With nearly 200 films to his name, Jess Franco is among the most prolific directors of the modern age. However, even the staunchest Franco fan will tell you that among the masses there are regrettably few true gems. The 1971 sexy revenge thriller She Killed in Ecstasy is one of them. The film treads a lot the same ground as Francois Trauffat's The Bride Wore Black, in which a scorned woman seeks out and kills the men who killed her fiance. In this case, however, Mrs. Johnson, the titular She, is seeking revenge on the people she holds responsible for her husband's suicide. The trick is, she does it by seducing them, men and women, before her lethal strike.
The film starts out with Mrs. Johnson, portrayed by the painfully beautiful Soledad Miranda, flouncing about in a sort of shiny metal chandelier of a top as her husband explains that his medical experiments involving human embryos will change the world for the better. It's the kind of clumsy exposition that serves solely to set the plot in motion, and it's certainly not Franco's strong suit. The film then quickly moves to a sort of peer tribunal in which the medical community rebukes Dr. Johnson's claim and strips him of his medical license. The arguments used on both sides are eerily reminiscent of the ongoing stem cell debate happening the United States today, I honestly didn't expect that kind of topicality. Following his expulsion from the medical profession, Dr. Johnson literally loses the will to live and soon offs himself, in the cinematically traditional way, with a razor blade in the shower. Mrs. Johnson loses her cool and decides to destroy the lives of the people who destroyed her happy, and exceptionally erotic life.
What follows is a series of sexually violent vignettes in which Mrs. Johnson seduces and then murders each of her husband's tormentors one and a time. Among these are Franco regulars Howard Vernon, Ewa Stromberg, and Franco himself, as the final masochistic villain to succumb to Miranda's irrefutable charms. After he first murder, a pretty standard stalk and slash operation, the potential victims begin to get nervous and cautious, which in turn forces Mrs. Johnson to get more creative and less inhibited with each passing corpse. This is one of the rarer cases in which Franco's incessant drive to create actually did him some good, his never ending creativity often forced him into subpar films with lackluster production, but this film is quite good, objectively speaking, not something a person can say about most of his other work, which is an acquired taste at best.
Franco's oeuvre is an intimidating one, and the ratio of diamonds to chunks of coal is frustratingly low, but for anyone looking to see what he could do when he was on top of his game, She Killed in Ecstasy is an excellent starting point. Soledad Miranda is inescapably magnetic on screen, and Franco smartly keeps here there for the vast majority of the film. Her piercing black eyes and long dark brunette hair frame her as a force to be reckoned with, even when she's not wearing anything but a flowing purple cape, and it's difficult for a waifishly pretty woman like that to be intimidating when she's completely naked, unless she's Soledad Miranda. This one is definitely recommended.
The Disc:
She Killed in Ecstasy is presented as the original German dub, the film was a German production, so the German dub was essential to recouping costs. The image quality, while not as pristine as some films from the era, is more than acceptable, even with frequent damage on the print. The clarity and colors are mostly gorgeous, and if anything, the film's presentation here illustrates Franco's frequent disregard for plane of focus in his films. What could easily have been just the damage inherent to shitty bootlegs is now shown to be on the actual prints of the film. Actors wander in and out of focus, seemingly with no regard for the final product, it's quite bizarre at times, but definitely a staple of Franco's work. The audio is not quite as impressive as the video, with there being a couple of demonstrably jarring sections in which the audio either completely drops out or is replaced by loud hissing. However, the film almost certainly sounds better than it ever has on home video, including the fantastic trademarked jazzy score that makes Franco's odd little films all the more compelling.
In terms of extras, Severin is certainly no slouch, and the effort expended on this piece is well worth it for viewers. Jess Franco died a few years back and one would think that supplementary materials would be tough to come by, however, David Gregory at Severin had the foresight to record hours upon hours of interviews with the man before his death. These interviews have come out in pieces over the last five years on Severin and Intervision's various Franco releases. Everything from The Sinister Eyes of Dr. Orloff, to Paula-Paula, to The House of Linda and their other releases have seen interviews from this session, and they are spell binding, and in this case, smartly subtitled. Even though Franco was speaking English at the time, the combination of his advanced age, poor health, and heavy accent did no favors to other releases. In addition to that there is a wonderful appreciation for the film from Franco authority, and author of the upcoming Murderous Passions: The Delirious Passions of Jesus Franco, Stephen Thrower, who has also authored definitive books on American drive-in horror and Lucio Fulci. The man is a wealth of information and a scholarly look at Franco is always appreciated.
The rest of the extras focus on the performers, supporting actor Paul Muller and the star Soledad Miranda. Paul Muller's interview is fairly short and non-specific, but still interesting to hear as he was a frequent collaborator with Franco and part of his usual troupe. The segment on Soledad Miranda is far more substantial, as Miranda-phile Amy Brown is the person to talk to about the woman who absolutely owns this film. Brown's scholarship on Miranda ties in with her exceptional fandom for this woman who died far too young shortly after the completion of her most well-known films. The piece is an essential primer for those, like myself, who knew little about Soledad Miranda but are curious about the woman behind those dark eyes.
The second disc in this set is a compilation of the jazzy, sexy scores from Ecstasy, Vampyros Lesbos, and The Devil Came From Akasava , three of Franco's films with Soledad Miranda, and three supremely groovy soundtracks.
She Killed in Ecstasy is an exceptional piece of early '70s sleaze from the time in Franco's career immediately before he put quantity over quality. It's sharp, fairly well written, and to the point. A fantastic primer.
Vampyros Lesbos is one of the most well-known titles in Jess Franco's oversized oeuvre, but where it stands in terms of critical stature is a bit less clear cut. It's hard to deny that a film about lesbian vampires is an attention grabber, and the concept alone is more than enough to get a few butts in seats. However, this film is less of an exercise in gleeful exploitation than an exercise in endurance for me, even with its moments of undeniable excess. What Severin Films manages with this release is nothing short of miraculous, though the film itself stumbles across the finish line with protracted sequences of exquisite beauty that lead nowhere in particular.
A skewed, yet surprisingly faithful, take on Bram Stoker's original Dracula story, Vampyros Lesbos transports the action from Transylvania to Istanbul and Spain, and gender swaps most of the story's key characters. Jonathan Harker becomes Linda Westinghouse (Ewa Stromberg), Vlad Dracula becomes the Countess Nadine Carody (Soledad Miranda), and Renfield becomes Arga (Heidrun Kussin). Other key characters also appear from the original story including psychiatrist Dr. Seward (Dennis Price). While the concept is interesting, and it appears that Franco has a decent idea of where to go with it, it never quite becomes engaging for me, and the languidity of the film proves to be to its detriment.
The countess seduces and victimizes Linda and the two begin a strange adversarial, yet erotic, dance of anguish. While this central plot line draws itself out over the course of the film, other characters and subplots interject infrequently and disrupt the flow of the central plot. There is a disturbed sadist, played by Franco himself, who tortures women in the basement of his hotel, which is tangentially connected to the main story by virtue of the fact that the hotelier is Agra's estranged husband. The countess has a mute henchman named Morpho (which is a fantastic name for a mute henchman) who never manages to justify his place in the film, apart from a few brief and unconvincing fight sequences. All the while, the story dances around the central exploitable element, the lesbian vampires.
The titular lesbian vampire in the film is played by the irresistible Soledad Miranda, who, even in her most laconic performances, is spellbinding. However, she definitely shares leading duties with Ewa Stromberg as Linda, a decision I'm not so sure I would've made. Miranda's dark hair and eyes certainly do mark a strong contrast with the light eyes and blonde hair of her victims, Linda and Agra. Perhaps Franco was attempting another level of subtext with the fairer women submitting to the darkness within the countess's soul, or maybe it was just the fact that the film was a Spanish-German co-production and these actresses were part of the deal. Either way, it makes for a slightly more interesting reading of the project. However, whatever subtext there may be, the surface of the film is a bit too glossy and hollow for me to get behind.
Franco was most definitely a filmmaker with his own sense of style, and Vampyros Lesbos very much fits within that sentiment. The film features the typical jazzy Franco score, which is certainly better and more exciting that the film deserves. The problem for me is that the score is underutilized, and Franco frequently chooses to conduct his more compelling visual sequences, just as the few fights in the film, without any score, which definitely makes them feel less impactful than they would given the proper aural punctuation. However, there's no doubting that the film is Franco's work, even from the first few minutes. What can I say, it just didn't really work for me.
The Disc:
Severin Films presentation of Vampyros Lesbos is a definitive look at a film that certainly needs a bit of context. The appearance of the film is quite good, certainly an improvement over the previous home video options, and even better looking than She Killed in Ecstasy with less subtle damage. The original German dub also sounds better than Ecstasy's problematic mix. While Ecstasy was largely very clear, the audio damage was very apparent at several points, and I don't recall having that experience with Vampyros Lesbos. Also included in the set is a DVD of the “bootleg” version of the Spanish dubbed version which is at least 7 minutes shorter, due in large part to Francisco Franco era censorship, and contains a different score from the German version. The bootleg looks rough, but as an artifact, it's definitely worth having.
The extras on Vampyros Lesbos mirror the collection of material available on She Killed in Ecstasy, just with the focus shifted slightly toward this film. We get more of Severin's fantastic long form interviews with Jess Franco, which will hopefully continue as they've secured even more of Franco's films for future release. Uncle Jess is a wealth of information and remarkably astute on the details of these 45 year old films, which is funny because in some of the other interviews on Severin's discs, you can hear his wife and longtime muse Lina Romay prompting him from the background with details about films that he'd long since forgotten. Author/expert Stephen Thrower (Nightmare USA, Murderous Passions: The Delirious Passions of Jesus Franco) also throws in his two cents on Vampyros Lesbos and its place withing Franco's canon. He is the one who provided the details about the different versions of the film in Germany and Spain, and he also helps to compare the film with Stoker's original story in a way that isn't immediately obvious to the casual viewer, bringing essential context to the film that helps to present it in its correct historical context. This disc also repeats the Soledad Miranda piece with historian Amy Brown from She Killed in Ecstasy, though it's well worth watching a second time for fans. The disc concludes with a nice little tidbit from Franco describing the legend that he was model for Yoda in the Star Wars films, and nice thought, though of dubious veracity. I like to think it's true.
Vampyros Lesbos is a great idea stretched a bit too thin, in my opinion. It's hard to hate the film, but it's almost harder to love it. It certainly has it's moments, and the performance from Soledad Miranda is infrequently spellbinding, but it just didn't hold together for me as a consistent work. Many, many Franco fans will disagree with me on this verdict, but the one thing I can say about my opinion it that it is my own and you are under no obligation to share it. Curious about the film? I can say with all certainty that you'll not find a better way to make up your own mind than with Severin's exceptional release. Definitely recommended.