PHOLLASTIA (1987) (original title) Phollastía France Fellations sauvages(new title) Spain Phollastía

Directed by "Betty Carter" [Jess Franco & Lina Romay]/Screenplay by Chuck Evans [Jess Franco], Lulu Lavere [Lina Romay]/DP: Terry De Corsia [Jess Franco]/Music: Daniel J. White/Editor: Jess Franco/83m 15s/Video: Fil a' Films [France] Additional cast: Carlos Quiroga, Bruce Leduc-rn A. Bartolos Velasco, Rex Robinson-rn C. Gonzalez Ordi, Traci King-rn Elisa Mateo, John Olms-rn Saez Montoro. [Credits from OBSESSION: THE FILMS OF JESS FRANCO which also lists an alternate French video title, Fellations Sauvages]

Produced by "Phalos Films", Madrid, this is rather upscale for a Jess Franco hardcore. Hiring a cast of experienced Spanish hardcore professionals and featuring some gleaming, mirrored sets, this shot-in-Benidorm sex comedy parody of the 1980s ABC primetime soap opera, DYNASTY (1981-1989),  has some interesting images and is staged with the kind of care a slightly more than average budget allow The Carrington family, including the cheating husband Blake and his scheming wife, are at odds over cosmetic expenditures. In the meantime their dysfunctional spawn go their own sex soaked ways. It's wall-to-wall hardcore orgies of handjobs, blowjobs, group sex and more sex. Franco pulls his camera back more than usual but some of the clever verbal puns were lost on me since my French is nil and I only had access to a poor dub of the ancient French video. It all suggests that by the late 1980s the hardcore novelty was beginning to wear on Spanish clientele as well as Jess Franco. Sarcastically referencing DYNASTY's Joan Collins, Lina Romay isbilled as "Jean Collins" and along with Jose Miguel Garcia Marfa (EL MIRON Y LA EXHIBICIONISTA-1985) are the only faces familiar to me in this show. But this is a film not really interested in..... faces. The costumes look surprising upscale given the genre. Apparently, the money spent on the cast and production made sure that it wasn't profitable after the box-office was exhausted.*

Treating this as a full feature production with a higher budget and pro porn players to be paid backfired on Franco according to Antonio Mayans, who declined to be in this film and FALOCREST, another hardcore parody shot back-to-back in Benidorm, but acted as the film's sales agent in the Barcelona market. According to Mayans, in an interview in the defunct FRANCOMANIA WEBSITE, "I wasn't around when Jess made them. He went to Benidorm and shot them there. It's different if you happen to be making a movie and - say, after lunch - you start filming a little porn film as well with the same available technicians, the same available actresses. It's a matter of shooting some porn footage, editing it and then selling iit. Fernando Vidal would put up some money and then he'd do the selling. But to go to Benidorm to make two porn movies, with people, with the structure of a real movie - that simply doesn't work out and I told him."**

Also, Franco scholar Francesco Cesari points out that Follar in Spanish = "to fuck" and the Ph, as in Phollastia = F. Yet another subterranean Jess Franco linguistic "joke" buried beneath the layers of hardcore action. Speaking of linguistic jokes and references, PHOLLASTIA and other 1980s Franco hardcores can be considered the director's own Lingua Franco. A lingua franca, also known as a bridge language, common language, trade language, auxiliary language, link language or language of wider communication here takes the form of films which are often classified and rejected by Franco critics as only ways open to the director to remain active and generate income. But being a director who imbues everything he films with his own personal magic one has to look at them and scrutinize them as "Jess Franco" films, projects which did indeed generate income and did keep him active while forcing him to translate his visions and obsessions into the language and structures of commercial pornography. The orthological games, the ditzy (even for Franco) photography, the frenetic attempts at Bunuel type comedy, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeiosie meets DYNASTY or FALCON CREST, all exmplify this.

*Spanish ticket sales amounted to  29,693, not enough to show a real profit after productions costs are factored into the equation.  [Thanks to Francesco Cesari] ** Thanks to Nzoog for the translation of this interview, conducted by "Chus" and "Al Pereira" Reference print: XHAMSTER video This is part of a continuing series on Jess Franco's 1980s hardcore record. FALOCREST (1987), made at the same time and on the same locations as this film, will be covered next. (C)Robert Monell 2025

LA CRIPTA DE LAS CONDENADAS-- Jess Franco, 2012

LA CRIPTA DE LAS CONDENADAS

LA CRIPTA DE LOS CONDENADAS (2012) When I interviewed Jess Franco in 2005 he described this video project as being inspired by the writing of Nathaniel Hawthorne and was to be titled THE HOUSE NEXT TO THE CEMETERY. It obviously evolved unyil it finally appeared on Spanish DVD* as LA CRIPTA DE LOS CONDENADOS. Here is an except from Alex Mendibil’s essay on the film, written in 2008, which appears in another blog post here. It also appears in Alain Petit’s essential critical study: Ou les prospérités du bis. “The 80's Golden Films productions showed how the Franco universe could rid itself of some of its essential elements without losing its essence. In films such as MACUMBA SEXUAL (1981) or EL SINIESTRO DR. ORLOFF (1982), we deal with familiar themes and classic gothic characters like the vampire or the mad scientist but without all the acting, set-ups or typical wardrobes. Castles, candles, crucifixes, cemeteries and sci-fi lab equipment were replaced by extravagant beach houses, fashionable clothing and everyday objects. The result was disconcerting, but somehow managed to articulate a less figurative and more abstract language in which the renewed versions of Orloff, Al Pereira, Radek or Red Lips still made sense. With the shift to video in the late 90's, the destruction of the traditional cinematic codes was definitive: no set-ups at all or overtly fake sets, natural lighting, direct sound, video distortion effects, and above all, non-professional actors hamming it up or, on the other hand, a very naturalistic, almost cinéma vérité feel. Any device used to maintain the illusion of cinema is removed or deformed to the point of parody, as if Franco wanted to emphasize the death of that former cinema and suggest an unrepresentative cinema, a cinema abstract (*), if you will. In LA CRIPTA DE LAS MUJERES MALDITAS, the rupture with mainstream cinema is complete. The film takes place in closed-off rooms, half-empty and white, and the only things we are allowed to see are a few looped images of a cemetery, and the blurred image of an angel shaped statue that illustrates the final battle against the cursed women. We know about that battle only through the voice- over since the images are only abstract and difficult to decipher at times. Adding to all of the above (lack of set-ups, costumes, performances, video effects, etc), Franco finally gets rid of the last two pillars of classic cinema: the director and the screenplay. As stated above, this is a story without story but Jess Franco goes even further and invents a funny trick to show that he too disappears from the set, letting the characters shoot the film with video cameras and, thanks to some strategically placed mirrors, discovering that nobody is directing them on the set. Fata Morgana, the real protagonist of the film, assistant director and cinematographer, directs the film literally in front of our eyes, shooting it while playing one of the cursed women at the same time. Nothing is hidden, everything is shown: lightning, cables, the boom mic and even the back of the camera. It is not a video documentary, no video-creation, no experimental video, it is something that still has no name. The only overbearance to the genre resembles a William Castle-style joke: at the half point, there is a "To be continued…" title card, then a fade to black, and then the movie starts up again with a “Part 2” title card on screen. According to Jess Franco, this is his own version of the double-bill features in the GRINDHOUSE (2007) style. Despite being shot on video, SNAKEWOMAN was an exception to this trend since it was made following the traditional cinematic standards.

Alex Mendibil (2008) Dr. Mendibil’s observations are well taken in this context. Some may see the film as a plotless porn epic wallowing in nudity and lesbian sexual activity. Franco has gotten to the point here where plot is of no interest, as his article points out, there is only a seemingly eternal present. This seemingly eternal present is populated by several nude women, some seen via carefully placed mirrors, taping the action/non-action with cameras. As Mendibil notes, plot is irrelevant here, as is the concept of director. The performers are the directors, the auteurs, a concept which will be unsettling to some viewers and critics. One immediately thinks of Warhol’s experimental features of the mid 1960s, or the jarring moments of naked human interaction in various films of John Cassavettes. But Franco goes even further, there are no dialogues here, no tortured monologues or confrontations as in the cinema of Cassavettes.

Here is what I thought of the film in 2015. Since then my thoughts have evolved: "Bless you, tremulous, throbbing flesh» a female narrator intones over a sensual interlude between several women in a room flushed with orange light. Yes, we are in the realm of Jess Franco and this is just one interlude in a two part 150 minute epic poem of joyous, mysterious, interactive, nonstop sensuality and erotic sensation. One doesn’t want to call it Sex, at least not of the traditional sort. It’s more a display of erotic signs and motifs in the cinema. Once again, as Medibil points out, there are no "performances", no male authoritarian director and no screenplay outside of a general outline or notes Franco may have used as a starting point. It's something unnamable and might be entitled, apologies to Samuel Beckett and HP Lovecraft, The Unnamable. As I wrote infamous review of Franco's following film, AL PEREIRA VS THE ALLIGATOR LADIES, it's an anti-masterpiece of anti-cinema. A nude actress points a video camera at the camera shooting the scene, breaking through the «fourth wall» of cinema. The group of Sapphic lovers often look at the camera, the viewer, who becomes part of the «action» or matrix of figures pleasuring each other in a no-budget labyrinth of mirrors, wicker chairs and television monitors on which the encounters are caught from other angles and reflected in strategically placed mirrors. One is reminded of Dr. Jacques Lacan's famous mirror stage.

The interiors are obviously someone’s (Franco's?) apartment in Malaga, but it represents the crypt of our Lesbos lovers obsessively, and with obvious joy, loving each other in lieu of the Exterminating Angel (Bunuel’s?) who will arrive for the judgement which makes up LA CRIPTA DE LAS CONDENADAS II. LA CRIPTA... is illustrated by the music of Bach, Hindemith, Ravel and Stan Kenton. Additional music by Daniel J. White. Originally scored and edited as films made in 2007 and screened at the 2008 Cinematheque Francais Jess Franco retrospective under the title A BAD DAY AT THE CEMETERY aka La Cripta de las mujeres malditas, an earlier two part version with somewhat different music and editing. It should be noted that this experimental epic, which uses the erotic cinema format as a commercial handle, is as obsessively personal and unapologetically expansive as the cinema of 1960s LBGT auteur Jack Smith (Flaming Creatures), more New York Underground than Los Angeles porn. A totally immersive experience which imposes alternate spatial-temporal coordinates on the viewer. There is no There there, as Gertrude Stein famously wrote of a storied city. Now available on 2 DVDs with English, French, Italian and German subtitle options. Bonus features include a Jess Franco interview, 3 short films including Lina Romay tras la camara and more. PAL, will play ALL REGIONS. Widescreen Anamorphic 1.78:1/Audio DD 2.0 Spanish. From VIAL OF DELICATESSENS. http://www.vialofdelicatessens.blogspot.com.es"

But that was then. This is now, 2025, and I have watched the film a number of times since finding further layers in a film which at first seem no deeper than the tender flesh of its actresses. The action, or non-action, unfolds in a timeless place, several rooms with shag carpeted floors and fitted with numerous mirrors and several television monitors. Time has stopped. The 150m runtime of both parts could take place in a split second or over a long night or a thousand and one nights. Aside for the opening shot of a large rock being battered by the surrounding sea and several shots of a generic cemetery exterior, the actresses are trapped (or liberated) in a hermetically sealed space, represented perhaps by the director's apartment. There is very little movement by players. It is like watching the gradual melting of a long frozen world.

Although it is a plotless, non linear, non representational film there is a narrative spoken by a male narrator on the soundtrack. The narrator is the only male actor in the film. The narative will be familiar from Franco's 1967 masterpiece NECRONOMICON/SUCCUBUS, where it is told to the female lead Lorna by the character played by Jack Taylor, her lover and ultimate victim. The narrative tells of a wealthy prince who marries a beautiful young woman who has no memory of her past. After a year of being happily married the wife stabs her husband to death in a garden. When the dying prince asks her why she has done this his wife speaks of a castle in the depths of Hell. Although the story pertains to the characters and narrative of that film it is heard several times in La Cripta... as kind of a counterpoint/backstory to the action, adding another layer of context to the matrix. It is crucial to remember that the 1967 NECRONOMICON became the way in which Franco escaped the prison of being a commercial director operating within the boundaries of 1960s Spanish cinema and its censorship. It garnered the positive attention of Fritz Lang, AIP Pictures and, most importantly, producer-writer Happy Alan Towers who would contract Franco to direct a series of international co-productions for the next several years. These co-productions would give him access to such world renowned actors as Christopher Lee, Jack Palance, Klaus Kinski and take him to such locations as Brazil and Istanbul with larger budgets and resources never before available to him. NECRONOMICON resulted in a paradigm shift in his life and career and LA CRIPTA... executes another paradigm shift, albeit one at the very end of his career. It's very instructive to watch both films back to back for these reasons. La Cripta, however has never gained a wide release out of showing at the Cinemateque Francaise retrospective and a limited edition Spanish DVD. What we are left with is something without a comfortable focal plane, no breakaway scenes, no compass to guide us, there is only the fascinating X ray of what was once the cinema of Jess Franco.