Johnny Showtimes: Jess Franco Double Feature

 by JB

The two films we discuss today are like opposite sides of the same coin. But it's a coin that inexplicably features naked ladies on both sides.

NOTE: The following originally appeared on the F This Movie website over ten years ago as one of my “Overlook” columns. The slightly amended column appears below to celebrate Junespoitation’s “Jess Franco Day.”

The Severin video label released two of Spanish wunderkind/ annoying pornographic hack Jesus "Jess" Franco's most famous films on special edition Blu-rays. Both are packed with bonus features and transfers that are nothing short of stunning. Unfortunately, these are the only things the two discs have in common.

Vampyros Lesbos, Franco's 1971 signature film, is unwatchable: a pointless, leering, distaff retelling of Bram Stoker's Dracula, which, coincidentally, Franco had just filmed in 1969 with Christopher Lee in the title role. She Killed in Ecstasy, Franco's follow-up film, features virtually the same cast and crew and its filming overlapped with that of Vampyros Lesbos. Yet She Killed in Ecstasy is very, very interesting: I love its utter weirdness, and I recommend it to my readers. The Blu-ray of She Killed In Ecstasy also contains a bonus CD containing the soundtrack music from both films—think Austin Powers being channeled by a band that only scores slasher films.

“Yeah, baby-- DIE.”

Both films feature Soledad Miranda in the lead role, and these are the roles with which she is most associated. Miranda died in a tragic car accident directly following her sixth Franco film, The Devil Came From Akasava; she was only 27 and did not live long enough to see her final films released. Look, I recognize that there is a bit of a James Dean thing going on here for her fans. She was beautiful and she died too young, so these films have become more than films; they are shrines of a sort, still-living totems to her memory. But that doesn't mean they're both good.

In the inaugural issue of Tim Lucas's Video Watchdog, he published a long essay entitled "How To Read A Franco Film," acknowledging that ol' Jess's films were not the types of movies to which most people were accustomed. From what I remember, Lucas made the case that Franco's films have zero interest in traditional narrative; they're more like dreams—which means, of course, that anyone can make one and they often turn into nightmares.

ANNOYING AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PAUSE: Though I cannot easily access that issue of Video Watchdog—it's buried in an unlabelled banker's box somewhere in my office closet—rest assured that I still have it. I bought Issue #1 on one of my first forays out of the house after my son was born. I've been reading Lucas's terrific magazine ever since. Video Watchdog just published its 176th issue; my son just turned 25.

UPDATE: When I moved to California three years ago, I sold all of my issues of Video Watchdog (all 184 of them; they filled two banker’s boxes and cost a fortune to ship.) on the eBay machine to some lucky fellow. There are some days when I wish I had them back.

BACK TO OUR STORY ALREADY IN PROGRESS: I deliberately watched both Vampyros Lesbos and She Killed in Ecstasy the same evening so that I could: 1) completely immerse myself in the Franco-verse, if you will; and 2) delight in the fact that now, after all my end-of-semester AP tests have been administered, I could spend an entire evening enjoying obscure foreign horror movies. King of the castle!

UPDATE: I retired from teaching eight years ago and no longer have to prepare lessons, teach classes, grade papers, or keep to a schedule that is compatible with “It’s a school night.” Yipee.

THE FIRST PLOT IN BRIEF: Vampyros Lesbos begins with Linda (Ewa Strömberg) witnessing a strange nightclub routine featuring a half-clothed Countess Carody (Soledad Miranda) making love to a mirror, a mannequin, and a blonde woman in a mirror pretending to be a mannequin. Try as she might, Linda cannot get the image of Countess Carody out of her head. She dreams that the Countess summons her to a mysterious island.

Though local hotel clerk Memmet (Jess Franco) warns her not to go to the island, Linda ignores this warning, goes skinny-dipping with the Countess, and quickly becomes her WILLING THRALL. Morpho (José Martínez Blanco) seems to be the Countess's servant and does all of her dirty work for her, which most of the time seems to involve merely showing up places and looking menacing.

Can Dr. Seward (Dennis Price) and Linda's boyfriend Omar (Andrea Montchal) stop Countess Carody from turning Linda into the undead? Can they stop this film from turning into a tedious, low-budget, nude retread of Dracula?

The main reason Vampyros Lesbos is unwatchable is Jess Franco's filming style, which I would describe as TILT/PAN/ZOOM. He simply cannot leave the camera alone. Far from suggesting anything through camera and lens movement, this interminable fiddling gives the impression that we are dealing with an inexperienced director suffering from a pathological urge to reframe shots while they're happening. It resembles a harried 1970s father over-using the zoom lens while making on-the-fly Super 8mm home movies. The zoom thing in particular occurs in almost every shot. It became so annoying that halfway through the film, I began to shout, "STOP IT! and "LEAVE IT ALONE! and "DON’T TOUCH IT!" and "JUST KEEP YOUR GODDAMNED HANDS OFF THE GODDAMN FUCKING CAMERA!” It was that nauseating.

Good thing I was alone, and all the windows were closed.

The second reason the film is frustrating is its snail's pace. This is one of the slowest films I have seen in a long time. The pace seems deliberate, as if designed to convey SOMETHING VERY IMPORTANT, but that never happens. The sluggish pace merely makes the film feel vaguely pretentious.

Maybe one problem is that, in his heart of hearts, Jess Franco really just wants to make pornography, but was prevented from doing so by the mores of the time and the marketplace. Vampyros Lesbos features oodles of nudity for nudity's sake (N’OODLETY?) but the nudity is mere padding—it adds nothing to the narrative, and so the audience is simply invited to leer, for what often seems like interminable lengths of time, at naked breasts and naked asses.

Perhaps fourteen-year-old boys find this compelling. I do not. The opening nightclub act seems to occupy a full twenty minutes of screen time. The Countess's later seduction of Linda, with its sub-Cinemax titillation and intrigue, seems to occupy another twenty. That adds up to forty minutes in a film that's only 82 minutes long. Gee.

THE SECOND PLOT IN BRIEF: She Killed in Ecstasy tells the story of Mrs. Johnson (Soledad Miranda), who loves her new husband Dr. Johnson (Fred Williams). They are as happy as happy can be. Dr. Johnson's research focuses on longevity and using fetal tissue to prolong the lives of the elderly; a medical committee (Howard Vernon, Jess Franco, and Ewa Strömberg) disapproves of this and has him disbarred. Dr. Johnson's despair leads to his suicide. Mrs. Johnson plots to seduce and then kill the members of the committee in colorful, imaginative ways.

Not only is She Killed in Ecstasy better paced than Vampyros Lesbos, but there is also more of a proper narrative. Vampyros Lesbos seems to be a turgid but perfunctory skin-flick version of Dracudyke; but She Killed in Ecstasy is chockfull of strange and interesting things. At its best, it resembles a somewhat brighter and happier David Lynch film. When is the last time any of us can remember an opening titles sequence featuring fully-formed fetuses floating in glass jars? What was the last film to feature "death by beach ball?" How many revenge films feature the protagonist and her lover together in bed... after he's dead? Okay, Franco, NOW you've got my attention!

The nudity here is also intrinsic to the plot, both to show both the young couple's passionate, happy marriage and the vehicle by which our murderous protagonist gains her victims' trust. In seducing her victims, Mrs. Johnson also learns personal and damning things about them. One of her victims is played by the film's director, so the film can provide us with a heaping helping of twentieth century post-modernism: "Oh, look, she's killing the director—she said that HE JUST COULDN’T KEEP HIS HANDS OFF THE GODDAMN ZOOM."

My recommendation is to purchase She Killed in Ecstasy. (Remember, you also get the cool CD of crazy, late-1960s psychedelic lounge/murder music.) Do not buy Vampyros Lesbos under any circumstances. Instead, send that money to us. We do have a Patreon, you know.