Jess Franco - Classic Halloween Cinema
Reviews by Rogan Marshall
SUCCUBUS - (Necronomicon - Geträumte Sünden, 1968)
Spanish erotic horror maestro Jesus Franco, whose 40-plus-year career and notorious aesthetic eccentricities almost allow him consideration as a one-man genre all his own, has made so many movies, and lately so many increasingly awful movies (when even his best work was never defensible by any “normal” or mainstream standards), that many among you might not even believe he managed a bona fide masterpiece or two, back in the proverbial day.
Franco came out of the gate strong in the early ‘60s, and as his reputation and budgets grew over the remainder of the decade, so did the strengths (and the strangenesses) of his work. He hit a notable peak sometime near 1969, during which year he directed four features; one of them, the nudie vampire milestone VAMPYROS LESBOS, remains his best-known work. VAMPYROS LESBOS is very Gothic, very sexy and fabulous trashy fun; it might be the best first Franco for neophytes, especially horror fans (who by and large won’t find much of what they’re looking for around here). In 1969 Franco also made SUCCUBUS; and though it might not really be a horror movie at all, SUCCUBUS is definitely an eccentric masterpiece.
SUCCUBUS concerns self-styled “erotic love queen” Lorna (Janine Reynaud, who was also one of Franco’s TWO UNDERCOVER ANGELS) almost exclusively; an unfocused backdrop of wealth, beauty and swinging ‘60s fashion, highlighted by a cute little Spanish castle and the mysterious lover who lives in it, only serves to provide an appropriate setting for the jewel that is Ms. Reynaud. Words can’t really describe the erotic energy and star power Reynaud exhibits in SUCCUBUS, but I’ll come back to it in a couple of paragraphs anyway. Lorna’s primary man is a director; she’s his star, and their little stage production, a dead sexy Grand Guignol/BDSM show, provides SUCCUBUS with a striking opening sequence.
After the show, the movie follows Reynaud with an attentive insistence that recalls GIRL ON A MOTORCYCLE and several Roger Vadim pictures, as well as other art films excessively obsessed with a specific female’s mystique; Lorna dances and strips for and flirts with and makes love to various intriguing men, wandering into and out of their beds, as well as a series of surreal dream sequences, which very quickly overwhelm the narrative. By halfway through the movie, reason can only perceive in SUCCUBUS an eroticized acid-inspired pastiche of Polanski’s REPULSION; viewers inclined to cling to a story’s internal “reality” must assume that Lorna is losing her mind, as her dreams and waking experiences become utterly entangled and indistinguishable one from the other, and her sexual escapades spiral toward externalizing this madness in acts of violence which may not be “real,” but do express her subtextual true character.
Like the very few other successful movies of this type, that is to say acid-drenched deconstructed comic surrealism (in this case dressed up as erotic horror), SUCCUBUS is held together by a torrent of wonderful words, endlessly amusing and intellectually stimulating dialogue that flirts with the abstract as often as the actors who deliver it flirt with the actress who’s always a participant. One of Reynaud’s onscreen admirers was played by screenwriter Pier Maria Caminecci, whose script for SUCCUBUS rivals the Beatles and Monkees movies for absurd wit, and the entire body of Eurotrash exploitation, in understanding Sadian eroticism. Caminecci obviously admires Bunuel a great deal; little touches that closely echo the sense for detail of Bunuel’s then-contemporary collaborations with writer Jean-Claude Carriere are sprinkled all over SUCCUBUS like a garnish.
(I won’t go so far as to state assuredly that the reason it’s likely this is Franco’s best movie is Caminecci altogether, but it would be easy to argue. The script is extremely clever, if decidedly eclectic, but writing is usually something Franco doesn’t bother to care about; this may in fact be the only Franco picture with a script that clearly surpasses the merely functional. In an interview among the extras on this Blue Underground DVD, Franco recalls that Caminecci was sometimes intolerable because of his “pretentious airs;” this may be merely a reference to on-set control issues, but I also figure that Franco figures bringing any self-conscious literary quality to a picture is “pretentious,” which, of course, includes any literate screenplay. Franco also mentions that Caminecci was having an affair with Reynaud at the time; that Caminecci showed him the faux Necronomicon which inspired the whole movie in some indirect way Franco doesn’t explain; and Caminecci turned Franco on to Friedrich Gulda, the pianist who provided the brilliant score, which I’ll get to in a minute.)
Back to Reynaud. Even if you’ve seen her elsewhere you just haven’t seen her until you’ve seen SUCCUBUS. An example of how powerful a presence informs this performance: the movie opens on a cute blonde and a pretty-boy man, tied to wooden x-frames, all bloody and disheveled. (This is only a stage show, but we, the real audience, don’t know that yet; Franco doesn’t show us their audience until the end of the scene.) Dressed in black, holding a big wicked knife, Reynaud prowls a slow figure-eight around her victims, considering them carefully, before she moves in. The scene continues with a protracted display of mild sadism, but its dramatic center, the scene’s hottest highest peak, is in that long moment Janine Reynaud takes to look the victims over. There’s a palpable sex magick in it; her posture, her movements, her stunning, wonderfully expressive facial features, during those intense endless seconds, add up to an effect as unusual and striking as 3-D. This unnamable supernormal quality informs Reynaud’s entire performance without let throughout the feature. The deranged acid babble comprising the dialogue returns again and again to the variously approached idea that Lorna is some kind of devil girl, intrinsically sexual, and intrinsically evil; by the time she starts getting violent, it’s hardly a leap to believe this talk and engage completely in this “succubus” conceit.
Franco’s grip on the atmosphere required by acid-damaged castle Gothic is always fierce and fearsome; on SUCCUBUS, it was at its absolute firmest. The typically cool cinematography that foundations Franco’s psychedelic aesthetic is distorted so much and so often that I wonder if half the reason this movie’s not more famous is that there’s no way to master it for videotape without making it look like crap. Good thing that doesn’t matter anymore; this Blue Underground DVD looks great.
(And speaking of looking like crap on videotape, there’s a pile of odd parallels, that I really don’t have room to get into here but can’t help briefly glossing over, between Franco’s SUCCUBUS and Ken Russell’s THE DEVILS. In both cases, a notorious maverick director is for perhaps the only time indulging all his wildest idiosyncrasies to their utmost extreme; in both cases, the material miraculously supports the ideas, and the movie successfully provides the director with a perfect showcase for his peculiar mania. And both movies seem touched by serendipity; like THE DEVILS, SUCCUBUS is perfectly poised in every aspect of its execution to an extent that seems supernatural, considering the apparent rush and buzz surrounding the production. [In 1971, the year he made THE DEVILS, Russell directed three pictures himself, by the way... I’d better just drop it; there’s really not enough room here to get into it.])
The music by Friedrich Gulda is masterful on its own terms; you won’t believe me if you haven’t heard it, but Gulda’s work for SUCCUBUS is a solid contender for best original motion picture score ever. Gulda’s uberadvanced piano playing changes style in kaleidoscopic fashion, sliding into and out of cool jazz, austere baroque, schmaltzy romantic, jaunty ragtime, ominous avant garde, in dizzying but perfectly controlled transitions often as neatly camouflaged as those between scene changes in the visuals they accompany. (It’s amazing how deftly Franco can slide one past you, even when he isn’t resorting to distracting you with long unbroken mesmerizing takes; often in SUCCUBUS I missed how the characters got from one locale to another, even the night I took notes.) Gulda’s piano is intermittently backed by a full orchestra deployed to brighten the colors of the broad stylistic spectrum his composition establishes; it’s as striking and ingenious (and audibly expensive) as the orchestral arrangements on, say, a Gil Evans Miles Davis album. (And just as good, actually, though you who haven’t heard it will start accusing me of wild hyperbole right about here, so I’ll just throw the thought away within these parentheses.)
I mentioned earlier that this is no “horror” movie, and I’ll reiterate, if I haven’t made it explicitly clear, that it not only lacks horror elements almost entirely, but leans hard toward absolute abstraction. And did I reference the blatant acid vibe often enough? (Franco doesn’t mention LSD in his interview; he does say that an unspecified new “creative freedom” allowed him to make this a “psychological” movie, about accurately portraying “paranoia.”) Honestly, the disc might as well come in a package with a couple of hits stapled to it. One side effect of its seriously obviously acid-addled attitude is that SUCCUBUS, despite much proto-Goth darkness and studied sadomasochism, is an extraordinarily gentle and light entry in the Franco canon; it feels more like a comedy than anything else. Maybe even a romantic comedy, depending on your sense of romance; it certainly has a lyrical streak; certainly, it is seductive. I find SUCCUBUS romantic as all hell, but then, I like most Jess Franco movies a great deal, on sort of what you might think of as a romantic level. There are even a few Franco movies that I’ve loved, and loved intimately. But though it’s too soon to say for sure—I’ve only seen 20 or 30 Franco pictures, which represents a mere fraction of his output—I think I might love SUCCUBUS the best.
TWO UNDERCOVER ANGELS - (El Caso de Las Dos Bellezas, 1969)
KISS ME, MONSTER - (Küß Mich, Monster, 1969)
To explain why a movie is worth seeing when it’s good is a difficult enough task; when the movie one wants to recommend is actually awful, the problem is compounded. Such is my dilemma, facing the wonderfully welcome (at my house) two-disc special edition of Jess Franco’s TWO UNDERCOVER ANGELS accompanied by its sequel KISS ME MONSTER. (The two pictures were made simultaneously, and their running times are so brief and their content so similar, that it’s unprofitable to consider them separately, even when they don’t arrive in the same box.) (When one does consider them separately, one finds the second movie marginally weaker; it’s slower, and quieter. Normally, when one isn’t watching them back-to-back and taking notes, it’s hard to distinguish between them at all, especially considering that TWO UNDERCOVER ANGELS has a werewolfy guy in it who ravishes girls, while KISS ME MONSTER doesn’t have anything of the kind... I’ve been wondering what that means, or how it happened, for almost 10 years now.) Made before Franco settled into the pattern of producing uniform horror-tinged fetish videos that has fortunately or not characterized most of his career, TWO UNDERCOVER ANGELS is an odd ungainly attempt at frothy fluffy fun, that succeeds as such on a campier level than one can quite believe is entirely intentional. Two gorgeous women, a smart redhead (Janine SUCCUBUS Reynaud) and a ditzy blonde (Rosanna Yanni), are professional spies or detectives of some sort... You know, I’ve seen both movies several times, and I’m still not exactly sure what kind of an outfit “Red Lips” (their code name) is supposed to be, which just goes to show exactly how confusing these movies are. I think—I’m not sure—but I think they’re detectives.
Anyway, at the beginning of the first movie they’re trying to find a missing girl, and the only clue is a painting for which the girl obviously modeled after her disappearance. (The wonderful art is a highlight of the movie and one of the reasons TWO UNDERCOVER ANGELS is better than KISS ME MONSTER; I can’t find a credit anywhere, but the paintings are either Esteban Maroto or someone closely imitating him). The gallery owner tells Reynaud the secretive artist won’t sell, so she steals the painting, and then she and her partner track down the artist. After that, well, um... The story, right, I was trying to tell you about the story... And the second movie has a whole separate story all its own... Um...
I must admit, my notes don’t make any more sense than the movies seemed to, at the time. Allow me to retreat to generalizations: these pictures these days play like a low-budget attempt to crossbreed the ‘60s BATMAN show and the ‘70s CHARLIE’S ANGELS, resulting in something like a female duo AUSTIN POWERS, with a heavy hint of sexploitatative Gothic horror thrown in, like the partially buried flavor of basil in a good red sauce. (You’re right: the movies I’m describing have indeed become oddly fashionable, fresh and flavorful of late; a whole new audience that hasn’t discovered them yet will love them, and this new special edition DVD strikes me as finely timed.)
Elements that don’t work the way Franco seems to have intended them to work nonetheless: for instance, bad scripted comedy, then poorly dubbed, becomes an ongoing exercise in making an audience laugh on all the planned occasions for all the wrong reasons. It’s really impressive in a unique, bizarre and awful kind of way, and also really hard to explain, except by example: in one scene, Reynaud watches a man open the front door of her apartment and walk up to her in the middle of the room—then demands angrily of him, “How did you get in here?” Another line that always makes me giggle: someone hitting on the blonde rambles at length about himself; she responds, “I find that very interesting. Explain it to me a little bit closer.” In another scene, the evil eye-patched artist, at a restaurant on a first date with a brunette victim-to-be, orders champagne; she says to him, just like this: “I love champagne. You know I’m part French, and I’d like to be alone with you.” If you set unanswerable questions of intent entirely aside, the dialogue is consistently funny, and sometimes sublimely surreal.
In any case, gorgeous women in sexy costumes who intermittently undress or get tied up and lightly whipped, in between running around pretty locations making like a pair of low-rent James Bondettes and tying up all the other characters and smacking them around, is an equation that always resolves out to straight giggles and grins, for almost any audience; as Franco says in the new special edition interview (quoting Max Ophuls of all people!), “cinema is watching beautiful women do beautiful things.” Like I said, it’s hard to explain why a movie is watchable when it’s good; it’s exponentially harder to explain its appeal when it’s lousy. And this is the problem when considering my hero Jess Franco. To dismiss him and reduce him with phrases like the unforgettable “genius without talent” that some clever critic (accurately) applied to Ed Wood is unacceptable; it’s quite clear even within his films, but more so in interviews, that Franco is a sharp guy and furthermore, a fully conscious artist, who imagines clearly and executes accurately. No; the explanation for how Franco’s best movies engage and entertain, despite extensive egregious flaws, is not to call it any kind of accident. Like the bumblebee’s flight, or the fixed speed of light, what powers Franco’s finest films eludes explanation. The fact that it is unquantifiable ought to be all the excuse I need to call it genius; for the work of any genius who clearly intends to be taken as such, it would be enough. But Franco himself would laugh at and dismiss the idea that he’s any kind of “genius,” or indeed that cinema is any kind of “art” at all, and even if he’s wrong, his position should be taken into consideration, in considering his work.
Great movies crafted on an intentional plane of pure entertainment by crews who eschew any ideas about “art,” themselves place or push all remarkable “low” or “trash” cinema beyond ideas of “good” and “bad,” and therefore beyond all traditional critical mastication or manipulation. Perhaps Franco best summarizes this ideology or approach himself; of TWO UNDERCOVER ANGELS, he says “it still works.” When a filmmaker places this concern—whether or not his work “works”—before the traditional primary critical concern—whether or not this work is “good” or “bad”—he places himself firmly upon a path that leads to making movies touched by true genius. Ideas about quality, about what specific qualities make a work good or bad, will always come and go; but sometimes, weathering all such winds of aesthetic fashion, specific recognizable canonized classics remain the same.
Not that such a phrase applies to these movies; golly—not yet, anyway. But they are a hell of a lot of fun, just as much fun as they were when they were made, if not even more. What else can we reasonably ask of a movie 30 years after it was made? What more could we possibly want?
