All posts by Rod Lott

Reading Material

The Films of Jess Franco

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Even Jess Franco himself likely never thought he would the subject of three books released in roughly a year’s time, and yet, here we are, with Kristofer Todd Upjohn’s Jess Franco: The World’s Most Dangerous Filmmaker released last January, Stephen Thrower’s Flowers of Perversion due come Valentine’s Day, and now Wayne State University Press’ The Films of Jess Franco in between.

Isn’t it a great time to be alive?

In 2013, Ian Olney delivered the fine Euro Horror, an accessible book with an academic bent, and his Films of Jess Franco could be a spin-off, as it takes a similar approach and flies off with that spirit. Olney and co-editor Antonio Lázaro-Reboll present their case of viewing Franco as an auteur, despite his “amorphousness” filmography and tending toward “spectacle and excess over unity and logic” working against him. I’ll be damned if they don’t convince.

Franco forever tiptoed through the tulips of genre — including crackling crime pictures, which Sex, Sadism, Spain, and Cinema author Nicholas G. Schlegel contributes a terrific essay on — but among the dozen pieces that follow, most concern themselves with his melding of sex and horror: “horrotica,” as Tatjana Pavlović dubs it. For example, Aurore Spiers draws comparisons between the vampire cinema of Franco and Jean Rollin (Zombie Lake, anyone?), while Andy Willis uses the arguable breakthrough Awful Dr. Orlof as a benchmark, and Finley Freibert dares to tackle the “Politics of Monotony” in the man’s dreadful DIY efforts (à la Mari-Cookie and the Killer Tarantula that formed the final chapter of the man’s career.

But all that is the expected route. Not as predictable — and, therefore, twice as engaging — are a pair of late-in-book essays, in which Xavier Mendik and Lázaro-Reboll respectively consider the postmortem cult of Franco muse Soledad Miranda and the role that zines like Thrower’s Eyeball and Tim Lucas’ Video Watchdog on championing Franco, if not outright fertilizing his brand-name status. —Rod Lott

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Comedy

Virgin Paradise (1987)

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Okay, okay — yes, I admit it: The only reason I watched Virgin Paradise is because its no-name leading lady, Zuzana Marlow (née Struss, I presume), and her yellow bikini joined forces to become an arresting visual highlight of 1985’s The Tower, a Canadian SOV SF thriller, and this comedic caper appears to be her only other prominent role in a filmography as slim as her Venus Swimwear figure.

Despite its come-hither title smack-dab in the golden age of teen sex comedies, Virgin Paradise contains no sex. This made-for-TV cheapie is called that only because of its eventual locale of the Virgin Islands. That’s where three newly minted college graduates — the only grads that year, judging from the otherwise barren Toronto campus as they exit the ceremony — head to celebrate all that pomp and circumstance. Marlow is Samantha, the rich girl obsessed with money. Her Tower co-star Charlene Richards, is Candice, the black girl obsessed with men. And Gloria Gifford (This Is Spinal Tap) is Julie, the divorced girl obsessed with alimony checks.

zuzana struss marlowThe Schick Hydro Silk razor strip of a story upturns the girls’ vacation plans, as they charter a boat christened Bad Timing — I’ll say! — on which smugglers have stashed emeralds worth $3 million or $6 million, depending on the scene. The jewels look like beads borrowed from a game of Pente, and Candice hides them in her container of hair gel. Sitcom setup firmly in place, the girls run afoul of pirates, one of whom resembles a squatty James Brolin. Our heroic trio also gets lost in the Caribbean, because that’s what comedy rules dictate right after you wonder aloud, “Look at all these little islands. How could we possibly get lost?”

Did writer/director Ron Standen possibly think the material was funny? One punchline in the action-packed (relatively speaking, of course) finale has Samantha utter in exasperation, “I said ‘distraction,’ not ‘total destruction!'” For the Canuxploitation faithful who eat up these video-lensed Emmeritus Productions, its threadbare funding, two-left-feet plotting and — if we’re grading on a curve — amateurish performances will not disappoint. The pleasure they’ll derive is not the kind Standen intended … except for the endless scenes of Samantha, Candice and Julie in more bathing suits than can be counted — mission accomplished there, my good man.

zuzana struss marlowPresumably to get the running time to the magic 90-minute mark, Virgin Paradise comes with a wraparound sequence featuring the gorgeous Marlow as a different character. Speaking in a baby-doll voice (which is most annoying) and wearing skimpy lingerie (which is most welcome), she relays the story to her diary — and the viewer — complete with interruptions throughout. One of her lines is “I kept thinking to myself, ‘Self, if only I had a camera to record it all. What a movie it would make.’” It did not. —Rod Lott

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Action

X312 — Flight to Hell (1971)

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In this film’s prologue, journalist Tom Nilson (Thomas Hunter, The Cassandra Crossing) sits at his desk to record an audio account of harrowing events he experienced in the past month, when a small passenger jet leaving Chile for Rio disappeared over the Amazon. Nilson teases that his story is “something extraordinary.” In reality, it’s a Jess Franco cheapie. And that’s not really a complaint.

Welcome to Utape Airlines X312 — Flight to Hell! One of the handful of passengers aboard is a big bank president (Siegfried Schürenberg, The College-Girl Murders) who’s fled his employer with millions in stolen jewels on his person — a fact not lost on the plane’s hijacker, inadvertently causing the craft to crash in the Brazilian jungle. On the ground, as the survivors attempt to make their way to safety, they’re chased by a band of revolutionaries led by Pedro, played by Franco regular Howard Vernon (Countess Perverse) in a visibly glued-on mustache that makes him look like Michael Shannon as a live-action Frito Bandito. And Utape employee Bill (Fernando Sancho, The Swamp of the Ravens) isn’t exactly making things easier on them, what with wanting the loot for himself and willing to murder to achieve that goal.

Characters are 100% recycled cardboard, with one defining characteristic — okay, maybe two, tops — to define them. They include a fey man (Antonio de Cabo, Franco’s Devil Hunter) with a tiny dog named Pepito, a grown Austrian woman (Gila von Weitershausen, Trenchcoat) forever clutching a teddy bear, a hot Spanish woman with built-in floatation devices (Esperanza Roy, It Happened at Nightmare Inn) and a rich American woman (Ewa Strömberg, Franco’s Vampyros Lesbos) who observes in broad daylight, “The moon is so romantic!” Earlier, right after X312’s rough landing, she says, “There have to be snakes and crocodiles, just like in the movies,” and dammit, she’s right!

From title and setup, X312 — Flight to Hell sounds as if a sweet little disaster film awaits your eyeballs, but let’s not kid ourselves. In such a confined space as the fuselage, Franco can’t engage in his goddamn zooms, so he gets this baby on the ground as soon as allows. That makes the movie fall into the category of jungle piffle. And, once more, that’s not really a complaint. —Rod Lott

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Thriller

When Time Ran Out … (1980)

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When Time Ran Out … could refer to the end of producer Irwin Allen’s reign as the movies’ “master of disaster.” A huge financial bomb, the film forced him into made–for–TV movie pastures for the half-dozen years his once-golden career had left. It represents something of an Irwin Allen all-star edition, too, reuniting The Towering Inferno above-the-line talent Paul Newman and William Holden, as well as The Poseidon Adventure second fiddles Ernest Borgnine and Red Buttons. Too bad getting the gang back together was all for naught.

You can break the story down to four primary beats:
• On a South Pacific island, an oil drilling foreman named Hank (Newman) is deeply concerned by a nearby active volcano.
• Shelby (Holden), a money-first hotel developer, not so much.
• Everyone is screwing around on one another, making for a cast list bordering on the incestuous.
• The volcano erupts.

In the compulsory hullabaloo, Hank and his tight-shirted ex-girlfriend/Shelby’s current girlfriend (Jacqueline Bisset, The Deep) rally people to trek to safety — or die trying. Minorities fare poorly, in part because they’re not white enough to hold on tight, I guess. The big set piece is rather dull, unless watching Burgess Meredith (SST: Death Flight) doing a wire-walking act across a rickety bridge in real time is your idea of crackling entertainment. James Goldstone, who directed the infinitely superior Rollercoaster, pulls off a flood sequence that is better than any of the lava scenes, because those look like you’re peering down into a can of red paint being mixed at Home Depot. The climactic hotel destruction should be the pièce de résistance; instead, it’s so cartoony, today’s viewer would not flinch if the word “KABLOOEY!” appeared onscreen.

Early in the movie is a tantalizing bit of would-be foreshadowing as Veronica Hamel (Beyond the Poseidon Adventure) warns of footlong centipedes emerging from the volcano … yet we never get to see them. In their place are James Franciscus (Beneath the Planet of the Apes) in a uniform made of Jiffy Pop foil; Edward Albert (The House Where Evil Dwells) sporting a ’do seemingly shaped by a cafeteria lady’s hairnet; Pat Morita (Do or Die) doing what amounts to an impression of Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s; and Allen’s untalented wife, Sheila, in a most unflattering muumuu. —Rod Lott

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Kitchen Sink

The Big Cube (1969)

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WTFAt the curtain call of her latest play, acclaimed, yet over-the-hill stage actress Adriana Roman (played by former Madame X, the legendary Lana Turner) announces her retirement. As the prologue for The Big Cube, the scene could stand in for the uneasy career transition Turner and her Tinseltown peers experienced when New Hollywood pushed boundaries and buttons, and in doing so, shoved Old Hollywood’s melodramas and musicals out of the way. The elderly white men who ran the studios sought to capitalize on the youthquake they never understood, resulting in supposedly “with-it” pictures that succeeded only in demonstrating how sorely out of touch said studios were.

At least their failures put some choice cuts of camp on our plates, The Big Cube included.

Adriana trades the theater for playing the part of well-to-do wife of über-wealthy Charles Winthrop (Dan O’Herlihy, Halloween III: Season of the Witch). The news doesn’t sit well with his daughter, Lisa (Swedish actress Karin Mossberg, The Uninhibited), whose accent is explained away by Daddy having shipped her to a Swiss school following her mother’s death. Lisa leads a life of Riley, partying with airheaded pal Bibi (Pamela Rodgers, Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine), who suggests things like, “Hey, large idea! Let’s call half a dozen guys and have an orgy!” and ditches her dresses when she gets sky-high.

At one groovy soirée, Lisa catches the eye of slimy med student Johnny Allen (George Chakiris, West Side Story), who manufacturers LSD in the university lab for his social circle. And when Johnny learns Lisa’s loaded, well, she catches his other eye, too. Just as Lisa warms to her new stepmother, her father dies. Per the sizable Winthrop will, Lisa is set to inherit a trust of $1 million unless she gets married and if Adriana consents to the union. Which she does not. Being human sleaze, Johnny hatches a scheme: Dose Adriana with enough LSD to drive her crazy — and perhaps even to her death.

Here is where the title of The Big Cube comes into play, priming viewers for its craziest sequences as Chilean filmmaker Tito Davison, helming his first and last Hollywood film, attempts to portray LSD trips, both from an insider’s and outsider’s POV. Johnny mansplains acid to Lisa with the you-don’t-say words of “You see sounds. You hear colors,” and Davison tries his damnedest to put that way-out feeling onscreen. I’ve never touched the stuff, but something tells me it’s more like the kaleidoscope of primitive special effects and less like the shot of Chakiris chunking a rock at your car windshield.

Anyway, the kids’ attempts to gaslight the ol’ bag give Turner the green flag to emote histrionically, as if she broke the glass marked “IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, JOAN CRAWFORD.” And that comparison is apropos because The Big Cube nearly qualifies as “hagsploitation” — if only it weren’t quite so colorful, dressed in puffy shirts and weighted down with horoscope medallions. It’s like the soap bubbles of Valley of the Dolls as filtered through the clutched pearls of Reefer Madness, but not as fun as either. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.