Horror Express / Gothic Originals: Flesh For Frankenstein (Paul Morrissey, 1973)

 As part of my portfolio of horror-related activities this October, I decided to belatedly revisit the two “Andy Warhol”/Paul Morrissey horror films for the first time in many years, purely to try to decide whether or not I actually like them.

Of the two films, ‘Flesh for Frankenstein’ in particular never really clicked with me back in the day, leaving a bad taste in my mouth which has endured for nearly fifteen years since my last viewing. Long story short: I found a lot more to enjoy in it this time around, but I can definitely still see where my younger self was coming from.

There’s a lot of rather good, really funny and innovative stuff going on here, but at the same time, much of what surrounds it feels tiresomely bad-on-purpose or sophomorically ‘offensive’, conveying a sense of full spectrum cynicism which makes the film difficult to fully engage with, or to even really get an angle on.

By which I mean, it’s hard to shake the feeling that, even as he was leaning heavily on the talents of the exceptional crew which producer/instigator Carlo Ponti had assembled for him (DP Luigi Kuveiller, Production Designer Enrico Job, Second Unit Director Antonio Margheriti and special FX maestro Carlo Rambaldi foremost amongst them), Morrissey still arrived on set thinking he was somehow better than these crazy Eyetalians and their silly horror movies. Newsflash from the Eurohorror Fan Gazette: he was not.

Each time I’m getting ready to turn it off in disgust and cue up some hearty, proletarian fare like Lady Frankenstein instead though, something sufficiently extraordinary or weirdly beautiful happens to keep me glued to this unsavoury epic, come what may.

Along with the sterling work of the aforementioned technicians, the main thing which got me through the film I think is Udo Kier’s performance as the Baron. He is absolutely fantastic here - OTT in precisely the right way to suit the material. Just a perfect, Python-esque lampoon of an effeminate Nazi aristocrat, he fills the oft-torturous dialogue assigned to him by the the script with unexpected, lip-smacking emphases, managing to make almost every line reading laugh-out-loud funny. (I won't quote the famous line at you again, but his despairing “zis is all YOUR fault!” as he throws his own severed hand in the general direction of Arno Jürging’s Otto at the film’s conclusion is pretty hard to beat.)

It’s a shame then that most of the rest of the cast fall so far short of Kier’s form that they might as well crumble to dust and blow away in the breeze when he’s going full throttle next to them. Jürging delivers a solidly furtive/dislikeable turn as the Baron’s dim-witted assistant, and it’s nice to see the iconic Nicoletta Elmi present and correct as one of the Frankensteins’ silent, creepy children; aside from that though, everyone else pretty much just plain stinks (a circumstance which I can well imagine Morrissey, in keeping with his Warhol/NY camp background, finding just heee-larious).

Monique van Vooren in particular is nails-down-a-blackboard bad as the Baroness (I’m surprised to discover she’d been acting since 1950), whilst Joe Dallesandro is stiff as a board, stubbornly ignoring anything in the painfully wordy script which might call upon him to emote or develop a sense of character (a decision I can only assume was deliberate, in view of the far better performances he went on to deliver in other European movies).

Along similar lines, issues like the confusion of the Baron and Baroness’s husband-wife / brother-sister status also grate. Committing to one scenario or the other could have allowed the characters to be more sensibly fleshed out (sorry), their assorted transgressions made more tangible, but mixing/merging the two feels either like a tiresome bit of “oops, we changed the script, lol” meta-bollocks, or a cheap attempt to shock easily offended viewers, depending on which way you choose to look at it.

That said though, the film’s overall level of perversity, combined with the extremity of Rambaldi’s gore effects, is undeniably pretty audacious. Outside of H.G. Lewis and his competitors in the depths of the Southern U.S. grindhouse circuit, I’m not sure that any filmmakers to this date had dared push their viewers’ faces into the realm of violated human innards with quite the pathological glee Morrissey exhibits here.

Placed alongside the film’s determination to pull every last unhinged erotic possibility from the corpse of the Frankenstein mythos, it’s fair to say that, in terms of pure bad taste excelsis, ‘Flesh..’ takes us to places no horror films had previously explored, and which few have dared return to subsequently (within the commercial/popular sphere at least), even as the kind of graphic splatter pioneered here became de-rigour through the 1980s; an achievement which it is difficult not to admire on some level.

Meanwhile, I also found myself reflecting this time around on the way that, rather than merely taking the piss out of gothic horror movies (which, let’s face it, is all too easy), Morrissey aims higher here by invoking many of the primary themes of mid-century European art-house cinema (bourgeois hypocrisy, echoes of fascism, the fading of the old aristocracy, masochistic sexuality, etc) and playing them as complete farce, as if, as an American, he thought all this wacky Euro shit was just a laugh riot, be it high-brow or otherwise.

Making things feel even weirder meanwhile is the fact that he chooses to express this using a variation on the era’s low-brow British humour (complete with our beloved funny foreign accents, etc), meaning that every scene which takes place outside the gore-splattered laboratory keeps threatening to turn into ‘Carry On Visconti’ or ‘Up Bunuel’ or something - a result only avoided due to the fact that the cast (aside from Udo) are too clueless or disengaged to really wring any laughs out of the absurd material they’ve been presented with.

On relfection, I don't really know whether this approach to socio-cultural satire is a good thing, or a bad thing, or what really, but it's certainly... something.

Which, now that I think about it, actually seems like a pretty good verdict on the entirety of this uniquely troublesome, badly behaved film. 

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Exploito All’Italiana: Delirium: The Photos of Gioia (Lamberto Bava, 1987)

As a lover of the irrational in cinema, it saddens me to report that one of the most delirious things about this late period giallo opus from Lamberto Bava is probably its name. First off, this ‘Delirium’ should definitely not to be confused with Renato Polselli’s more comprehensively delirious 1972 ‘Delirium’, nor indeed the 1979 American horror film of the same name. And, if you’re thinking, hang on, pictures of what? Well, ‘Gioia’ is the Italian version of ‘Gloria’, which is the name of the central character in the English dub under review here, so, there you go; it’s not just a poster typo that stuck, although quite why the title wasn’t anglicised to match the dub heard in English territories is anyone’s guess. (1)

So, having got that out of the way, let’s crack on and see what kind of enjoyment we can wring from the younger Bava’s attempt to sew up elements of Argento, De Palma and indeed his father’s own ‘Blood & Black Lace’ (1964) into a kind of crudely assembled Ultimate Giallo, telling the can’t-miss tale of Gloria, the excruciatingly rich and tasteless publisher of a soft porn/fashion magazine named ‘Pussycat’, and of a vengeful killer stalking and murdering the models in her employ.

As you might well have anticipated, ‘Delirium’ is first and foremost a veritable riot of out-of-control ‘80s kitsch. The film’s visuals immediately recall the slick, hyper-real fantasias of Argento and Michele Soavi’s ‘80s films, whilst the fetishised, Helmut Newton-esque fashion / photography milieu that provides much of the local colour seems like a direct homage to ‘The Eyes of Laura Mars’ (1978), executed here with a level of garish, exploitative tackiness that makes Irwin Kirshner’s film look like a model of taste and restraint in comparison.

This aesthetic is carried over wholesale into the movie’s shamelessly prurient stylised murder sequences, and, needless to say, the wardrobe and hair-styling throughout must be seen to be believed, whilst the displays of conspicuous consumption highlighted in the production design are such that the characters may as well be lounging around on furniture made of gold doubloons.

Another thing viewers will soon note is that lead actress Serena Grandi has unsettlingly large breasts. Not the cool, Russ Meyer / Tura Satana kind of large breasts, but the kind that look out of proportion with the rest of her body and tend to make you worry about the terrible back pain she must be suffering.

Realising it is his solemn duty to exploit these assets appropriately, Lamberto does so not just via a ludicrous climax that sees Gloria going one-on-one with the killer whilst wearing Victoria’s Secrets-style lingerie, and also through the means of a sub-plot in which she reignites her love affair with a jobbing actor, aptly played by the ubiquitous George Eastman. In a delightful touch, Eastman is introduced whilst in costume for some kind of barbarian movie his character is appearing in. [I’ll put money on the fact that this actually WAS his costume from Ruggero Deodato’s ‘The Barbarians’, released the same year].

Grandi and Eastman’s passionate-in-inverted-commas jacuzzi love scene is… quite the thing, proving beyond doubt that wherever the younger Bava’s talents lay, it was certainly not in the arena of eroticism.

During ‘Delirium’, I wasn’t overly troubled by the notion that Grandi might be a gifted actress, but, in fairness, IMDB reveals that she has over fifty credits in theatrically released Italian pictures across four decades, so she must be doing something right. Perhaps it was just the combination of a distinctly iffy English dub and general tone of OTT melodrama that torpedoed her here, who knows.

Happily though, Grandi is flanked by a battalion of familiar faces in the supporting cast, including Daria Nicolodi (brilliant as ever, making comical “shifty eyes” faces behind the backs of the cops as they question her about the murders), David Brandon (whom you’ll recall as the outrageously camp English theatre director in Soavi’s ‘Stage Fright’ (1987), here expanding his range to include an outrageously camp English photographer), and ‘60s starlet Capucine, who puts in a great turn as Gloria’s embittered former mentor/rival magazine publisher (red herring much?), retaining about as much dignity as is humanly possible in a movie like this.

In order to differentiate his product from the legions of other “beautiful fashion models get butchered” titles competing for our attention across the decades, Lamberto’s principal gimmick in ‘Delirium’ involves shooting the murder scenes as heavily-tinted subjective sequences giving us the POV of the murderer. Nothing out of the ordinary there, I’ll grant you, BUT it seems that this killer’s ill-defined paranoid schizo tendencies cause him/her to see his/her photogenic victims as rubber-faced monsters of one kind or another, thus instigating ‘Delirium’s sole claim toward delirium.

The first time this happens – with fluorescent gel lighting flashing crazily as a model we just saw leaving a late night soiree in Gloria’s villa suddenly walks on-screen with a giant prosthetic eyeball head, shortly before she is impaled by a pitchfork – is genuinely pretty crazy; an authentic WTF highlight that momentarily justifies the movie’s title.

This is only topped by the second – even more distasteful - murder sequence, in which the killer visualises his showering victim with a compound-eyed aphid head. Overpowering her, s/he subsequently slathers his/her victim in what appears to be honey, before unleashing… a shoebox full of bees! (It was the shoebox that cracked me up.) Presumably an attempt to capitalise on ‘Phenomena’s (far superior) insect effects a few years earlier, this is all utterly inexplicable, and just as grotesquely daft as it sounds. (2)

As if all that weren’t enough to keep us busy, we’ve also got a peculiar sub-plot involving a wheelchair-bound teenager who spends his time spying on the kinky goings-on around Gloria’s pool and making obscene phone calls to her, but hey, it’s ok, he’s a good kid really. Beginning as an obligatory Hitchcock nod, developments here take a pretty weird diversion in the second half of the film, when it is revealed that wheelchair boy’s incapacity is a self-inflicted psychological condition resulting from the guilt he feels for the car crash that killed his fiancée. For a few moments there, ‘Delirium’ seems as if it’s about to turn into some ‘General Hospital’ tearjerker, and… I have no idea why any of this ended up in the movie to be honest, but hey – at least it’s unexpected.

Also worthy of note, we have another reliably banging, synth-drum heavy score from Simon Boswell, and a wonderful ‘Pieces’-esque moment in which a cop investigating the first murder presents his superior officer with a blood-free pitchfork, announcing “I found this in the tool shed” before the latter stares quizzically at him for a few seconds, then orders him to “get it to the lab, for testing!” (Ah, small pleasures).

Now, by this point, you’re probably thinking that ‘Delirium: The Photos of Gioia’ is shaping up to be one of the greatest Euro-trash horror films of the 1980s. How can it not be? Well, I don’t have any easy answer for you, but let’s put it this way: one of the great unsolved mysteries of European genre cinema must be: given the lengths it clearly goes to to please the kind of people who’d want to watch a film like this in the first place, how come ‘Delirium’ is basically just not that much fun to watch?

It’s a puzzler alright, but for Exhibit A I’ll put the following proposition to you. Given that Lamberto Bava’s ‘greatest hits’ as a director (the two ‘Demons’ films) provide a veritable blueprint for dispensing with exposition entirely and making horror movies that go off like rockets, it is ironic that, whenever he ventured into thriller/giallo territory, his films tended to suffer from serious pacing issues.

Essentially I think, whilst Lamberto can handle the action/exploitation stuff like a pro, he has no feel for either building tension or developing believable character interactions, and when doing so becomes necessary, he is apt to flounder.

Furthermore, for a film named ‘Delirium’, plotting here is disappointingly mundane. The nature of the killer’s monster delusions is never really expanded upon (indeed, this whole device is dropped in the movie’s second half), and things culminate with the kind of crushingly inconsequential “oh, it was… that guy” type resolution that has long been the hallmark of inferior gialli.

With no real surprises or innovations, the film’s 95 minute run time feels pretty gruelling, with toe-curlingly awkward, repetitious dialogue, highly variable performances and ill-motivated corridor wandering eventually reducing it to a painful crawl to the finish line, in spite of the myriad bells and whistles I’ve outlined above.

And for Exhibit B meanwhile… again, I’m not entirely sure how to put this, but there is a certain lack of charm to ‘Delirium’ that makes me reluctant to give it the same breaks I’ve accorded many of the other films I’ve reviewed in this Exploito All’Italiana strand.

By 1987, I suppose things were getting pretty far down the line towards po-mo self-awareness and the kind of “so-bad-it’s-good” mentality that led many cult filmmakers to creative penury during the dark days of the ‘90s. In this respect, the scenes of monster-headed weirdness in ‘Delirium’ feel contrived – knowingly silly - where, just a few years earlier, more genuinely unhinged filmmakers like Lenzi or Polselli would likely have thrown them in entirely in earnest.

It feels as if Bava was sufficiently canny to know exactly what he was doing with the various cultural reference points and commercial necessities spliced into this picture, but was not smart enough to really justify them or put them to any interesting use. Instead, the film veers toward a cynical, camp sensibility that never feels entirely satisfactory, light years away from the simple, derivative charm of pictures like Sergio Martino’s ‘Hands of Steel’ (1986) or Bava’s own Blastfighter (1984). It’s a fine line perhaps, but Clever-Stupid can make for a good time - Stupid-Clever not so much.

Just a few months ago, we were looking at a Lamberto Bava film – Graveyard Disturbance – that crashed and burned as a result of its total failure to fulfil audience expectations of a horror movie. It is curious therefore to reflect on the way that ‘Delirium’ ostensibly delivers in spades on everything an inebriated Euro-cult fan could possibly wish for, yet still somehow comes up empty-handed. What can I say - It’s a funny old game, isn’t it?

It’s not that ‘Delirium’ isn’t worth watching at some point if this kind of thing floats yr boat. On the contrary, it’s loaded with stuff to make you grin and chuckle and gasp, right on cue. But, just as in the world of empty ‘80s narcissism that the film purports to critique in some vague, five-degrees-removed type fashion, those grins, chuckles and gasps will feel hollow and fleeting, where once they ran deep and rich.

(1) For the record, IMDB currently lists upward of twenty feature films with the name ‘Delirium’ – mostly indie horror efforts released during the 21st century, although there’s also a Spanish ‘Delirium’ from 1983, a 1997 Filipino one, and most intriguingly, a 1965 Iranian horror movie that also shares the name. Now that I’d like to see!

(2) We need to acknowledge at this point that ‘Delirium’ is about as shamelessly misogynistic as these things get, but c’mon. If you’ve made it past the poster art and plot synopsis, you should be prepared for that. You might as well criticise a bulldog for drooling. Should you wish to mount a defence of the film on these grounds, I suppose you could point to both Nicolodi and Capucine as strong/interesting female characters who are never overtly sexualised, and perhaps even make a tenuous claim that the film’s camp sensibility pushes its leering depictions of eroticised violence into a guilt-free queer/po-mo context. But, I’m not going to make these arguments – in fact I’m going to drop the issue right there. ‘Delirium’ is gloriously indefensible rubbish, and I’m happy to enjoy it as such.

Franco Files: Bloody Moon (1981)

In 1981, a group of callous German producers sparked a major incident in the esoteric world of horror movie sub-categorisation, when they thoughtlessly invited the ‘80s American Slasher Film to make incursions into the ancient kingdom of Jess Franco. Or perhaps it was the other way around. Nobody quite remembers. Either way, a confrontation was inevitable, and the results could have been catastrophic. Forces were mustered, and, in a darkened alley near a picturesque Alicante holiday village, the two sides met for a showdown.(1)

Strutting, Slasherdom paraded its arsenal:

* A large cast of young actresses, each of them more conventionally attractive and quote-unquote ‘wholesome’-looking (not to mention more frequently clothed) than those you would expect to see in a 1981 Jess Franco film.

* The shadiest and most incompetently managed Spanish language summer school in the known world. (“International Youth-Club Boarding School of Languages” reads a sign spelled out in those slanted, adhesive letters that are usually used for putting house/room numbers on front doors.)

* Teen pool party opening sequence incorporating hand-held ‘killer POV’ shots and mildly ‘transgressive’ usage of a Mickey Mouse mask.

* A bold wardrobe of ‘80s casual attire that actually seems pretty spot-on in its circa-’81 anticipation of the more garish trends of the coming decade.

* A generous scattering of conveniently placed gardening tools and industrial wood-cutting equipment.

* Lumbering, mute gardener guy as obvious red herring.

* A succession of neatly cling-filmed corpses deposited in and mysteriously removed from closets for maximum jack-in-the-box scare / ‘huh-it’s-gone-am-I-going-crazy’ effect.

* Sinister introverted brother who has been released from mental institution, but clearly shouldn’t have been because he’s crazy and murderous. I mean, just look at him - he has a scar on his face and silently stares at stuff. Nuts, I tell you.

* An excruciating American-English dub track that seems designed specifically to make every female character sound like a congenital moron, and every male sound like a sleaze-dripping closet psychopath. (And to make us laugh like a drain whenever an underpaid voice artiste sighs and gives her best shot to a line like “I bet he’s never even made it with a girl, the phony Spanish lover!”)

His pride wounded by all this unfamiliar transatlantic hoo-hah, Franco responded in kind:

* Wobbly tracking shots across picturesque Spanish harbours, culminating in a focus pull on that big goddamn rock he seems to like so much.

* Exactly the same Costa Blanca shooting locations seen fifteen years earlier in Attack of the Robots.

* An actress who looks a lot like the regrettably absent Lina Romay moping seductively in the upstairs window of a Spanish hacienda in a transparent night-dress, contemplating mischief. (The very same window used to frame Françoise Brion in ‘..Robots’, if anyone’s taking notes.)

* Wobbly, focus-blurring zoom shots of the moon, because, y’know – moon.

* A soundtrack that sounds as if the employees of a German library music label began pulling all-nighters and experimenting with Gysin/Burroughs cut-up technique.

* Language school proprietor who struts into the student “Disco Club” in a white suit & black shirt combo, momentarily looking like some decadent, DeSadean strip-club overlord.(2)

* Gore effects so audaciously shoddy they practically break the fourth wall and engage you in discussion re: the persistence of notions of theatricality and disbelief suspension in genre cinema

* Uncomfortable (and illogical) incest-based sub-plot.

* Persistent, low level evocation of that particular atmosphere of intangible, woozy dementia found in only the finest deep cuts of European trash-horror.

And so, battle commenced, in a conflict that will be known forever as ‘Bloody Moon’. Unless you live in Germany - then it's ‘Die Säge des Todes’ (“The Saw of Death”). Or Spain, in which case it’s ‘Colegialas Violadas’ (“Violated School Girls”). In Denmark, it was ‘Sexmord på Pigeskolen’ (“Sex-Death at the Girls’ School”?). Argentina went with ‘Terror y Muerte en la Universidad’. But no matter - to the likes of us, ‘Bloody Moon’ it is.

Legend has it that ‘Bloody Moon’s producers, keen for some reason to recruit the commercially washed up director of ‘Hellhole Women’ and ‘El Sexo esta Loco’ to their slasher dream project, lured Jess Franco on board by promising him the chance to work with up-and-coming German sexploitation star Olivia Pascal, the services of “one of the best effects guys in Hollywood”, and an original score by Pink Floyd.

Pascal materialised. The ‘Floyd did not. Effects ended up being masterminded by some guy Franco knew who handled props and owned a polystyrene head. A bit of a bummer for our long-suffering auteur, we might suppose, but seasoned Francohiles will well know that when the chips are down on a production, that’s often when the magic happens. Often, but not always. Sometimes ‘Oasis of the Zombies’ happens, but we’ve just got to cross our fingers and pray.

In the highly enjoyable interview included on Synapse’s recent blu-ray edition of ‘Bloody Moon’ (from which the screen-grabs above are definitely NOT taken), Franco speaks at length about his dislike for the film’s German composer, whom he angrily accuses of providing “fucking Dutch music”, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Hopefully we can assume that, rather than dismissing the entire cultural output of The Netherlands here, Jess is here referring to some particular form of film music popular at the time, or something like that? I’ve got no idea what he means to be honest, but regardless - if this German cat was bringing it, and Franco wasn’t digging it, my instinct is to go with Jess on this one. (Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned from the frankly unhealthy amount of time I’ve spent watching his work, it’s that JF knows a good tune when he hears one.)

Ever willing to take a deep breath and give it his best shot, Franco took up the bat and got swinging, digging into his own archive of surplus musical bits and bobs and applying a bit of the ol’ cut n’ paste to Gerhard Heinz’ credited score, with reliably off-kilter results. (The extraordinarily odd, squelchy cue that serves to weirdify the otherwise wholly routine “killer POV ascending the stairs” shot early in the film is my personal favourite moment in this regard.) 

It is easy to assume that Franco applied a similar ‘make do & mend’ spirit to all aspects of this ill-starred shoot too, his veteran’s determination to make the best of a bad job for once triumphing over the opposite tendency toward cack-handed laziness that more frequently shone through in his early ‘80s work-for-hire gigs. Despite all the initial signs of hostility between ‘Bloody Moon’s oil & water components, such inspiring leadership seems to have led to both parties in the dispute realising that they had more in common than they initially thought (after all, what was Franco’s earlier ‘Exorcism’ (1974) if not a peculiarly twisted entry in the pre-‘Halloween’ proto-slasher canon?), allowing the project’s conflicting aesthetics to blend and interact in strange and wonderful ways.

For me you see, the thing about slasher films is that their inherently minimal and repetitive format demands that, to become enjoyable for those of us who have no particular love for the genre, they must be… what’s the right word? Eccentric – that’ll do. To generate interest, a slasher must either a) be a technically excellent and emotionally involving motion picture ('Black Christmas' or Tony Williams' 'Next of Kin' spring to mind), or b), plug the gaps between dead teens with the most off-beat, aimless and just plain weird diversions that come to hand. And, given that so many products of the sub-genre’s early ‘80s golden age were cheap, amateurish films made by otherly inspired individuals for purely opportunistic reasons, many of them thankfully embark upon route b) with a great deal of gusto.

‘Bloody Moon’s Spanish-pretending-to-be-American compatriot ‘Pieces’ is perhaps the preeminent example of how things right, by which I mean wrong, by which I mean just sort of strange and confused, in this regard. The Australian-pretending-to-be-American ‘Strange Behaviour’ aka ‘Dead Kids’ is another good one, as is the genuinely-American-though-presumably-beamed-in-from-another-dimension ‘Hack O Lantern’. You can pencil in your own additions to the list, I’m sure. If not, the archives of Bleeding Skull should provide a lifetime's worth of pointers.To recap then: routine, competently made slasher = BORING. Eccentric, amateurish slasher = GOOD TIMES.

During Bloody Moon’s opening half hour, there were some shaky moments where I was worried things were heading in the former direction. The vacant, empty-eyed teens and tedious two-shot conversation scenes. The duh-brained “homages” to ‘Halloween’ and ‘Psycho’. The over-before-its-even-begun un-plotline. The surprisingly good but never quite exceptional cinematography. The presence of this so-called Nadja Gerganoff (in her only screen role) occupying the ‘slutty older sister’ role that should so rightfully belong to Lina. 

But I should have had faith. By the time a detailed discussion takes place regarding the most appropriate sweater to wear on a midnight fishing expedition with some lusty sailors, I was getting into the swing of things. After a perfectly cube-shaped polystyrene boulder narrowly misses our heroine's head, I had that nice “literally anything could happen next” buzz going on. As things stumble toward a climax, the pace quickens, slightly. Events get wilder, editing choppier, framing wonkier and music more unhinged. By the time Lina’s stand-in artlessly slices a guy in half with a chainsaw, I was ready to stand up, weeping with joy, and thank God for bringing all these people together for a few weeks on the sultry Spanish coast.

As far as the – ahem – serious consideration of Jess Franco’s cinematic legacy goes, few would seek to place ‘Bloody Moon’ on the same level as his more accomplished and personal work from the ‘60s and ‘70s. But as a Halloween-adjacent Friday night beer & pizza movie, it delivers beautifully, in ways that a non-Franco directed cynical cash-in slasher would likely never have achieved.

So, to return to where we began. It is 1981. The ‘80s American Slasher Film and the world of Jess Franco face each other across that dark alley near Alicante. Silence reigns. After a few minutes of whsipered discussion, they decide to cancel hostilities and made sweet love instead. The result? WE ALL WIN.

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Kink: 3/5

Creepitude: 3/5

Pulp Thrills: 4/5

Altered States: 2/5

Sight Seeing: 3/5

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(1) ‘Bloody Moon’s main production heavy-weight Wolf C. Hartwig was the man behind the interminable “Schoolgirl Report” series that pretty much defined the aesthetic of cheapo German sexploitation in the ‘70s (and of which Franco directed one of the stranger installments). Hartwig’s hefty catalogue of cinematic tat actually stretches as far back as 1959’s ‘Horrors of Spider Island’, and in 1977 he seemingly tried to re-balance the scales by taking the sole producer credit on Sam Peckinpah’s ‘Cross of Iron’, the same year he also handled ‘When Girls Make Love’ and ‘Confessions of a Naked Virgin’. I’ve not read up on the working relationship between Hartwig and Peckinpah, but one suspects they might not have seen eye to eye.

(2) The “Disco Club” also serves litre bottles of beer to students as a takeaway, plays lumpen, Shawaddywaddy style retro-kitsch rock n’ roll and allows entry to passing sailors (rollerskates optional). My kinda language school, as if we hadn’t established that much already.

Franco Files: Mädchen im Nachtverkehr / ‘Girls of the Night Traffic’ (1976)

Of the innumerable sex comedies and caged women exploitation pics produced by Erwin C. Dietrich’s Switzerland-based Ascot/Elite productions during the 1970s, most prove fairly dismal viewing (to my tastes at least). The presence of Jess Franco and Lina Romay on the payroll did at least lead to Dietrich’s company names appearing on a handful of masterpieces and the occasional slice of out-of-nowhere weirdness though – and in the latter category, 1976’s ‘Mädchen im Nachtverkehr’, rather awkwardly translated as ‘Girls of the Night Traffic’, proves a case in point.

This certainly wasn’t one of Franco’s more personal projects for Dietrich – indeed, there seems to be some controversy over how much of it he was actually responsible for, with Dietrich taking credit as writer and co-director on IMDB – but I think that the oddball humour and general garish surrealism found within makes Jess’s contribution clear, adding interest and a sense of campy enjoyment to what would otherwise be a pretty forgettable shot-in-a-week softcore(ish) quickie.

Taking place in a bouncy comic-book world of guilt-free sex and commerce, the story here is thin bordering on non-existent, and centres upon three happy hookers (the only one of whom I recognise is Franco regular Kali Hansa), who lounge around naked on a big bed in their shared flat, recalling stories of adventures with their more unusual clients. I can’t speak for the way the girls’ banter scans in the original German, but the English fan-subs on my copy have them spouting some of the most mystifyingly overwrought double-entendres I’ve ever encountered in a motion picture;

“He rooted around in the belltower. It was sensational.”

“He modestly asked me if I would perform the trumpet angel for him. Why not?”

“I won’t do shock treatment with you. I’ll do ‘shell-seeking’, that’s easy.”

What does it all mean? Don’t tell me, I think I’m happier not knowing.

One brief vignette sees Hansa servicing a Dr. Hichcock-like character who has her reclining in a coffin previously occupied by his late wife, on what looks like an empty, black-draped sound stage, whilst funereal music drones on in the background. The sheer unexpectedness of all this renders it quite fun, and things take a further turn taking a turn toward the bizarre when the man appears to introduce his penis as “mein gondola” and begins shouting “gondola! gondola!” as he thrusts away once the inevitable action commences. Inadequately translated German slang, or just random weirdness? Again, I think I’m happier not knowing.

Meanwhile, another of the girls makes a date with the always slightly terrifying Eric Falk, who here presents an even more unwholesome presence than usual as a sexually inexperienced and apparently mentally deficient foreigner, who says things like “if it not cost too much, I make love, yes?” This is not quite so much fun, but, um…. ok.

Back at the shack, a lengthy sequence of sexy banana eating and sapphic frolics ensues (“honestly, we never get bored”, says someone), until the film suddenly plunges headfirst into the depths of Franco’s erotic-fantastique imagination for a positively dream-like sequence in which one of the girls suddenly finds herself trapped in a bamboo cage amid a set-bound jungle, before the other two approach in military uniforms (presumably recycled from Barbed Wire Dolls, or some similar picture), and things proceed in much the kind of direction you’d expect... until the scope of the scene widens out to reveal that this is actually a stage act being performed in some totally bizarre jungle-themed neon nightclub!

A trademark Franco trick of course, but used to maximum reality-trashing effect here, giving the impression that we’re suddenly adrift in the void, roaming through one of the innumerable such rooms that must be continually operating in the director’s mind.

In a subsequent flashback demonstrating how the girls fell into their current occupation, one of them is seen tootling away on a saxophone, practicing in the hope that she won’t lose her current job in a brass band – another self-referential wink to the mere handful of weirdoes whom one assumes might have been following Jess Franco’s career back in 1976 – before Hansa’s character barges in on the pretext that she’s a burglar trying to rob the place!

Introducing the third member of the trio, we cut to yet another thoroughly goofy vignette in an artist’s studio, where girl # 1 is trying her luck as an artist’s model and attracts the attention of the artist’s daughter/lover (her precise role is deliberately left a bit vague, as if the filmmakers hit on the icky incest theme but didn’t quite want to go all the way with it, or else just forgot or something).

 “It’s nice painting her thighs, when one is used to yours”, says the leery, pencil-moustached artist at one point, and once again, an avalanche of questionable euphemisms add a whole extra layer of strangeness here. “One always looks forward to the opening of a theatre”, says one of the girls when the fella unzips his pants, “but be gentle on the hero, he’s suffering from stage fright”. The camp factor is pushed even further by cut-away close ups to the guy’s paintings, which are absolutely HIDEOUS – air-brushed monstrosities full of fawns and dewy eyed sheep… just wonderfully absurd.

Toward the end of the film, a rather unsavory storyline emerges that kinda anticipates scenarios which were re-used for 1977’s superior ‘Die Sklavinnen’ (aka ‘Swedish Nympho Slaves’), in which the girls are kidnapped one by one by a swinging couple and sold on to Eric Falk’s character (see, I TOLD you he wasn’t to be trusted!), who is working for a cadre of Islamic white slavers who hang out in a smoky Turkish restaurant where some intense-looking musicians choogle away day and night on sitar and tablas (because India, Turkey – close enough, right?).

Here, in a turn of events that ranks pretty high on the list of “scenes you’d be unlikely to see in a motion picture nowadays”, the malevolent, fez-wearing Turks pound away doggy-style at their bored captives whilst yelling allegedly comedic variations on Muslim prayer mantras. The whole thing is so stunningly tasteless it’s kind of extraordinary, to be honest. Indefensible, undoubtedly, but at the same time, the knowingly ludicrous, slapstick presentation leaves it only a stone’s throw away from the kind of outrages a young John Waters was perpetrating at around the same time on the other side of the Atlantic.

If you’ve got a strong enough exploitation-stomach to shrug off a few light-hearted Islamophobic rape scenes though, the rest of ‘Girls of the Night Traffic’ remains 60-something minutes of utterly stupid, frivolous fun – the kind of sex flick that constantly objectifies the female body (that sort of being its core purpose, after all), but without ever feeling the need to get cruel or gross about it, and that slings random elements and jarring, inexplicable diversions together seemingly at random, with no apparent rhyme or reason, leaving us completely in the dark re: what’s coming next.

Though in essence the film is perhaps only marginally sillier than the innumerable hours of Germanic softcore nonsense that emerged from the ‘70s, we can assume that Franco at least was fully aware of the ridiculousness of the project he was involved in, and my guess is that he was deliberately ramping up the camp factor here as far as he possibly could, leading to the kind of movie where you can almost hear the cast & crew cracking up off-screen at the kind of nonsense they’re being paid to create.

On the downside, Francophiles should note that the film suffers from an absolutely chronic lack of Lina, which immediately loses it a point or two in the ‘Kink’ category (who knows, maybe she was visiting family or something on the week they made this one?), but that aside, if you are the kind of person who would even contemplate acquiring and watching a film like this in the 21st century, then god knows, you will probably enjoy it.

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Kink – 3/5 
Creepitude – 1/5 
Pulp Thrills – 3/5 
Altered States – 2/5 
Sight-seeing – 0/5
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Losey at the BFI, Part # 3: Secret Ceremony (1968)

As the innovations of the early ‘60s began to give way to the cultural upheavals of The Sixties as we know and love them, the kind of unconventional, psychologically/politically engaged, quasi-artistic filmmaking that Joesph Losey had pioneered in preceding years increasingly began to seem like ‘the in thing’, with the British film industry reeling in turn from the impact of Antonioni’s ‘Blow-Up’, Polanski’s ‘Repulsion’ and ‘Cul de Sac’ and Lindsay Anderson’s ‘If..’, ending the decade with the colossal bad trip of Donald Cammel’s ‘Performance’, a film that in many ways owes its very existence to the themes Losey explored in ‘The Servant’.

During these boom years for his brand of film-making, Losey seems to have immersed himself in a series of more high profile projects than he had previously attempted, moving into colour and toward more stable studio backing as he turned out the uncharacteristically light-hearted spy caper ‘Modesty Blaise’ (1966), followed in quick succession by a more consciously avant garde, but by most accounts less successful, reworking of the themes explored in ‘The Servant’ in 1967’s ‘Accident’, and ‘Boom!’ (1968), an absurd sounding vehicle for Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton that relocated a Tennessee Williams play to a Mediterranean Island.

Sadly I didn’t get the opportunity to see any of those films at the BFI, but I was lucky enough to catch screenings of Losey’s two subsequent films, ‘Secret Ceremony’ (1968) and ‘Figures in a Landscape’ (1970). And, boy, do they ever make for a strange double bill. Both are utterly unique films to the extent that they are almost without precedent in modern cinema, but at the same time they are so different from each other it’s almost impossible to believe they were made concurrently by the same man.

To start with ‘Secret Ceremony’, well…. christ, I don’t know where to start. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Let’s begin at the beginning.

Leonora, played by Elizabeth Taylor and made up like a stern Roman Catholic housewife who’s gone slightly wrong, with weird zig-zaggy stockings and a black mourning veil, boards a London bus.

(The whole film is photographed in totally maxed-out Technicolor, but simultaneously with a very drab colour palette, as if Mario Bava relocated to Kilburn on an overcast day and only brought his brown and green filters.)

On the bus, she is silently hassled by Cenci (Mia Farrow), a witchy, wild-eyed young girl, who follows her when she gets off. It seems Leonora is going to the cemetery. On the way there, both women pass through the church, and pause to stare in desperate fascination at a christening service. In the graveyard, Leonora puts flowers on the grave of her daughter, who drowned aged eleven, as is recounted in detail on her tombstone. Turning around, she bumps into Cenci, and, in highly confusing moment, appears to recognize her as her dead daughter. Cenci, for her part, identifies Liz as her own dead mother, and precedes to drag ‘mother’ back to the opulent gothic mansion where it seems she has lived alone for many years, and there feeds her a yummy silver service breakfast. And my god, the house in this film is simply incredible – the vast main entrance hall is done out in beautiful neo-classical art nouveau frescos, whilst the inner rooms look like Elizabethan palace chambers stuffed with a mad range of antiques from all ages.


So, personally, I’d love to be accosted on buses by witchy girls who want to take me back to their gothic pads for breakfast, but Ms. Taylor seems quite unhappy about the whole situation. Not that it stops her from gratuitously stuffing her face and immediately declaring that she needs a nap and falling asleep on a kingsize bed.

Now at this point, one would be forgiven for thinking, what the hell is going on? Is Cenci really Leonora’s dead daughter, or is she really Cenci’s dead mother, or neither, or both, or what? None of the possible combinations really makes much sense, and the only thing that IS made clear to us is that both of these women are completely mad. And with no more reliable narrative voice to inform us of what’s actually going on, we spend the next… well, god, it seems like hours… simply watching them stumble around the decadent chaos of the mansion, acting crazy with each other.

They take a bath together in a big Victorian tub, and Cenci torments Leonora by repeatedly pushing a rubber duck under the water in mockery of the drowning of… herself?, her sister?, Leonora’s completely unrelated kid? – who knows. They choose outfits to wear for the day – hideous, hilarious outfits the like of which no sensible lady of any era would be seen dead in. Liz declares that she wants to find the perfect dress for a happy, bright sort of day, and rejects Cenci’s first suggestion (some sort of giant, woolen monstrosity) because “no dear, that’s the sort of thing you’d wear if it was bloody pissing it down”. Then she apologies for her language, declares it time for another nap and falls asleep.


The whole thing is highly reminiscent of the Maysles Brothers’ classic documentary Grey Gardens, and, like that film, ‘Secret Ceremony’ is a definitive example of pre-ironic camp, a movie that’s capable of reducing a modern audience to near constant fits of laughter and disbelief, despite being a very real and serious endeavor to its creators and participants.

At some point, two spiteful maiden aunts turn up to visit, and rudely taunt Cenci as they go about stealing some of the valuables laying about the house. It seems they run an antique shop solely off the back of all the stuff they’re ripping off from the house. Later in the film, Leonora goes to visit them there, memorably dressed in what seems to be a purple airline stewardess outfit and matching fez, and gives them hell about it, symbolically tearing a doll apart in the process.

Things take a(n even more) sinister turn as it becomes clear through their rambling, inconsequential exchanges that both women have suffered abuse at the hands of a man called Albert – second husband and step-father respectively, we gather – a circumstance they recall by giggling as they compare imitations of the sex noises he made them make.

Whilst Leonora is asleep, Cenci wonders down to the kitchen where she declares that “my virginity is the only thing I possess”, before she starts a conversation with an imaginary Albert, feeds him his dinner, and throws herself across the table, simulating being raped by an invisible assailant, in a violent transformation that seems to prefigure post-Exorcist possession movies. Watching from behind a paneled door, her ‘mother’ bursts into tears, and the camera shifts upward, across the surface of an out of focus grandfather clock….


And it is at this point readers that, for the good of us all, I must cease this scene by scene synopsis, because, well…. my god – it’s only the laughter that stops me from waking up at night screaming. I’ve maybe described about a quarter of what happens in the film, and from hereon in it just goes further and further off the deep end.

For one thing, Albert returns! He may be clad in a dirty mac, a truly ridiculous leprechaun beard and floppy hat, but yes, I’d recognize those drooping lids and inquisitive eyebrows anywhere…. it’s only motherfucking Robert Mitchum! He doesn’t seem too perturbed to see his dead wife peeking through the curtains, and returns later when she’s gone out to continue his affair with his step-daughter, who, despite clearly being massively traumatized by his previous interference, returns his advances in her own weird way, agreeing to shave his beard off for him (christ, SOMEONE had to), as he holds forth about his recent sexual history. Albert, it seems, is some sort of suave, irascible sex fiend who’s been off working in academia in America, enjoying the company of students, colleagues’ wives, daughters and anyone else unlucky enough to enter his orbit, but, like a comic book villain version of Humbert Humbert, he just can’t get the image of a young Cenci sliding down the banisters off his mind. “Do you realize”, says the droll, measured voice that once told us the story of left-hand right-hand, “that all over the Australian bush, fathers are banging their daughters like there's no tomorrow? What makes me any different?”


By and by, this whole merry crew end up relocating to the seaside, where the film reaches a level of high camp so sadistically feverish it could only really be put into its true context by a panel consisting of John Waters, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Herman Goering’s floating, disembodied brain.

I think I finally reached my breaking point during the sequence in which Mitchum confronts Taylor on the dunes. She is overseeing a lavish picnic, clad in a purple floral dress, push-up bra and a huge, girdle-style leather belt. “You look more like a cow than my late wife”, Albert observes, “no offense, I'm very fond of cows”. “Mooooo!”, he proceeds to taunt her, as she stabs at him in fury with a butter knife, in continuation of the surreal, nightmarish life and death struggle that seems to comprise this film’s final forty minutes.

In another scene that’s liable to be etched on my mind for longer than I’d like it to be, Leonora, goaded even further into hysterics, performs a symbolic abortion on Cenci, pulling the fluffy crab toy she’s been using as an ersatz baby out from under her dress and tearing it apart in a hideous, sledgehammer montage of screaming faces, tearing fabric and mad woman wrestling.


Needless to say, things stumble on toward a morbid, overblown gothic finale in which the fate of each member of our deranged love triangle is played out to the accompaniment of orchestral bombast and ridiculously overbearing religious imagery, as our weird protagonists’ faces are cross-faded into images of the crucifixion and…. shit, that’s it, I’m outta here.

I don’t know *what* to make of this film. Given its colossal strangeness, icky subject matter and complete lack of commercial potential, it is ironic that this is first of the Losey films I’ve seen that was made for a major American studio. Picture if you will, some poor commissioning editor at Universal, sitting in a dark room some time in 1968 watching a rough cut of ‘Secret Ceremony’, head in hands, muttering: “oh shit, I am in so much trouble”.

But then, hey, what do I know? Ok, so I’m someone who’ll happily put on a Female Prisoner: Scorpion movie to unwind with after tea, and ‘The Secret Ceremony’ reduced me to a gibbering wreck. But head over to the film’s page at IMDB, and you’ll find plenty of positive reviews from people – Liz Taylor fans mostly it seems – who are happy to regard it as a serious and successful melodrama about family breakdown.

Maybe that illustrates some kind of profound point about perceptions and expectations of mainstream vs. underground cinema, or maybe these people are all just fucking mad, who knows. I mean, maybe there are hundreds of sanity-shaking, borderline offensive films such as this one lurking in the hinterlands of ‘70s family melodrama, unseen by the likes of us cos they don’t have a name director attached? I don’t know.


But whatever – on some level, I suppose the IMDBers have a point. Buried somewhere within ‘Secret Ceremony’ is an effective gothic tragedy. Someone – was it Roger Corman maybe? – once said that the essence of any gothic horror story could be reduced to “a pretty girl goes into a big house, gets the shit scared out of her”, and, whilst ‘Secret Ceremony’ isn’t horror (well, not intentionally anyway), it is on that level that the film could have succeeded. In and of itself, Mia Farrow’s performance is startlingly good, and if the film had concentrated more on investigating her world – that of a damaged, deeply confused teenager living in fear amid the opulent ruins of her ancestors – well… it could have been beautiful.

But it isn’t. Joseph Losey’s capacity for visual and emotional excess we have already noted in some of his earlier films – for better or worse, it’s one of the things that marks him out as a director of such great interest. But combined here with his lack of interest in maintaining a clear-cut narrative, with a script (courtesy of George Tabori) that make the Andy Warhol Frankenstein and Dracula movies look like models of quiet good taste, and with Elizabeth Taylor cleaving into view like the dread revenant of a thousand ham-fisted melodramas, and…. well it’s a wonderful, awful, dignity pulverizing, nigh-on hallucinogenic nightmare of a motion picture, conceived and executed on an unself-conscious level that most of the subsequent filmmakers who have SET OUT to freak people out with this sort of thing could never hope to equal.

It’s as if in trying to take his established set of favourite themes – psycho-sexual power games, shifting identities and unconventional, destructive love triangles played out within the enclosed environment of a single building – and applying them to a group of characters who are dangerously mentally ill, Losey has somehow forgotten to examine that illness from an outside perspective, and instead has let it take over and command every aspect of the film. From the lighting and the costumes through the dialogue, the over-acting, the fragmented narrative, the seemingly endless, pointless emotional climaxes, ‘Secret Ceremony’ isn’t so much a film about people who are insane, it is more a film that has GONE insane.

Naturally I commend it to you in the highest possible terms. ‘Secret Ceremony’, ladies and gents. As the poster blurb for that other misunderstood cinematic gem ‘Wayne’s World II’ put it: you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll hurl.