2nd February 2009

As one who is happier watching moderately obscure and offbeam movies rather than settling for synthesised studio sludge, and as one who’d rather watch an indifferent exploitation film rather than a heavyweight Hollywood drama, I usually have much more fun in the backwaters of 70s sleaze movies than I ever did at the London Film Festival. I do try and balance the two extremes in the interests of a healthy diet, but frankly a straight choice between Amistad and Love Letters Of A Portuguese Nun isn’t any choice at all.

Jess Franco’s IMDb page gives him 189 director credits under 69 different names, and a random few have dropped into my mailbox recently. And even though these particular examples are ultimately pretty terrible, I’m not about to cancel any others off the rental queue.

Because when he’s good, he’s very good...but when he’s bad he’s absolutely unspeakable. Vampyros Lesbos and She Killed In Ecstasy are wonderful little films, with fab and groovy costumes and sets, and even more fab and groovy soundtracks. (I know how to have fun: I’m playing the Vampyros Lesbos Sexadelic Dance Party CD even as I type. Who cares if the movie makes a blind bit of sense: it’s crazy but, crucially, entertaining.) X-312 Flight To Hell, on the other hand, was made in the same year but is entirely non-fab and as ungroovy as you can get: a cheap, dull and instantly forgettable slab of sleaze in which various unsavoury characters crash in the Amazon jungle and have to walk back to civilisation. Occasionally some of them take their clothes off. Whoopee.

Dracula: Prisoner Of Frankenstein and Curse Of Frankenstein form a particularly grotty double bill of the more unspeakable variety of Franco. They’re just two of the ten films Franco made in 1972, and both are complete nonsense, cheerfully mixing and matching from disparate sources, fact with fiction with other fiction. Not only are they nonsense but they’re incredibly dull and that’s the problem: I’m fine with nonsense if it’s interesting nonsense. It’s also technically shoddy: the production values are microscopic and all the money’s on the screen, all £3 of it. Franco’s big directorial technique is the zoom lens and boy, he’s not afraid to use it (whether or not he’s zooming into the right thing, or indeed anything in particular). I’d hate to see this from the front row of the Odeon Leicester Square.

In Dracula: Prisoner Of Frankenstein, Dracula is killed fairly quickly, not by Abraham Van Helsing as is the norm, but by Dr Seward. Frankenstein (a dubbed Dennis Price) turns up and revives him, with the intention of creating an undead army so he can rule the world and the afterlife as well. He also has his monster in a metal box. Eventually it all comes to a head at Frankenstein’s castle where another vampire (who had previously done nothing more than occasionally climb out of a coffin and wander off in her nightie) sets off a fight between Dracula and the monster while Seward rallies the peasants in a flaming-torch lynch mob. In the whole thing there are maybe a dozen lines of dialogue (nobody speaks for the first seventeen minutes or so) and half of that is Frankenstein soliloquising his fiendish plans in voiceover.

Curse Of Frankenstein is even messier. We don’t get any Dracula this time but we do have Frankenstein and Dr Seward back, both played by the same actors as before, plus the monster (now painted silver). The new addition is Cagliostro, who Wikipedia informs me was an 18th century Italian occultist and alchemist, and we also get his daughter Melissa, a bird woman who eats human flesh. Cagliostro and the previous film’s Dracula are both played by the same actor, Franco regular Howard Vernon. And, in scenes entirely unrelated to the rest of the movie, Franco’s wife Lina Romay wanders about the forest talking to her granny. Frankenstein buys the farm fairly early but keeps being brought back to life by various characters to answer questions. I only saw this movie about a week ago and the details of Cagliostro’s plans for world domination have already seeped out of my mind. But according to the subtitles, Frankenstein’s full name is Mathias Artur Frankenstein and he has a daughter called Vera.

Incidentally, what I didn’t realise until after I’d sent the Curse Of Frankenstein DVD back was that Franco had shot some parts of the film twice: with and without nudity for different markets. The DVD’s extra features included scenes from the “unclothed” cut of the movie rather than the fully clad main film. But I honestly don’t think it would have been a better viewing experience for having randomly selected scenes performed in the nude..

Until the next time.

Richard.