BEST OF 2023: Jess Franco releases.

The Best, and most revelatory, Jess Franco related release of 2023 was Severin Films' comprehensive 4 disc, 4K UHD-Blu-ray set of Jess Franco's 1970 COUNT DRACULA, directed for Harry Alan Towers in November 1969. The world UHD premiere and the Blu-ray have spectacular video and sound quality, scanned in 4K from recently discovered, uncut camera negatives. The elements are virtually pristine. There's over 5 hours of bonus features, a highly informative commentary track by horror historian David Del Valle and Franco actress Maria Rohm, and much more.

I have to admit that I've never been a big fan of this film, either as a Dracula film or a Jess Franco film. It seemed cheap, rushed, deeply flawed and not as true to the Bram Stoker novel as it claimed to be. I had been c onditioned by the two previous Dracula features Hammer had already made with Christopher Lee in the title role, HORROR OF DRACULA and DRACULA, PRINCE OF DARKENESS (1965), both more than capably directed by Terence Fisher. Of course there were the commanding presence of Lee and the magesterial musical score by Bruno Nicolai to savor. But that was not enough in my view when I first saw the film on local television broacast in the early 1970s. Something was missing, I felt. What was missing were the carefully lit compositions of exteriors and general lighting design, both restored now in 4K. The interiors, at least, look gorgeous, bathed in color gel lighting and arranged with care. Franco did his job, but it didn't turn out to be a passion project. As Maria Rohm points out in her commentary, both Franco and Towers knew the game was over and that this would be their last collaboration.

My introduction to the film was via a local television broadcast in the mid 1970s. I was a confirmed fan of the Hammer Dracula's, especially HORROR OF DRACULA (1958) and DRACULA PRINCE OF DARKNESS (1965), which also featured Lee as a much more athletic Count than he is in Franco's film. I had already heard of Jess Franco by reading a men's magazine article in the late 1960s about his notorious X rated (in America) SUCCUBUS [NECRONOMICON] (1969). But it would be at least another decade before I would see that on a poor VHS dupe. After viewing COUNT DRACULA I wasn't anxious to see another Jess Franco film any time soon. It started with those damn German Shepherds standing in for wolves of Transylvania, first seen during the coach ride where Dracula drives Jonathan Harker (Fred Williams) to his castle. That everything was painfully out of focus didn't help. It seemed a poorly photographed, rushed, cheap production, carelessly planned and, at best, routinely directed. And it didn't follow the promise of the title card that the story would be told exactly as Stoker did. Sometimes exact faithfulness is not the way to go. NOSFERATU (1922), the classic silent version directed by F.W. Murnau, is most interesting in the way it departs from the novel. Max Schreck as Count Orlok looks nothing like the king vampire described in Stoker's prose. Orlok resembles a rodent which has someone taken on human shape. That look is continued with the appearance of Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog's 1979 remake, although the actor adds considerable pathos to the character. The full title of the Murnau film, NOSFERATU: A SYMPHONY OF HORROR correctly states its tone, pacing and texture. It's a  piece of melancholy music suffused with dread, illustrated by Expressionist compositions. Tod Browning's 1931 DRACULA, based on the hit stage play, is as static as an over rehearsed theater piece, but Bela Lugosi is hypnotic in the lead, even though the second half trails off into soporific dialogue scenes. It too has a musical quality, struck in the opening strains from Tchaikovsky's SWAN LAKE. Browning may have had a more suggestive, subtle cinematic work in mind if one considers some of his later statements, and Universal recut the picture, shortening it. Jess Franco, working with Lee in the title role, worked with producer Towers, to stay with the novel's description of the Count, and he's a rather sad antique, albeit a deadly one, who talks nostalgically of the history of his family and homeland. His white hair and moustache in the early scenes conform closely to Stoker's original description and as the film proceeds the hair turns black as he gorges on a series of victims. The blood is the life and reverses the aging process. But he's never as menacing as
Schrek, Lugosi or the swashbuckling Dracula in the Hammer films starring Lee. Severin's HD presentation gives the film greater sharpness and more enriched color than all previous home video releases. The high definition detail is extraordinary and focuses attention on the very artificial looking cobwebs seen throughout the castle, the overhead wire mechanism which drives the bats and makes the suddenly revived stuffed animals which the heroes encounter at one point seem less menacing than ever.

Franco's famous crash zooms seem to be utilized for mere convenience, to avoid the time it would take to do additional set-ups, rather than the space-collapsing devices which give such films as DRACULA CONTRA FRANKENSTEIN a compellingly abstract, almost post-modern quality.The jarring telezooms into coffins, landscapes and objects seem to announce a personal stylistic choice in that film rather than a cost and time saving measure, although they probably were also used for that reason. Hammer's Dracula films always looked lush and more well resourced than they actually were, EL CONDE DRACULA looks rather tattered in comparison. The obviously fake boulders thrown onto the gypsy caravan and the burning of Dracula in his coffin throw us out of the movie at a crucial moment. The film ends in a flurry of more shaky telezooms.

The brooding, symphonic, urgent Bruno Nicolai score creates most of the atmosphere throughout and makes up for the visual awkwardness of many key scenes. The living dead girl manner of Soledad Miranda is electrifying in the scenes she shares with Lee and provide memorable frissons. Franco himself seems rather dispirited in his appearance as the clinic employee. Perhaps that's because the director himself was becoming deeply disillusioned with his work for Towers, the film's co-writer and co-producer. Franco was obviously becoming frustrated and bored as an employee of the Towers film factory. Just compare his energized presence as the inquisitive writer in EUGENIE DE SADE (1970), made just after this film and without Towers overseeing the production as writer-producer. It comes as no surprise that COUNT DRACULA would be Franco's final directing job for Towers.

The factory process of commercial filmmaking in Spain during the horror boom would become an even more interesting subtext in Portabella's intriguing experimental documentary on the making of EL CONDE DRACULA.

Franco struggled to make a personal film while remaining true to the source material, but Portabella's unique film deconstructs both the final product and workaday production of it. Franco did bring considerable artistry to the final product but CUADECUC-VAMPIR, opens up the actual shoot, infuses it with an eerie, abstract poetry and provides another subtext, that of making a commercial horror film on an iconic subject in late 1960s Spain still ruled by the dictator Francisco Franco. Spain welcomed international film productions in the 1960s as a way of increasing cultural exchange, boosting an uncertain economy and bringing foreign investment in the national coffers. Parts of DR. ZHIVAGO and Sergio Leone's wildly successful Spaghetti Westerns used Spain's desert and mountain regions as a ready made exotic backdrop. Costs were low there and the locals were grateful to get steady work on US, Italian and other co-productions. Portabella, who had produced Bunuel's notoriously banned (in Spain) VIRIDIANA (1961) had already rattled the authorities there, and he was much more subversive in every regard than EL CONDE DRACULA's director at the that time, although when Franco later cut himself loose he would evolve into a master of subversive genre cinema from the 1970s onward.
Portabella shot his film in high contrast black and white, sometimes the image goes into negative, creating a further sense of unreality, projecting the footage of the shoot into an alternate dimension. It chronicles the shoot in roughly sequential order but selects key scenes and then shoots them simultaneously to the actual production from different camera angles, sometimes revealing the cast and crew (including Jess Franco) as they go about their work. Soledad Miranda looks directly into Portabella's camera and flashes a demure, somewhat chilling smile. Christopher Lee mugs for the camera and seems to be having a good time on the set as he reaches out toward Portabella's camera as if to grab it while a jarring sound is heard on the soundtrack. Most importantly, Portabella, like Murnau, understood that the story of Dracula was best told without words, the stumbling block in the Lugosi version. The best moments in the Hammer Dracula's were the wordless moments of menace just before and during the appearances of Lee's Count. It should be noted that Franco's DRACULA CONTRA FRANKENSTEIN contains no dialogue during its opening scenes and most of of its runtime. What dialogue there is is functional, delivered with dispatch and minimized by the director and actors. Of course, the big difference there is that Franco cast longtime collaborator Howard Vernon as a very unique, fumetti style Count Dracula.

The use of sound is quite unusual and distinctive. Most of the footage is either silent or appears with music, loud crashing sounds, creating a soundscape which operates in counterpoint to the images. Footsteps are heard but they don't quite synch up with the footfalls in the scene, a train is heard but it doesn't seem to be the modern one seen suddenly cutting across the screen. The arrival of Harker by coach in Transylvania is here scored with disturbing crashing sounds while the arrival a 1960a black American sedan, delivering Maria Rohm on set clad in a stylish floppy hat, leopard skin coat and movie star sunglasses is accompanied by dreamy jazz.

The black and white images have a very grainy texture, enhanced by the 1080 HD resolution. A very different version of the novel unfolds in Portabella's footage, one which somehow is much closer to the tone of the original prose than Jess Franco's finished version. Capturing a sense of dread between the shots of the actors in informal groupings or preparing for an imminent shot. The final scene bursts into synchronized sound as Lee reads the final lines of the novel, in which the destruction of Dracula is described. Set in the actor's dressing room, he addresses the audience directly, speaking of the economy of the prose and notes some of the descriptive details. The destruction of Dracula in the is, of course, quite different, replacing it with the burning of the Count in his coffin after which the body is dumped over the castle walls. The staging, shooting and editing of the scene leave much to be desired and one is struck by how simple and superior the actual ending is as Lee reads them in his resonant voice. He then closes the book and stares into camera for an unnervingly long time before Portabella is heard calling, "cut!". Those few lines are really all that is needed to make an effective closing scene.  Lee and Portabella obviously had a much better sense of the what made the novel so haunting and memorable than did the writer and director of EL CONDE DRACULA. That's why these new HD release of both films is so essential for those interested in the novel, the history of Dracula films, Spanish horror, experimental cinema and the career of Jess Franco.
This fully loaded package also has two discs of Special Features, some ported over from the previous Severin Blu-ray. Probably the most interesting of the new features is a 90 minute 2017 Documentary on the making of both COUNT DRACULA and CUADECUC-VAMPIR, with Dr. Alex Mendibil. The inclusion of the full Bruno Nicolai's magesterial score should please both fans of the composer and European cult movie scores. It adds tremendously to what impact the finished product has both as a horror film and a Jess Franco film. (C) Robert Monell, 2023****

BLUE RITA/DAS FRAUENHAUS Blu-ray; 2 Disc SE DANCE, GAS, KIDNAP, TORTURE... REPEAT.>

BLUE RITA SE: Full Moon. This kinky, visually dazzling Eurospy fantasia is one of Franco's most unique films and a personal favorite of the features he made for Erwin C. Dietrich. 2 Disc- Blu-ray+DVD. BLUE RITA/DAS FRAUENHAUS, filmed in Paris and featuring Martine Flety (COCKTAIL SPECIAL) and Pamela Stanford (LORNA, THE EXORCIST) as leaders of a criminal organization of female seductresses and spies. The visual style of this Erwin Dietrich-Robert De Nesle production, deploys a lot of colorful costumes, color gel lighting, dutch camera angles, smoke, mirrors and eye catching filter effects. The women are a bisexual, sadistic, and exhibitionist lot who make a lot of trouble for a Russian spy (Eric Falk) and an undercover female Interpol agent sent to break up the operation, hidden behind a high class stripi club in Paris. Opening with a strip performance lit by a crimson spotlight the performance scenes give Franco ample oppurtunity to display his fetish stylistics with full aesthetic splendor.

This all plays as a more stylish reconsideration of the plot and style of Franco's Harry Alan Tower's produced THE GIRL FROM RIO (1969); a turnaround from his Captive Women portofoio of Women-in Prison/Peril epics. It's much less conventional and more infused with Franco's unique personal style than Towers allowed. Dietrich was a more supportive producer who gave Franco permission to be himself. That means what we have here is a wild eyed action painting, a million light years from a tepid Bond imitation. The Paris exteriors and sci-fi interiors give the film a look and vibe quite different from the other Erwin Dietrich productions. The much less supportive Robert De Nesle was co-producer and was very much in attendance during the Parisian shooting according to an interview I did with Pamela Stanford on her work with Franco. She remembered De Nesle literally rushing the cast from location to location between scenes and making sure no time was wasted. He always considered Franco a reliable employee who would deliver a profitable product. Dietrich respected Franco as an artist who would deliver a personalized work in his own time so didn't bother interfering. The French language track here, with English subtitles included, give the proceedings an Art-Exploitation q along; the English dub is included on the DVD disc and unfortunateAly gooes against the film's aesthetic grain. Also included on the Blu-ray is a photo gallery and an interview with Franco enthusiast-director Peter Strickland. The color gel lighting effects and fetishistic props really pop, shimmer and shake in HD and the more appropriate French soundtrack make this a much more enjoyable experience than FULL MOON'S previous DVD release. (C) Robert Monell, 2023 Product details Product Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.48 x 5.31 x 1.18 inches Director ‏ : ‎ Jess Franco, Jesus Franco Media Format ‏ : ‎ Anamorphic, NTSC, Widescreen Run time ‏ : ‎ 1 hour and 15 minutes Release date ‏ : ‎ December 12, 2023 Actors ‏ : ‎ Esther Moser, Olivier Mathot, Erik Falk, Pamela Stanford, Sarah Strasberg Studio ‏ : ‎ Full Moon Features ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0CF39WB42 Number of discs ‏ : ‎ 2 Best Sellers Rank: #15,181 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV) #1,669 in Action & Adventure Blu-ray Discs

SEXUAL STORY OF O (Jess Franco, 1981)

Historia Sexual de O 1981 86 MINUTES European Trash Cinema and Video Search of Miami (U.S. import)/Severin Films Blu-ray. DIRECTED BY JESS FRANCO WITH: ALICIA PRINCIPE, CARMEN CARRION, DANIEL KATZ, MAMIE KAPLAN, MAURO RIVERA ======================================= Features Reviews* One might think of another S&M tinged Franco film while watching SEXUAL STORY OF O. That would be the 1982 BLACK BOOTS, LEATHER WHIPS. Both films deal with sadomasochism gone beyond a recreational form of sex. That film was a Jess Franco Neo-Noir with a downbeat ending. SEXUAL STORY OF O is even more downbeat and nihilistic.

Odile (Alicia Principe), a beautiful but naive young woman vacationing in Spain, attracts the attentions of a voyeuristic couple who live across from her hotel. The couple spy on her as she lounges around naked, and when they invite her over for a session of grou sex, Odile gives in immediately. Odile's fate is telegraphed with reading from Norman Mailer's downbeat war novel, THE NAKED AND THE DEAD. After spending days enjoying this menage a trois, the couple take Odile to the villa of the wealthy Wanda Von Karlstein (Carmen Carrion), where the sex continues. Wanda's sadistic husband (Daniel Katz) drugs Odile's drink and rapes her. When she awakens, Odile is chained to a bed, and her captors have sado-erotic torture and death in mind. One of her abductors has a sudden attack of remorse after finding her mutilated body, murders the Von Karlsteins, and walks into the ocean carrying Odile's dead body, shades of the ending of the Val Lewton-Jaques Tourneur masterwork, I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE.

HISTORIA SEXUAL DE O is quite a bit better than some of Franco's rather tedious sex-a-thons of the 1980s. The flowery, tropical locations and gorgeous cinematography offers a counterpoint to the downbeat melodrama. A melancholy female vocal sets a sombre tone throughout, which Franco maintains until the very last shot of the blazing sun beating down on the aftermath of violence and death. There are many effective visual and aural touches throughout, which amplify the theme of corrupted innocence. For instance, Odile is first seen wandering in an idyllic garden reading excepts from Norman Mailer's gritty World War II novel, "The Naked and the Dead," literally foreshadowing her own fate. It is also significant that her voyeuristic abductors use Beethoven's famous chorus from his Ninth Symphony to seduce her attention, underscoring the theme of Old World decadence preying on Odile's gullibility. As Odile, Alicia Principe (a.k.a. Alicia Pedreira) offers sensuality and modernity with a tragic ignorance of the brutal ways of the world. Exotic looking Carmen Carrion and the gaunt, sinister Daniel Katz are well-cast as the wealthy tormentors. Katz's impotent freak-out while raping Odile is especially blood-curdling. There is also a subtle sociological subtext similiar to the situation in Franco's 1973 THE PERVERSE COUNTESS, wherein upper caste villains use a financially struggling lower-class couple to provide victims for their bloodlust. This inequity creates a further irony in which a henchman turns on his vicious employers. The final sequence is shot with filters which spectacular light halations, colorful erutions of primary color patterns over images of torture and murder. With the players masked up and costumed for predatory S&M, it moves the action into a surreal plane, a taboo dimension as in a sequence from Sade's writing. If it uses the context of a snuff film, it's one made by a poet, elegantly shot, edited and scored, with a palpable emotional impact. Franco had blended S&M imagery with horror as far back as his early 1960's Gothics such as THE AWFUL DR. ORLOFF and THE SADISTIC BARON VON KLAUS and he would continue into his post 1990s digital era, with films such as FLOWERS OF PERVERSION.

Scenes and images from earlier Franco films are recycled throughout but in altered contexts, such as the scene in which the only survivor of the massacre carries Odile's body into the ocean, reenacting the end of THE PERVERSE COUNTESS. The long, excruciating sequence detailing Odile's torture and death is painful to watch, as chains, whips, and studded medieval-style weapons are used. Franco encourages us to become emotionally engaged with Odile, often taking her point of view, which ratchets the level of intensity even higher. The stuff of a sex tourist's nightmares, HISTORIA SEXUAL DE O is highly recommended. (C) Robert Monell 2023 =======================================