(1982)
Overall: WOOF
Even at his "best", Jesús Franco was a regularly challenged filmmaker. 1982 was no different than any other year for him, with no less than ten films produced, one of the more regularly distributed and seen Oasis of the Zombies, (L'Abîme des Morts-Vivants, The Abyss of the Living Dead), being probably not even the worst of them. Franco filmed a Spanish version alongside the French one, though seeing it dubbed and in the public domain is the most common method these days. As far as what it brings to the man's opposite of a flawless legacy, it is pretty much more of the same. There is gratuitous use of stock footage or what is about as exciting as stock footage, a simple yet disastrous plot, no budget, and nearly every shot results in a zoom. Most of all though, it is jaw-droppingly boring. Three zombie scenes are present, (each spread out about every thirty minutes), and in between them Franco is almost impressively incapable of making anything that is happening even accidentally interesting. Plenty of other lackadaisically-paced horror movies were made in and around the same era that is for sure, but this one offers up so very, very little besides a few somewhat OK looking walking corpses. Actually, more like a few somewhat OK looking STANDING corpses that of course get zoomed in on.
(1982)
Overall: MEH
One of the numerous erotic horror films by Jesús Franco staring his wife and muse Lina Romay, Mansion of the Living Dead, (La mansión de los muertos vivientes), is as frustratingly detrimental as any other one. Filmed on location at a Gran Canaria hotel during the off season, Franco makes surprisingly fantastic use out of the barren setting which should be populated by large numbers of people yet instead seems appropriately haunted and empty. Choosing to use virtually no music besides the occasional chiming of church bells is another excellent detail. Everywhere else though, it is a typically confused effort. Misogynistic to a laughable extent, several women are killed of course, but not before getting raped for lots of minutes, chained up and starved, fed rat poison, made to kill, and eventually married off to either Satan or the lord, it is rather haphazardly conveyed which. The female victims are also all shown as helplessly nymphatic. The last twenty minutes revs up the plot rather ridiculously and you would be right to assume that absolutely nothing adds up once the "Fin" title hits the screen. Scattered around the movie are more of Franco's trademark boring sex scenes which do the best possible job of dragging the occasionally menacing mood to an absolute standstill. When the film is successfully channeling the Blind Dead series and providing a genuinely eerie mood though, it is rather alluring though.
(1988)
Overall: MEH
The last adequately-funded film of Jesús Franco's career was the Spanish/French co-production Faceless that featured English-speaking actors exclusively, most of whom had long become horror genre regulars. Helmut Berger, Telly Savalas, Caroline Munro, Brigitte Lahaie, Anton Diffring, and Howard Vernon were all on board for what is essentially Franco's own remake of his The Awful Dr. Orloff, (with Vernon making a cameo as a character with the same name), which was low-budget bastardization of Eyes Without a Face to begin with. While it is certainly nice to see the director working with a budget well outside of his usual meager means plus with such a recognizable cast, this still ends up being a mostly unintentionally silly affair. Many lines of dialog are preposterous, but the performances only occationally go into full camp, creating somewhat of a tone malfunction where the movie is not as hilarious as it is probably supposed to be. The gore set pieces are nice and gruesome though it is comparatively low on the nudity while still being as sleazy as one would expect. Meanwhile, the ending could be one of the most abrupt and unresolved ever filmed and once again becomes somewhat of a joke in the fact that the title song by Vincenzo Thoma shows up for only about the nine-hundredth time over the end credits.
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