction to movie fans, but any attempt to film Bram Stoker's novel needs to introduce the Count all over again. Even forty years after Jess Franco's interpretation of the story, writers and directors are looking for different angles from which to show the legend as it's evolved in our collective mythology, quite independently from Stoker or any single filmmaker.
In an interview on the DarkSky DVD of Count Dracula, Franco explains that his objective was to do the most faithful film version of Stoker to date. Looking back, the prolific director scoffs at the notion that Francis Coppola's version was more faithful to Stoker than his. My friend Wendigo, who may count as more of a vampire expert than Jess Franco, claims that the 1970 Count Dracula is really no more faithful, cumulatively speaking, than Coppola's. He admits that Franco is right about how Coppola's romance storyline deviates from Stoker's more simply bloodthirsty intentions, and concedes that Franco doesn't taint his version with like sentimentality. But Franco then proceeds to distort the story in so many different ways of his own that his claim of fidelity becomes ludicrous. He eliminates characters and changes some of the relationships among the survivors, making Dr. Seward an assistant at Van Helsing's clinic and Lucy Westenra the fiancee of a British (not Texan) Quincey Morris. Franco also innovates, giving Renfield a backstory with a daughter who became Dracula's victim during a tour of Transylvania, giving Van Helsing a stroke so Herbert Lom doesn't have to travel to another location with the vampire hunters, and having Dracula attack Mina in a box seat at a theater while a chorus sings Fahoo Dores or some such thing. Most laughably, the director improvises a sort of attack upon the vampire hunters by Dracula's menacing yet immobile collection of taxidermy, and has the gall in retrospect to tell us that that was a nice scene to look at. Wendigo could go on at great length on these deviations, and is talking faster than I can write, but I think his point has been made quite sufficiently.
To be fair, Wendigo acknowledges that Franco did do some bits of Dracula right for the first time in movies. Working closely with Christopher Lee, he gives us a Count in the opening scenes that really resembles the character in the novel, and a speech that is verbatim Stoker. Dracula's brides also get to say their original lines, and the Count offers them a baby in a bag to keep them off Jonathan Harker, as in the novel. Most importantly, Lee enacts the novel's youthening process for the vampire as he gluts himself on fresh blood, going from fake grey to hair dye in dramatic fashion. As a rule, Wendigo says, whenever Lee is on screen Franco lives up to his supposed intention. Otherwise, without Lee looking over his shoulder, the director assumes artistic license, though without much artistry. Franco is off-key in a different way than Coppola is, but both versions strike plenty of false notes, though in different spots.
Men: Are you tired of going grey? You need fresh blood for darker, fuller hair! (Allow several treatments to get the full effect)
Sir Christopher Lee has been privileged (cursed, he might say) with opportunities to offer more than one interpretation of Dracula (the entire Hammer series counting as one), with the Franco film representing his own idea of authenticity as well as the director's. Unfortunately, Wendigo feels that Lee's work here is weaker than in his best Hammers. Even out of elderly makeup, Lee comes across too often as a tired old man, without the energy he enjoyed a dozen years earlier. His speech about his crusading ancestors should be a bombastic, warlike oration -- Gary Oldman actually does better here -- but Lee's delivery is bland and complacent like a retired British general recalling the good old days in camp. Wendigo allows that Lee may have overstated his feebleness the better to sell his rejuvenation in England, but thinks that the star's performance never really recovers from the lackluster first impression. He doesn't invest the character with the uncanny quality Bela Lugosi provides with his eerie slowness, which doesn't project health but isn't feeble, either. Wendigo doesn't really think Lee gives a bad performance here, but feels that Lee has done better in less faithful Dracula films.
Lee's limitations may be obscured by the black hole on screen that is Klaus Kinski as Renfield (or "Reinfierd" in the DVD's Italian closing credits). Wendigo and I have heard Kinski's performance here praised for years after we'd first seen the Franco film, and that's always left us wondering whether something had been cut out of the version we saw, since our recollection was that Kinski did nothing but stare at the padded walls of his cell and grab the occasional insect. Now, having seen a presumably complete DVD, Wendigo says: "I'd criticize his performance if he gave a performance." But there's nothing there. People involved with the production clearly realize that they have to explain something about Kinski. Producer Harry Alan Towers claims that he had to trick Kinski into doing his scenes by telling him he wasn't making a Dracula movie, while Franco says Towers is full of it. But Kinski's is a singularly uncooperative act. We can believe that the great man may have refused to speak lines or even utter sounds for Franco. When he's offscreen, we hear great howls and screams that are attributed to Renfield, but inside the cell sits a mute who plays with bugs or finger paints with gruel flung on his wall. Wendigo sees that Franco and his writers may have had an innovative notion of Renfield as a man who has shut down mentally after losing his daughter to Dracula, only to spring to dangerous life by the vampire's mental commands, but a mute Renfield does nothing for the story. Totally gone is the mania that defines the Stoker character and must be expressed verbally. We're left with a virtual actor's strike on screen, an appearance that can only be praised by Kinski cultists, just as the movie as a whole can be approved only by indiscriminate Franco fanatics.
Kinski's stunt-dummy gives a livelier performance.
I've seen Jess Franco at something closer to his peak form, while Wendigo hasn't. Count Dracula leaves Wendigo doubting whether Franco has any talent as a director. This film has little sense of art direction or Gothic expressionism apart from whatever Franco found on his locations or could apply with a generous use of cobwebs. He does little with composition or camera movement to create atmosphere, with rare exceptions like Dracula's appearance in Mina's box seat. This is one of the films that earned Franco a reputation for a lazy reliance on zooms; a comparison with Tod Browning's use of dolly shots is telling. Franco shows little skill with the actors, leaving Herbert Lom (whom Wendigo thinks a near-ideal Van Helsing) lost while treating the other vampire hunters almost interchangeably. He certainly flatters Maria Rohm and Soledad Miranda, but Count Dracula probably is not his best showcase for either actress.
Junior vampire Soledad Miranda starts small while Dracula hunts the big game (Maria Rohm).
As for special effects, Wendigo did like a few attempts, like the double-exposure materialization of Dracula's brides out of their coffins and the simple yet effective dissolve of Dracula's shadow, a moment straight out of Stoker. Franco makes decent use of simple gimmicks like smoke and mist for appearances and disappearances of characters. On the other hand, Count Dracula may have the worst bat effects ever, exemplified by the Transylvanian Glider Bat that sails unflappably past Lucy's window so often and by the bouncing boulders that the hunters drop on hapless gypsies. One of those giant rocks hits a horse smack on the head, but the animal is almost undisturbed, and after we see them come to rest after scattering the crowd, Franco cuts to a shot of gypsies somehow crushed under these paperweights. Wendigo also objects strenuously to Franco's substitution of police dogs for wolves, something the director apologizes for in his interview. Wendigo's view is, if you don't have the means to do something right, skip it -- just as Franco (probably wisely) skipped anything to do with the Demeter and its voyage to England.
The vampire hunters had staked two of Dracula's brides without a mess before Quincey Morris (Jack Taylor) hit a gusher on the third attempt. Had they missed vital organs before?
Seeing Count Dracula after many years has only decreased Wendigo's opinion of the movie and its director. Speaking for myself, having seen more Francos (including Vampyros Lesbos, which I may get Wendigo to watch someday), it strikes me that the director is only fully engaged and energized when working with his own personal mythology and symbolic iconography, regardless of the genres involved. He may talk big about his ambitions for Dracula now, but the film looks like a work for hire in which he invested little of his own particular creativity. Whatever interest Count Dracula has rests entirely on Christopher Lee's variation on a favorite theme; apart from that, there's little here for vampire fans or Franco fans, though Wendigo can speak only for the former.
Here's a German trailer for Nachts wenn Dracula erwacht uploaded by DocPhnoeker. It's actually pretty easy to follow regardless of language.
This is going to be more of a photo essay than a review because the appeal of the first film in Jesus Franco's "Red Lips" series (also known in some quarters as Sadisterotica) is primarily visual and, to be frank, the plot doesn't bear much analysis. Here's the situation: "Red Lips" is the sobriquet of a notorious masked cat burglar of the kind that infested 20th century Europe, but for our purposes denotes a two-woman team who can be thieves, spies or private detectives, depending on who pays them. In an enlightening interview on the Blue Underground DVD, Franco explains that his notion was to cross Abbott & Costello with the Sixties comedy-thriller genre, with Bud and Lou reimagined as battling Euro-babes.
In uniform.
Out of uniform.
Sophisticated voice scrambling techniques.
If looks could kill she wouldn't need that gun, though actress Rosanna Yanni could have used such a weapon to shoot her way out of White Comanche a year earlier.
Diana the redhead (Janine Reynaud) is the bossy Bud type and the brains of the group, while Janine the blond (Rosanna Yanni) is proud of her stupidity because that's what men like. But it doesn't take much to be the brains of this outfit. In the English dub Diana is saddled with a horsey sort of voice, somewhere between Carol Burnett and Miss Jane Hathaway, that undercuts her sex appeal, while both voice actresses are stuck with tin-eared English dialogue to read. For instance: the Red Lips have just received a ticking bouquet of flowers from a pretend admirer. After running around with the bomb nearly as long as Adam West did in the Batman movie, they finally dump it into their pool just in time for it to explode and douse them with a spout of water. Their response: "Such a dirty deal!" But then they have to dive into the pool to dodge a drive-by, so at least the dialogue doesn't linger in your mind. It isn't meant to.
For the sake of arguments, the story has the Red Lips stealing a painting from one Napoleon Boulevard (Franco at his most Lorre-ish, protesting that "I don't like it any more than you do."), the subject of which resembles a missing woman whose husband is willing to pay amply to recover her. Negotiating by raiding his house in the middle of the night, RL arranges to be paid $50,000 for the missing girl's delivery, dead or alive. As Diana theorizes a link between the violent artwork and a wave of disappearing women, she sends a skeptical Janine to find out more about the elusive artist, Ernst Tiller.
We already know Tiller's technique: apparently a student of the mad painter from The House With Laughing Windows, he has women kidnapped and tortured by his "good friend" Morpho to incite his muse. It will take Janine time to learn this once she overcomes her natural laziness, prodded by Diana's promise that their take will make a trip to Vegas and a tryst with "Frankie" and "Dino" possible. There will be interviews with elderly lecherous gallery curators who are killed by blow darts, trips to a trippy nightclub where Diana is hit on by an ardent blond, and other adventures that need not detain us now.
Unusual reticence for Franco: Diana doesn't take up the blond's proposition. A few years later, who knows?
Janine is Two Undercover Angels incarnate: dumb as a bag of hammers but oddly attractive to look at. This film finds Franco in a pop-art phrase that gives us bold, colorful images with an almost instinctual eye for cinematography and art direction. He deals in iconography more than polished composition, the screen reflecting his own engagement with provocative situations and symbols. Concepts and characters recur in his films: Morpho, for instance, will reappear in other plots and contexts despite his apparent demise here. The image of the hairy minion has a power over Franco, as if the equivalent for young Jess of Jacinto "Paul Naschy" Molina's encounter with Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man or the fictional impact of Frankenstein on the little girl in Spirit of the Beehive was a viewing of Return of the Vampire. Though Morpho is all evil in the present picture, his bushy visage and dark clothes remind me of Andreas, the pitiable lycanthropic servant of Return who switches sides several times in that movie.
Of Morpho (left), his creator (in the picture, not Franco) says: "Through the science of psychiatry and the use of psychotropic [or is that psychothropic?] substances he became so, and believe me, it wasn't easy."
That's what I mean about evocative imagery and Franco's iconic use of actors. You see the same thing in the eyepatch-sporting mad painter Tiller (who also dons a fez while sojourning in Ankara) and most obviously in our miniskirted gun-toting heroines. They aren't meant to be characters in the conventional sense; their meaning is in the way they look, the clothes they wear and what they do on screen. That can still be meaningless depending on your sensibility, but for me the movie works even if the story and the acting don't. It appeals to my pseudo-nostalgia for a Swinging Europe that I never knew and may never have actually existed, that I only had hints of from the old magazines I used to collect or read at the library and the rare movies that turned up on local TV on weekend afternoons and evenings in the good old days. It's a place and a time I would've loved to visit, and films like this (and better ones, too) are as close as I'll get. Maybe you'd like to visit, too....
And here's a trailer, uploaded to YouTube by thisoydmon. I should perhaps be more critical of the dubbing, but my memory of Spirited Killer is too fresh for me to be judgmental toward anything else.