Jess Franco's final period of filmmaking lasts from the the second part of the last decade of the 20th Century until his death in 2013. OBSESSION: THE FILMS OF JESS FRANCO doesn't cover it at all, being that it was published in 1992, still situated in the analog age. There seems to have been a generalized dismissal of this last batch of films, some remakes of earlier films, such as INCUBUS, BROKEN DOLLS, which revisit the plots and characters of two of his best films, LORNA, THE EXORCIST (1974) and ISLAND OF LOST WOMEN. More about those later.
LUST FOR FRANKENSTEIN (1998)
Written, Produced and Directed by Jess Franco, US/Spain.
With Lina Romay, Analia Ivars, Carlos Subterfuge, Michelle Bauer, Amber Newman, Robert King.
93min. A One Shot Production.
While LUST FOR FRANKENSTEIN may evoke memories of B movie icon William Beaudine's final feature film, JESSE JAMES MEETS FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER (1965), it's nonetheless a good place to begin a survey. This 1998 remake of a classic of the director's Robert De Nesle portfolio is sometimes visually astounding, obsessively personal, ultra-bizarre, morbid, perverse and maddening, terms which come immediately to mind while or just after watching this most recent entry into the Frankenstein file of Jess Franco. Earlier drafts include such grade Z mixes of horror, sexploitation and experimentation as THE EROTIC RITES OF FRANKENSTEIN (THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN -1972 ) and DRACULA, PRISONER OF FRANKENSTEIN filmed with the same cast, crew and sets the same year. The monsters in those films, played by Fernando Bilbao as a silver skinned, moronic killing machine, have nothing on Michelle Bauer in this new version. Casting the American scream queen in this legendary role was a stroke of genius, as her always nude (except for combat boots!) creature is a riveting, pathetic creation as the lover-slave of sex-starved scientist Moira (Lina Romay), the frustrated daughter of Dr. Frankenstein.
The plot is minimal, as usual in Franco's post 1980's work, narrative elements are pushed to very edges of what can best be described as a nonstop barrage of digital delirium delivered at full metal intensity to the eye, ear and libido. The violent nightmares of Moira include bloodly visions of Dr. Frankenstein and his female composite. The monster (whom may or may not be Moira's erotic fantasy) shows up, becomes her lover and her instrument of revenge, killing everyone else in the cast. They end up in bed together at the end, as Moira wonders if it all really happened. The action (or non-action) begins and ends with a famous quote from Hitchcock's REBECCA (1940), an Academy Award winning classic and one of the numerous direct and indirect references to films made by others as well as Franco's own previous work (Romay is seen wearing T-Shirts with logos from SUCCUBUS and THE DEVIL CAME FROM AKASAVA- late 1960's thrillers featuring - respectively - Janine Reynaud and Soledad Miranda, two legendary and hypnotic sex stars the likes of which we will probably never again experience). We are a long way from Franco's earlier adaptations of James Whale's classic THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, and Franco has undergone a radical stylistic evolution by this time. This wasn't going to compete with memories of Warhol's FLESH FOR FRANKENSTEIN (1974), which had platters of dripping guts, 3D, Joe Dellasandro, Udo Kier and the Warhol name attached, but neither is it Richard Cunha's 1958 monochrome trashterpiece, FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER, which was targeted for a certain profit point on the American Drive-in circuits.
The lack of a sustained/coherent plot is likely to deny many access to the visual/aural delights which abound as is the obsessive focus on sex (nothing new for Franco). What is new here is the fact that the production has the unmistakeable DNA of video and is layered with what seems like miles of digital effects courtesy of the director's collaboration with the technicians at the Centro de Tecnologia de la Imagen-University of Malaga, Spain. Imagine the "Beyond the Infinite" final passage of Kubrick's 2001... redone by Salvador Dali, Charles Manson and the Marquis de Sade, on a budget of next to nothing, and you get some kind of idea what is in store. The digital imaging appears in virtually every scene and many shots have numerous layers of highly saturated colors, incongruent forms, jarring video noise, floating structures, playing over the erotic encounters between the scientist, the monster, a dominitrix from hell (the white-hot Analia Ivars) and everyone else in sight.
Add to all this a throbbing, jacked-up neo-heavy metal score by Mikel Sagues and Franco himself and you have the ingredients for a mind reeling spiral which forever seems on the verge of spinning out of control, but somehow seeming to occur at the rate of events at the bottom of the ocean floor. Welcome to the parallel universe called Jess Franco, digital style. "Why has it taken you so long to get here?" the film seems to ask as it commences.
More on Franco's video-verse in Part 2.
Orignally published and d(C) by Robert Monell at Thu, Dec 09, 1999, 12:08:07; New Expanded Version (C) 2023, All Rights Reserved.
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