It's been a while since my last Jess Franco review (the similarly Third Reich-adjacent women in prison film
Barbed Wire Dolls), but I remain baffled by the large number of otherwise aesthetically simpatico cinephiles who consider Franco one of the b-movie greats. I don't get it. Franco's films have an appealingly energetic rawness, and he always manages to capture a half-dozen beautiful landscape shots, but most of his images are pedestrian, his plots are insanely stupid (but not stupid enough to be funny) while also being needlessly complicated and boring, his characters always make the stupidest moves possible while also being mostly boring people who are so thinly drawn you never get any sense of who they are, his short running times feel much longer, and he's a lecherous old creep who can't stop ogling his actresses' bodies. There's a way for T&A and sexual content to be fun and silly and entertaining in this kind of film, but Franco's camera lets you know he doesn't care about his women characters' desires or pleasure. He just wants to leer at them from a safe remove.
So, yeah,
Oasis of the Zombies (the more common title) ain't no great shakes if you, like me, are a Franco skeptic. The guy sure was motivated, though. He directed 204 films between 1957 and 2013, the year of his death, and my rather paltry sampling of this enormous buffet could mean that I'm way off in my analysis. Maybe the handful of Franco films I've seen are aberrant outliers in a psychotronic bacchanal of a career.
Our film begins with a couple American (?) tourist women in short-shorts driving a jeep through the deserts of Libya. They stop to explore an oasis, Franco's camera zooms in on their asses for a couple minutes, and they're killed by Nazi zombies. Then the plot gets too damn busy and turns into a war film about German and British troops fighting it out over some gold in the Libyan desert. Everyone gets killed except one British captain, who is rescued by nomads on camels in another overly complicated side plot, but he's killed in the present by a German nut he inexplicably told all about the still-buried gold. (Also, he looks exactly the same in the early '80s present as he did in the '40s flashback. Also, also, the Nazi zombies all have contemporary shaggy early '80s hairdos and sideburns.)
The German asshole, some woman he's with for no apparent reason, and two other guys who pop up out of nowhere in the back of the German guy's jeep halfway to the desert set up camp in the oasis and try to find the gold. Guess what? The Nazi zombies with '80s rock hair show up. Meanwhile, the son of the murdered British captain decides to read his dad's diaries for the first time and convinces four of his college chums to quit school a week before final exams and fly to Libya to find the Nazi gold with him. Oh shit, they also run into the Nazi zombies with '80s rock and roll hair. I forgot. They meet some other dumb, boring Brits in Libya and join forces with them shortly before heading to the oasis, but who gives a shit?
Hey, it's 1:07 a.m., and I'm tired of writing about these dummies. This movie sucks, but I'm still glad I saw it, because I enjoy every horror movie made between 1895 and 1992, no matter how terrible. (I generally don't enjoy any horror movie made between 1993 and now, no matter how good, with many solid exceptions.) Many truly awful lines of dialogue made me laugh, and some of those sand dune landscape shots were weird and pretty. I also liked the zombie with the bugged-out eyes. That undead son of a gun looked full of constant surprise, and he filled me with mirth. Mirth, I tell you. What's the deal with Jess Franco? Why do so many of you fellow degenerates think he's the bee's knees? What's up with that? Sell me on it. What am I not getting?
(This review brought to you by Saturday night beer and whiskey intake and a full-of-the-beans attitude.)
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