Prolific Spanish exploitation director Jess Franco is in full horndog mode in The Demons, his 1973 French-Portuguese Satanic nunsploitation witch-curse lesbian softcore sexploitation 17th century period piece revenge epic, available in multiple hacked and slashed and panned and scanned versions on VHS, DVD, and whatever surviving prints are floating around. I'm not sure what version my wife and I watched last night on a semi-bootleg DVD copy, but I assume it was the full enchilada pasted together from the various cuts, as the running time was a full two hours, the scope compositions were presented in the correct aspect ratio, and the spoken (and unspoken) languages jumped, seemingly at random, from English to French to Spanish to German to telepathy (the characters were sometimes silently looking at each other as the subtitles churned out unspoken dialogue).
Franco has a sizable cult following, but I'm a bit of a skeptic. I find him too sloppy and repetitive (and zoom-lens happy) to fully embrace, even as his lurid, pulpy b-movies with arty aspirations read on paper like my kind of thing. It's fitting that the Franco movie I do really like out of the handful I've seen, Marquis de Sade's Justine, is considered boring and unrepresentative by the hardcore Franco-heads. I'm not a hater, though. I can always find something to enjoy in Franco, and since The Demons is a '70s Euro-horror with witch curses, sexy nuns, and enthusiastic blasphemy, it kept me happily entertained when it wasn't testing my patience (admittedly a 50/50 split).
The Demons opens with a witch being tortured and then burned at the stake on the orders of Lord Justice Jeffries (Cihangir Ghaffari, a Russian-born Iranian who became a Turkish movie star and then an international character actor and producer whose best-known credits on this side of the tracks are Shaft's Big Score!, Bloodsport, and Abel Ferrara's Fear City). The witch curses everyone watching and says her daughters will get revenge. Jeffries laughs this off because he thinks the old crone was childless, but his witch-torturing accomplice Lady De Winter (Karin Field) is unsettled and urges a search for the offspring. Jeffries relents. Lady De Winter is married to Lord Malcolm De Winter (Howard Vernon), a kindly, absentminded type who just wants to look through his telescope, so she's been making time with another witchfinder, Thomas Renfield (Alberto Dalbés), who gets off on witch torture almost as much as her. He also whips her nude body while she confesses to witchcraft. This is all just a warmup for Lady De Winter, however, who's really into the ladies.
I'm a little fuzzy on how Lady De Winter and Renfield get there, but they somehow receive enough information to check out a pair of sisters, Kathleen (Anne Libert) and Margaret (Carmen Yazalde), who were abandoned and taken in by a convent. The convent is run by Mother Rosalinda (Doris Thomas), a stern taskmaster who nevertheless wears a lot of makeup for a nun and is barely concealing her powerful horniness for her charges. Rosalinda recently got an eyeful of a nude Kathleen writhing in confusing, somewhat aimless ecstasy on her bed in a dream state, which caused her to do some nude, aimless, and confusing bed writhing of her own that same night. There is so much confusing nude bed writhing in this movie, complete with many artless and often out-of-focus zooms in on the butts and pubic hair of the women. Franco may be one of the only filmmakers who can make you mutter to yourself, "Can you please stop showing us this beautiful naked woman and get back to the movie? I'm bored."
Margaret plays by the convent's rules, but Kathleen yearns for worldly pleasures, which allows the devil to get a foothold in her dreams. After a pervathon interrogation from Lady De Winter and Renfield in which Lady De Winter checks to see if the women are still virgins, Kathleen is taken to Lord Justice Jeffries for an inquisition and torture sesh when the Lady's invasive check shows a loss of virginity. Kathleen is then tortured in a variety of nude ways to the arousal of Lady De Winter and Renfield, who both secretly fall in love with her. Their lust is not as secret, however, and the pair start making out in front of everyone after watching some torture. This is the kind of thing that happens when you neglect your wife for a telescope, Lord De Winter. Kathleen enchants nearly every man and woman who lay eyes on her, and she is soon freed by Lord De Winter during a five-minute break from his telescope, causing big problems for everyone.
Meanwhile, Margaret, despondent over her sister's absence, is visited by the spirit or vision or physical embodiment of her long-lost mother, fresh from hell, who fills her in on the revenge plot. Her mother then sends one of Satan's minions to take the younger woman's virginity and switch her allegiances from God to Satan. The sex is apparently good enough to make her change teams, though it looks as unerotic and baffling as most other Franco sex scenes, and soon Margaret is a full-on emissary of hell.
Her first order of business is having some baffling, unerotic sex with Mother Rosalinda and then hitting the road for Lord Justice Jeffries' place to put the demonic smack down on Jeffries, Lady De Winter, and Renfield for roasting her mom. Will there be time to sex up Lady De Winter first? You bet your ass. Key word: ass. (Lady De Winter doesn't recognize Margaret out of her convent wear until she sees her naked ass.) She's also been delivered a stunning superpower. When she feels like it, she can transform a living person into a cheap Halloween decoration-looking plastic skeleton just by giving that person a smooch on the lips. Nice.
The sisters go on separate journeys, new characters are introduced, and their paths cross again. There are many artless zooms, plodding scenes, hilarious performances, and baffling events along the way. Some of it is boring, some of it is a good time. Sometimes Franco accidentally captures a beautiful or visually powerful image. Sometimes he just zooms in on an out-of-focus partial butt cheek or some pubes for a weirdly long time. These are the kind of things you put up with if you're a Franco fan. The closing moments are pretty satisfying, though. I'll give him that.
So, The Demons. It's an intermittently satisfying lesser melange of Ken Russell's The Devils, Michael Reeves' Witchfinder General, Franco's own Justine (including a similar interlude with a painter), and any random '70s adult film, but you'll never confuse it for any other filmmaker's work, so here's to you, Jess, you dirty old weirdo. They don't make 'em like that anymore.
1 comment:
Your writing is entertaining and informative.
Post a Comment