1970s Spanish Horror Part Fifteen

CUADECUC, VAMPI

(1970)

Dir - Pere Portabella

Overall: GOOD

 

The second full-length from experimental filmmaker Pere Portabella, Cuadecuc, vampir utilized the bizarre yet ingenious idea to take footage from the making of Jesús Franco's Count Dracula and turn it into an avant-garde, black and white silent film that is eons more atmospheric and engaging.  It hardly takes any effort to one-up a Franco movie, but even though the narrative follows the same linear time frame that is based off of Bram Stoker's novel, the approach here goes one further than simply telling a straight-ahead story or providing a behind the scenes exposé.  Composed of fly-on-the-wall material that captures the cast and crew goofing around on set mixed with shots done from alternate angles than what Franco used, the exceptional, ambient, and often industrial sound design would fit right at home with David Lynch's Eraserhead.  At other times the soundtrack cuts out entirely or utilizes a couple of seconds of conventional music, but it is always jarringly juxtaposed with sounds or silence that create an endlessly unsettling, tension-fueled tone.  Worth checking out for such mood-setting as well as its singular, genre-defying approach, it stands as one of the most surreal Dracula movies ever made.

 

BEYOND EROTICA

(1974)

Dir - José María Forqué

Overall: MEH

 

An unpleasant, lackadaisical thriller, Beyond Erotica, (No es nada, mamá, sólo un juego, It's Nothing Mama, Just a Game, Lola), plays the exploitation game in a more sincere manner than most, focusing on vile people doing vile things with no nods or winks towards the audience.  That is to say that it is a plantation drama that clearly demonstrates how the indigenous working class are tormented and exploited by wealthy foreigners, and it does this bluntly and humorlessly which is fitting for the ugly material.  David Hemmings plays the sexually depraved, sadistic, and spoiled son of a family whose financial power goes unchecked by the village that they inhabit, with his mother Alida Valli creating a nurturing atmosphere for his perversities.  Elements of incest, back-stabbing, and Stockholm syndrome play into things as well and everything ends on the most cynical of manners where the abused become the abusers and all parties on screen are unrepentantly villainous.  Hemmings is effectively odious, Vallis is pathetically disturbed, and Andrea Rau makes for an alluring victim who turns the tides in her favor.  Throw in some animal cruelty, rape, people hunting people, and Rau getting fed a sandwich full of worms and you have yourself a nasty affair.

BILBAO

(1978)

Dir - Bigas Luna

Overall: MEH

For his grisly debut Bilbao, Catalan filmmaker Bigas Luna showcases the coldly deranged mind of a pervert with OCD for over ninety minutes, basking in the kind of unflinching exploitation allowed in a post-Franco regimented Spain.  The director's penchant for mixing food with eroticism is grossly on display as Àngel Jové narrates his obsession with a prostitute while pouring milk over his much older wife's body and stuffing sausages in the mouths of fish.  As an examination of severe mental illness where detached depravity has completely consumed a miserable individual, the stark presentation goes a long way.  Nearly the only dialog is Jové's inner monologue which means that long bouts of silence and the same two or three pieces of music make for a punishingly repetitive slog of a watch, a watch which is as boring as it is ugly.  The cinematography is persistently poor and perhaps purposely so as there are entire sections shot in almost total darkness where it is impossible to decipher what is even happening when Jové's loathsome character is not cluing us in.  It all leads to an icky yet inevitable abduction climax and scene where Isabel Pisano's title character has her public hair shaved for what seems like seven hours.  It is fascinating in its intimacy and unapologetic grime at least to a point, but it also overstays its welcome and leaves the worst kind of sour taste in one's mouth, again no doubt deliberately.

1980s Jesús Franco

OASIS OF THE ZOMBIES
(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.

MANSION OF THE LIVING DEAD
(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.

FACELESS
(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. 

1970s Jesús Franco Part Three

EUGENIE...THE STORY OF HER JOURNEY INTO PERVERSION
(1970)
Overall: MEH

Fittingly adapting the work of Marquis de Sade at the very turn of the 60s into the 70s when such hedonistic subject matter and perverse sexuality was fortifying itself in much of European cinema, Jess Franco's Eugenie...the Story of Her Journey Into Perversion, (Eugenie de Sade, De Sade 2000, Eugenie de Franval, Eugenie Sex Happening, Eugenia, or just Eugenie), was the second such de Sade title that he brought to the screen.  The first was the previous year's Marquis de Sade: Justine, also with Maria Rohm as well as Jack Palance of all blokes.  This was also the last collaboration between the Spanish filmmaker and Christopher Lee, the latter of whom apparently became appalled the the finished product was shown exclusively in London's "blue" district, essentially meaning porn theaters.  Of course watching it particularly by today's standards, it hardly qualifies as pornographic and if anything, the overt sadism in de Sade's original text is quite toned down.  In that regard, the movie rather poorly conveys its subject matter, being the complete corruption of an innocent girl, (who in the novel was anything but innocent from the get-go), as her ultimate, evil about-face comes off kind of sudden and sloppy.  Though it is photographed better than most Franco productions, there are the usual problems of drab pacing, unsuitable music, and ultimately rather yawn-inducing sex scenes that take up lots of screen time.

THE DEMONS
(1973)
Overall: MEH

The early 70s were ripe with nunsploitation and witch trial films so rather hot off the tails of Ken Russell's The Devil's comes Jess Franco's non-union, French/Portugal equivalent The Demons.  The story could not be more predictable considering the source material and being both written and directed by Franco, it is a pretty preposterous story at that.  Women get accused of being witches and then forgotten about, they fall head over heals in love with multiple men at a time, and everyone is so sexually repressed that all of their on-again/off-again morals come off as impossibly messy.  This latter element may be somewhat of the point, but it still makes for an unintentionally goofy presentation where it seems more important to make everyone be whatever cliche is necessary at that particular time than anything else.  Also typical of a Franco film, the nudity, (which there is a consistent stream of), provides one of the most boring parts with more women kissing and fondling each other's rare ends when they are not writhing around on a bed and moaning.  To say that these frequent moments get in the way of the plot is not really that fair since such exploitative, skin-exposed nonsense is as much if not more so the selling point as anything.  Still, Franco knocks out a quick, easy cash-in here as he was beyond competently able to do during his prime.

LORNA THE EXORCIST
(1974)
Overall: MEH

Teetering heavily on the verge of being legitimate pornography, Lorna the Exorcist, (Les possédées du diable), was Jesús Franco's sleazy, exploitative version of Faust more or less, with the "Exorcist" tag being thrown in there merely as a typical European cash-grab to bank off of William Friedkin's mega-huge The Exorcist released the previous year.  The sex scenes are mostly as dull as ever for a Franco film, but the mere abundance of them, the heavily padded plot, (including a long flashback sequence that relays the exact same information that was just painstakingly explained to us via exposition in the scene before), and that fact that at least the women here are actually having sex on screen with full genitalia and all, certainly qualifies it as more than simply an erotic horror movie.  Franco spices it up a little bit by going full-tilt into the bizarre though.  There is incest between Lina Romay and more than one of her parents, including her "mother" feeding her her breasts while calling her her sweet daughter.  Then she does things with a dildo as well as monthly bodily fluids that no one let alone a parent should be doing to anyone let alone their kin.  Another memorably ridiculous moment involving real life crabs takes place on a part of a woman's body that you can easily predict.  Elsewhere, Franco is still hardly much a story teller and it is technically another hodgepodge of tons of zooms, uninspired cinematography, and tedious music, just with more uncomfortable sexuality than one would prefer.

1960s British Horror Part Five - Fu Manchu Series

THE FACE OF FU MANCHU
(1965)
Dir - Don Sharp
Overall: MEH

Ignoring the ever present whitewashing that many films in typically Anglo Saxon countries produced during this time, (only one actual Asian speaking main character is actually Asian here), The Face of Fu Manchu has Christopher Lee as the fictitious, evil criminal mastermind and because it is Christopher Lee, it is therefor certainly watchable.  Thankfully, the legendary actor had enough class and good sense to not put on a fake Chinese accent to go along with the fake Chinese makeup, (though he would unfortunately hint more at that in later installments), but his title character is written as generically boring as they get despite how competently Lee portrays him.  The plot is so simple that much of the action seems forced and barely warrants much more than a complacent shrug from the audience.  The general lack of creativity in the script department unfortunately permeates the whole, which throws in a lot of drawn-out fist fights to make the film appear more exciting than it is, with said fist fights being just as lackluster as anything else transpiring.  Four more films immediately followed this one, (each one emerging a year apart as to effectively wear-out the franchise), but unfortunately things were already off to a very mediocre start to begin with here.

THE BRIDES OF FU MANCHU
(1966)
Dir - Don Sharp
Overall: MEH

Once again Fu Manchu is up to his old tricks which in installment two is already starting to wear thin.  Handled again by one of Hammer's second tier directors Don Sharp, (The Kiss of the Vampire, Rasputin, the Mad Monk), this would be Sharp's last in the Fu Manchu series before he was replaced by Jeremy Summers the next go-round.  The role of Scottland Yard detective/Fu Manchu's arch enemy Nayland Smith was switched from Nigel Green to Douglas Wilmer, but besides that, The Brides of Fu Manchu is an almost identical run-through as the previous year's Face of.  Daughters of prominent scientists and political figures, (who all seem to conveniently be around their mid twenties and attractive), are gathered up by the Asian-by-way-of-Christopher-Lee tyrant to use as leverage to get his next doomsday weapon operational.  He thwarts the authorities hunting him every step of the way through the exact same means, (misleading them with disguises, red herrings, and announcing dates and locations of his attacks by way of the airwaves), until he does not anymore, then getting his headquarters blown up only to have him ominously threaten in voice-over that he will of course be back to fight another day.  Lee gets a little more screen time and we pretty much jump right into him back in action with no set up, but the retreaded story elements are so precise that it barely if all all warrants its existence in the first place.

THE VENGEANCE OF FU MANCHU
(1967)
Dir - Jeremy Summers
Overall: MEH

Switching directors with Jeremy Summers, (House of 1,000 Dolls), for round three in the Constantin Film produced Fu Manchu series, thankfully the villainous, title-character overlord at last changes up his world domination scheme.  Though he still cannot help but to kidnap somebody's daughter and torture them to get what he wants.  The man has an itch he seems incapable of not scratching.  The Vengeance of Fu Manchu is appropriately titled as the story focuses near exclusively on the would-be undoing of his arch enemy Nayland Smith, which up until a point is showcased somewhat interestingly.  We are given a rather large thematic-leap pill to swallow for the plot to gain momentum, but this is forgivable as the pace is kept up even though most of the action set pieces yet again seem to be padded on to fatten the fist fight quota.  There are also some very unmemorable side characters with rushed-to-non-existent backstories, two entirely pointless musical segments, and everything is more clumsy than clever in that Smith's at-long-last capture is depicted entirely off-screen.  The biggest flub though is in the ending which appears to have been improvised after they forgot to write one.  At this point it is assuredly laughable that no one ever bothers to check the recently blown-up remains of Fu Manchu's hideout to see if he is actually dead, instead just continually shrugging and literally proclaiming that they will probably hear from him again.  With two more sequels on the way, their very predictable prediction would prove correct.

THE BLOOD OF FU MANCHU
(1968)
Dir - Jesús Franco
Overall: WOOF

Well, bringing Jess Franco on board to helm the fourth Fu Manchu excursion noticeably changes a few aspects, none of which in a good way.  The first three films in the franchise being relatively competent if somewhat lifeless in many parts, The Blood of Fu Manchu is the first one to aggressively insult the viewer's intelligence.  To pit all of the blame on Franco would probably be unfair as most of the observable directorial choices he makes are innocent enough quirky camera angles, zooms, and more nudity and sadism than was previously on display.  Yet he also very jarringly inserted footage from another movie, (The Girl from Rio), and somebody somewhere made some dubious editing choices.  Lady Manchu Lin Tang, (Tsai Chin), now has randomly generic Eastern mystic powers for the first and only time, (for one scene), and has a brief moment of her cackling on her throne, which is also out of character.  The schlock level is jacked-up elsewhere as well with the worst character in the series, (some fat bandit pendejo called Sancho Lopez), getting way too much screen time and Dr. Petrie badly attempting comic relief about how cold his tea is getting while he is suffering in a dungeon.  It is the plot though that takes the most jabs at our intellect as Fu Manchu gets a bunch of kidnapped girls, (yes, more of that), to get bitten by a snake and then sends them all over the world to kiss and poison his enemies which will miraculously kill all of them at the exact same moment six weeks later when the moon is full.  When the heroes dash in at the last minute to save the day, do they unleash a stream of bullets anywhere near Manchu or his daughter who are just standing there watching?  Why would they do that when they can instead easily pick off all his no-name henchmen and for the forth straight time blow up his hideout and admit that he is probably going to return again later.  As Mr. Charles Brown would say, "Good grief".

THE CASTLE OF FU MANCHU
(1969)
Dir - Jesús Franco
Overall: WOOF

Well the "movie" that finally brought the Fu Manchu franchise to a mercy killing end is powerfully awful enough to have had the potential to end everyone's career involved, let alone the titular villain's fictional legacy.  After watching it, one can be at a complete understanding as to why it caused the cast of MST3K to break down into tears of agony.  Right out of the gate, the signs are pointing towards doom as footage from two different movies, (the earlier The Brides of Fu Manchu and inexplicably the Titanic film A Night to Remember), are spliced together to make up the opening scene.  In fact nearly all of the effect shots are taken from stock footage and other films, (including a moment where a dam gets demolished for absolutely no plot-worthy reason).  So there are assuredly budget problems here.  Things get increasingly muddled to the point of incomprehensibility and also wearisome as the running time clocks down, making the majority of The Castle of Fu Manchu the kind of bad cinema that is more boring than funny.  For a few moments sprinkled throughout and certainly all of the last twenty minutes though,  the bets are all off.  Characters easily escape as Fu Manchu watches them escape, characters whose names we do not even remember fall in love with absolutely no build up, a woman drowns in waste high water, a prisoner is declared to have no further use only to have further use in the next scene, a doctor easily bests several trained guards at unarmed combat, a scientist who can speak just fine is given a heart transplant in order to continue to speak just fine and when he is asked again to divulge a secret formula and simply says "no", Fu Mahchu gets it anyway on a piece of paper that someone nonchalantly hands him, and well, this will go on for about another thousand words if we are to list everything atrociously wrong here.

1970s Jesús Franco Part Two

THE BLOODY JUDGE
(1970)
Overall: MEH

So many witch-burning films.  Jesús Franco sensationalized re-telling of the later days of Judge George Jeffreys in The Bloody Judge, (Proceso de las Brujas, Night of the Blood Monster), could afford to be a little more sensational.  For starters, it contains probably the least exciting battle sequence ever filmed, mostly because it plays more like stock footage with just an endless see of horses, canons, and soldiers that have no names doing the whole war thing over dramatic marching music.  That is just one relatively minor and somewhat amusing blunder though.  Christopher Lee is very Christopher Leey as the stereotypical, ruthless Judge who coldly condemns every accused witch he comes across, of course has his own hypocritically lustful intentions, and gets his comeuppance at the end.  Though his preordained demise is anything but satisfying as he just kind of randomly faints to death after witnessing someone else get what is heading his way.  Even Franco's nearly mandated nudity/violence quota is also noticeably diminished.  The only really surprising element to the sub-genre here is that he forgoes abundant scenes of eye-wincing, dungeon-set torture.  We get a few of those, but really, (for a Franco film in particular), it is "disappointing" to instead spend extensive amounts of screen time talking politics, alliances, betrayals, and watching villainous brutes calling women "whores", "bitches", "wenches" and then smacking them around.

COUNT DRACULA
(1970)
Overall: MEH

On paper, this Dracula adaptation from Jesús Franco should work better than it does.  It has both Christopher Lee once again in the lead that he had already long made famous for Hammer Studios AND has Klaus Kinski ideally cast as Renfield a mere nine years before he would play the Count himself in Werner Herzog's Nosferatu remake.  Though the concept of vampires, a Gothic setting, and sexual overtones all seem ideal for such a filmmaker to take on, the results in Count Dracula are far from satisfying.  First off, Kinski is absolutely wasted as the would-be ranting and raving lunatic Renfield.  He instead spends all of his handful of scenes staring off into space and only utters a single word of dialog.  For his part, Lee gets to indulge in a rather faithful to the novel speech proclaiming his zealous, ancestral pride, but otherwise he is comparably dull when compared to even his phoned-in, later Hammer Dracula sequel performances.  He is off camera for large chunks of time and when he does show up, he pretty much just stares menacingly for a few seconds.  If you were expecting nudity at every opportunity, there is absolutely zero to be found.  Do not worry though, there is gallons of zooms, not even trying day for night sequences, and plenty of "people walking around" scenes.  The screenplay was credited to no fewer than seven people and it certainly reeks of having too many cooks in the kitchen.  Once the first relatively straight forward act is over, the movie waddles off at a snails pace and seems to lose all focus by the finale, the last twenty minutes or so coming off as if they were shooting it chronologically and were running out of film stock and money.

THE BARE BREASTED COUNTESS
(1975)
Overall: WOOF

There are pointless, meandering, and suffocatingly boring vampire films and then there is The Bare Breasted Countess, (Female Vampire, various others).  Three different versions under even more titles exist, (a "normal" horror one, a softcore erotic one, and a still soft yet more genitalia revealing pornographic one), but you would be very hard pressed to find any of them comprehensible let alone entertaining.  Franco's indulgences of combining the absolute bare, (har, har), minimum storytelling with tedious, uninteresting shots of people moving as slow as humanly possible through random terrains finds its apex here.  Other directors such as Jean Rollin come to mind in utilizing similar ingredients to their bizarre, seductive works, but Franco's images are so vapid that combined with the almost unwatchable pacing, the film is a mindless headache.  Lead actress/Fraco's eventual wife Lina Romay plays a mute whose only actions are to look into the camera, nod her head a few times, and thrust her body on anyone and anything that she comes in contact with.  Meanwhile there is a sort-of subplot with some doctors and inspectors not-really-at-all investigating her murders and Jack Taylor narrates a bunch of nonsense that until about halfway through the film leads us to believe that his scenes were taken from a completely different movie.  Franco seems to be intentionally dreaming up something artistically important here as he compared the film to Nagisa Oshima's far superior In the Realm of the Senses, but sadly this is just an amateurish mess that cannot honestly be enjoyed on any level.

1970s Jesús Franco Part One

VAMPYROS LESBOS
(1970)
Overall: MEH

The praise granted to the music for Jesús Franco's seminal lesbian vampire film aptly titled Vampyros Lesbos, (Las Vampiras), is all levels of baffling.  Euro-horror in particular, (amongst its many traits), had a tradition of randomly inappropriate film scores and this one "delivers" in that category, nearly exceeding all others.  Only a few mere seconds at a time are the only breaks we get from the sitar-laced, psychedelic garage band score that is upbeat and jaunty at mostly arbitrary times.  It never once enhances any kind of disturbing or eerie mood and is consistently obnoxious and ill-fitting.  Considering that the music was co-written by Franco himself and was certainly not a misplaced afterthought, this leads one to conclude that it was knowingly meant to convey some kind of tone.  As a "horror" experience, the movie is unacceptable, meaning that it is more akin to the type of ethereal exploitation that Franco helped expose to a wider audience here.  Yet with the script being awful even for a Franco film and the direction bordering on inept, (with sluggish pacing, enormous plot holes, and haphazard editing), it is certainly avant, but more in a laughable, inadvertent way.  There are a select few almost memorable moments though and the completely wooden performances do in fact give it a successfully surreal quality of sorts.

A VIRGIN AMONG THE LIVING DEAD
(1973)
Overall: MEH

Infamously butchered with added pornographic scenes upon its release in France and Italy and then re-edited again with totally unrelated zombie footage shot by a hired Jean Rollin in 1981, A Virgin Among the Living Dead, (A comme apocalypse, Among the Living Dead, Christina chez les morts vivants, Christina, princesse de l'erotisme, Christina, Sex Princess, La nuit des etoiles filantes, Los suenos eroticos de Christine, and Zombie 4), is one of the filmmaker's very rare consistent offerings.  Well, at least in its original, Jesús Franco-cut, unmangled form.  Many hallmarks of Franco and Euro exploitation cinema in general are a plenty, with liberal amounts of nudity, a completely logic-defying script, terrible dubbing, bizarre performances, and tedious pacing.  Yet for once, all of these pieces seem to concoct a satisfyingly odd endeavor.  What barely qualifies as a "plot" is certainly confused, but it creates such an offbeat result that it becomes more interesting than boring as it goes along.  Rarely as well, the ending is downplayed in a very somber and bewitching way and provides the film with one of its strongest moments.  Often times in Euro-trash, (particularly Franco's generally embarrassing brand of it), dreamlike storytelling is fighting such an uphill battle that it is basically a wild dice roll if any of it ends up working.  This film occasional rides that fine line of tipping into inanity, but whether it rides it luckily or not, the outcome thankfully attains its goal.

JACK THE RIPPER
(1976)
Overall: MEH

Overtly gruesome in a few instances of course, Jesús Franco's West Germany/Swiss co-produced Jack the Ripper, (Der Dirnenmörder von London), seems to have the ideal casting choice in the title character, with Klaus Kinski in a roll he was practically born for.  Portraying very unnerved men who were brimming with inhuman amounts of rage just under their unwholesomely quiet and restrained demeanor was something that came all too natural to the German actor and he barely comes off as acting here.  That said, one certainly would not go as far as to expect him to rape women and cut their tits off right afterwards in real life.  Franco maintains his usual emphasis on nudity and vulgarity, that latter aspect of which provides the film with some crass humor at parts.  There is nothing particularly erotic here, but this seems to be intended as its unwholesome, sexual murder elements are meant to be repugnant.  Whereas the burlesque moments in front of cackling Brits all brimful of ale are equal parts exploitative, though relatively harmless.  Besides pacing issues which are to be expected, the unfortunate final act really falls apart in the logic department with a woman willingly putting herself in harms way, followed by easily one of the least satisfying endings that any slasher horror movie has ever had.  So it is ultimately a bit of a missed opportunity save Kinski's effortlessly spot-on performance.

1960s Jesús Franco

THE AWFUL DR. ORLOFF
(1961)
Overall:  MEH

Historically important for basically being the first Spanish horror film and it does have one or two creepy moments, but The Awful Dr. Orloff, (Gritos en la noche, Screams in the Night), is really nothing more than a sub-par homage/rip-off of the much lauded Eyes Without a Face.  While this one may have its cult following as its director Jesús Franco surely does, it also pales in comparison to the film whose footsteps it is clearly trying to follow in.  For one, our male hero played by Conrado San Martin makes one of the most mind-numbingly idiotic yet convenient for the plot decisions near the finale that both reeks of cheapness and inept screenwriting.  There is also a throw-away scene at the same moment where he and his partner, (who have been desperately trying to catch the man responsible for kidnapping and murdering so many women), both have a hysterical young girl run up to them in the street saying she was chased by a lunatic with a knife to which the inspector's logical response of course is to say "Ah get outta here will ya.  This whole town's gone crazy."  Besides the stupidity, the film is your standard, "mad doctor kidnaps girls for experiments" stuff where we are just waiting for the inevitable moment where his mute and deformed assistant with a heart of gold turns on him, the main female protagonist outsmarts him, and the hero male comes dashing in.

THE DIABOLICAL DR. Z
(1965)
Overall: MEH

Yet another evil doctor titled horror outing from Jesús Franco emerged in The Diabolical Dr. Z, (Miss Muerte, Dans les griffes du maniaque).  The opening is a bit rough with Antonio Jiménez Escribano appearing as what a five year old would draw if you asked them what a mad scientist looks like, (huge goggles, crazy Gene Wilder white hair, wheelchair, etc).  He rushes into a room full of scientist having some sort of meeting and proceeds to not only get scoffed and threatened for spouting his "crazy but of course correct" theories of good and evil being curable, but he also dies from all the stress right then and there which is pure silliness.  After that though, things become far more interesting and Franco executes them very well.  Mabel Karr is a formidable evil female lead as Doctor Zimmer's deranged daughter and it is a pleasant "twist" to have her be the actual title character.  We even have a surprisingly exciting man-on-man fight to the death near the end, surprising because it is not the ole "one punch to knock em out" stuff.  Estilla Blain is also excellent as the sultry-dancer come unwilling living instrument of revenge.  There are more goofs in the form of several plot points that are just too advantageous to be convincing, but it all remains compelling enough to ultimately work.

SUCCUBUS
(1968)
Overall: WOOF

Succubus, (Necronomicon - Geträumte Sünden), is the first movie that Jesús Franco made outside of his native Spain, at last fully fed-up with said country's strict censorship laws.  A curiosity then in that respect and ripe with many of the elements that Franco would continue to explore throughout the following decade, namely naked women and gore, though the latter is very tame this go around.  It is also an incredibly difficult film to follow.  The opening scene is well executed enough and tips us off appropriately that all is not what it seems, but once the foggy-lensed dream sequences take over for seemingly the rest of the durration, it becomes an unfollowable mess.  Lead Janine Reynaud floats around one setting to another, has interactions with numerous people who call her different names and may or may not have previously known her, there is some guy's eyes we keep seeing who is apparently supposed to be Satan, (which you would never guess), there is a castle she maybe lives in, there is a psychiatrist she talks to, the narration changes characters, and then she starts killing people.  Well, or something.  All this would make for a nice, surreal horror outing if not for the undeniable fact that it is so painstakingly sluggish and boring. Sadly, Franco movies are routinely this humdrum so it is hardly an isolated case.