Oasis of the Zombies: Jesús Franco

It's never professional for a film critic to dismiss a bad film simply on the grounds of "being boring." But I can't think of a better adjective with which to describe Jesús Franco's Oasis of the Zombies. Everything about this film is an assault on the viewer: the zombie make-up is pathetic, the pace is slow and dreary, the characters forgettable, and the death scenes uninspired and phoned in. The soundtrack is one of the worst that I have ever heard. There are multiple moments when it sounds like the composer literally fell asleep on the keyboard, resulting in shrill, sustained synthesizer chords that pierce the eardrums. The story involves a lost caché of Nazi gold in the African desert. When a group of young treasure hunters go out looking for it, they discover that the Afrika Korps troops that had been killed while transporting it had been transformed into zombies. Of course, we're never really given a satisfactory answer as the why they became zombies. But I suspect that it hardly matters. Oasis of the Zombies isn't a film. It's an endurance test.

3/10

She Killed in Ecstasy: Jesús Franco

There are two ways to examine Jesús Franco's She Killed in Ecstasy: via its technical qualities and via its strength as a story. From a technical stand-point, She Killed in Ecstasy may be Franco's most beautiful and stunningly realized film. Cinematographer Manuel Merino's perpetually floating camera and sharp eye for surrealistic frame compositions create an indulgent, lurid atmosphere that complements the shocking story. The images are frequently matched with bizarrely upbeat music which gives the film a sense of feverish detachment. And yet, from a story stand-point, She Killed in Ecstasy has issues. The plot is essentially a reversal of the rape-revenge formula: after a scientist who illegally experimented on human embryos commits suicide after being expelled from the academic community, his heart-broken wife sexually seduces and murders the four members of the medical committee responsible. So whereas rape-revenge films involve women responding to sexual violence with physical violence, She Killed in Ecstasy has its protagonist respond to physical violence with sexual violence. But here's the main problem: we are supposed to empathize with the wife's quest for revenge. But allow me to point a few things out. First, the four committee members were needlessly cruel in their personal attacks on the scientist, but they were still technically justified considering the fact that he was illegally experimenting on humans. And second, any feelings of sympathy we might feel for the wife are immediately abandoned when she starts to kill innocent bystanders who were uninvolved with her husband's death. Taken simply as a stylistic exercise, She Killed in Ecstasy is exquisite. But as a story, it doesn't past muster.

5/10

Bloody Moon: Jesús Franco

I mentioned in my review of Devil Hunter (1980) that the films of director Jesús Franco seem to have a cruelty quota. If there isn't a certain amount of misery and pain in one of his movies, then he has to figure out a way to artificially add some. One of the best examples that I can think of is in his film Bloody Moon, a relatively effective slasher flick about a deranged killer going on a murder spree in a Spanish resort/language school. I have only seen a handful of Franco's films, but Devil Hunter stands apart from them with its emphasis on pacing and character psychology. The film's plot is surprisingly well formulated and even provides an interesting twist at the end about the identity of the killer. Standard slasher logic tells us that if you never get a good look at the killer and the film tries to finger a particular character without explicitly confirming their guilt, then that character is a red herring. But Bloody Moon manages to pull a kind of double red herring, subverting genre cliches and expectations without seeming forced or satirical. And while the film is very plot and character driven, Franco still delivers several stomach-churning death scenes. The most notable is when the killer manages to trick a victim into getting tied up in a lumber mill before sawing her head off with a power saw. But even that grisly death scene didn't satiate Franco's cruelty quota. So Franco finishes the sequence with a scene where the killer runs over a young boy who happened to witness the murder and tried to stop it (being hit by a car inexplicably chops this boy in half with such surgical precision that one wonders if there was another power saw beneath the car). And then there's a scene where a real snake was decapitated for a cheap jump scare. While the other murder scenes at least somewhat tie into the plot, this authentic moment of fatal animal cruelty is completely pointless. But that doesn't stop Franco from prepping the audience for this random plot cul-de-sac with an establishing shot of a scientist looking around a laboratory for a lost snake. Nevertheless, Bloody Moon is one of the better Franco films that I have ever seen. Think about that for a bit.

6/10

Devil Hunter: Jesús Franco

Jesús Franco's Devil Hunter is the most boring cannibal film that I have ever seen. And now that I have just finished writing that sentence, I need to go lie down and re-evaluate my life. What does it say about me when I hold a movie like Cannibal Holocaust (1980) or Cannibal Ferox (1981) up as a model that other films should aspire to? Regardless, Devil Hunter is a punishingly boring film about a kidnapped white model being held in a South American country. Two men go into the jungles to try and pay the ransom. But when both sides try to double-cross each other, the woman gets free. However, she is quickly captured once again by a native tribe who intend to sacrifice her to their cannibalistic god. So the surviving rescuer has to try and find her before she is killed. Clocking in at around 100 minutes, the film is mercilessly padded with scenes of people stalking through the jungles and naked native women doing erotic "jungle dances." Most of this is overlaid with audio of the cannibal god gasping and choking through what sounds like an asthma attack. The film's dullness is only occasionally interrupted by scenes of pointless cruelty (the model endures a lengthy rape scene that literally does nothing to further the plot and is never mentioned again). The film is also blatantly misogynistic. It features a leering camera that randomly lingers on close-up shots of the female characters' naked genitals, recalling Franco's work as a pornographer. It's one thing to use porno aesthetics in a porn film and another to use them in a film about women being kidnapped, raped, tortured, murdered, and eaten. Every woman in the film either gets tortured, mutilated, killed, raped, or objectified by Franco's camera. As I watch more and more of Franco's filmography, the more I'm inclined to believe that he had a cruelty quota for every single one of his films. What's worse, I know that Devil Hunter is child's play considering some of the other films in his oeuvre.

3/10

Faceless: Jesús Franco

The similarities between Jesús Franco's Faceless and Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face (1960) are unmistakable. Both involve a crazed doctor that kidnaps beautiful women in order to transplant their faces onto a scarred loved one. But whereas Eyes Without a Face displayed a kind of cinematic poetry akin to Jean Cocteau, Franco approached the film as an exploitation piece. That's not necessarily a condemnation, of course. In fact, Faceless is one of Franco's most technically astute and accomplished films. The film follows plastic surgeon Dr. Flamand and his assistant/lover Nathalie as they steal the faces from beautiful women for his sister/lover Ingrid who was accidentally mutilated with acid by a disgruntled ex-patient. In the true tradition of Italian exploitation, a Nazi doctor and a mentally-handicapped assistant/rapist also become part of their schemes. Faceless also does a decent job juggling its primary story with a subplot concerning an American private detective hired to track down one of Flamand's victims. It's not uncommon for such films to have subplots, of course. But they very rarely manage to incorporate them without making them seem like they came from an entirely different movie. Some of the special effects are decent, as well. Although, in all fairness, one of the effects where a woman's face is removed is particularly amateurish. But, overall, Faceless is one of Franco's better efforts.

6/10