At this stage in his career, the one thing you can be fairly sure about is that there is far too much sex in the films of prolific Spanish director Jess Franco. This fact alone negates much of his work, and the early 1980s are a prime example of this. I am pretty sure that even the most ardent fan of the intimate finds this endless succession of sex acts gruelling. If it's pornography you're after, why complicate it with an ongoing story-line - and vice versa?
Yet, this is the world of Franco, and it was a finely carved out, well-oiled machine by this stage. His films were becoming more difficult to distribute and so I can only guess the sex was there to spice things up - and with his long-time muse Lina Romay on board, it certainly does that. It's everywhere! True, this story features the most disturbingly dysfunctional family you're likely to see this side of a Texas chainsaw, but more depth given to the characters would have been a good thing.
That's my negativity done with. This is one of Franco's weirder efforts, and it is clear he and his regular cast and crew were doing exactly as they wished by this stage. Actor Antonio Mayans' luck seems to have run out here. Usually, the opening credits have barely finished rolling before he is cavorting intimately with the female star of the show - often Romay. Here, the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction, so to speak. He plays, very effectively, Mario, who is a failed actor, and shies away from his promiscuous daughter Desdemona (Romay, billed here as Candy Coster), even though she openly flirts with and desires him. His unfulfilled wife Dulcinea (Carmen Carrión) is disappointed in him because the rumours of his perverse and nefarious activities turn out *not* to be true - so she seemingly has issues of her own (to distance her from her unsavoury relationship with Desdemona, Franco has ensured Dulcinea is her step-mother - as if the lack of any physical relationship makes her actions less unpalatable). Then we have Paulova (Asunción Calero), the mentally challenged sister, who also gets her own lessons in self-pleasure to idle away the hours. They all live in a modern-looking home on an island paradise they have clearly become bored with. Solitary, their food is shipped in from elsewhere.
Such an isolated family life could be fascinating. A similarly perverse and outcast (step) father-and-daughter relationship was explored far more interestingly in Franco's 'Eugenie' ten years earlier. But here, the director is not so keen simply to imply what is going on, he prefers to lay it on with a trowel. Several trowels.
When it works, it works very well. It's a punishing story. Evil Dulcinea finds a happiness she doesn't deserve, whilst everybody else (apart possibly from Paulova) is resigned to one form of misery or another.
The whole thing is filmed in such a way that every blemish or shadow on the actors' skin is laid bare, much like the actors themselves much of the time. Every slight bruise and pimple adds a very visual extra dimension of un-sophistication to a film that straddles many tones at once. But then, with 80's Jess Franco, that is a common issue. The truth is, the director seems to know exactly what sort of film he is delivering. My score is 5 out of 10.
