WINTER OF DISCONTENT: A Virgin Among the Living Dead

Made in 1973 and, arguably, a consolidation of the aesthetic triumphs and bold narrative experimentalism of ‘Vampyros Lesbos’ (1971) and ‘The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein’ (1972), the transitional ‘A Virgin Among the Living Dead’ denotes a continued rejection of genre imperatives and a deeper, more profound embrace of the director’s own iconoclastic vision. Indeed, ‘A Virgin Among the Living Dead’ – or, to use the more appealingly poetic original title, ‘Christina, princesse de l'érotisme’ – can be seen as the vanguard of Jesus Franco’s true golden age as auteur.

Who the hell am I kidding?

‘A Virgin Among the Living Dead’ was one of at least ten films that Franco made very quickly and on the cheap during 1973, which in turn was just one year in a decade which saw him churn out at least 70 titles. Apologies here for the lack of specificity, but given the panoply of pseudonyms the guy used (personal fave: Dave Tough), the 197 films that IMDb attributes to Franco as director is less a comprehensive filmography than a jumping off point for anyone determined enough to undertake their own research into the Spanish maverick’s long life and crazy career.

In the pantheon of cult and curious cinema, Franco’s name is up there with Jean Rollin, Joe D’Amato and Bruno Mattei, though it’s always seemed to be that he falls into something of a middle ground. Franco never quite attains the hazy dream-like conjurations of Rollin, nor does he go all-out in the pursuit of unapologetic exploitation a la D’Amato. And there’s enough of a signature style in evidence that he (mercifully) sidesteps Mattei’s rancid ineptitude.

‘AVAtLD’ charts the hallucinatory experiences of titular virginal heroine Christina Benson (Christina von Blanc) as she returns from schooling in London to the ancient and decaying family seat in wherever (I couldn’t determine whether it was in Europe or Latin America) for the reading of her father’s will. A local innkeeper tries to dissuade her from going to the house/chateau/mansion/castle [check out the screengrab below and delete as applicable] …

… and makes some pointed comments which suggest the place is empty. Factor in the English language title and I don’t think you’ll be in for any surprises come the denouement. She’s collected from the inn by chauffeur-cum-handyman Basilio (Jesus Manero – i.e. Franco himself), a tubby individual with a pre-Village People moustache, some evident learning difficulties and an inability to express himself in anything other than grunted monosyllables.

Arriving at chez Benson, she meets, in short order, eccentric pianist Uncle Howard (Howard Vernon), stern and unfriendly Aunt Abigail (Rosa Palomar), slatternly Carmence (Britt Nichols) who may or may not be related to someone, anyone or no-one and is given over to wandering around in a half-open nightgown most of the time, and a blind girl (Linda Hastreiter) who I don’t recall being referred to by name. This visually-challenged young lady seems to be a seer or medium and tells Christina that her soul is white, meaning she’s pure of heart, and oh by the way it might be in her best interests to pack her bags and head back to London like immediately.

A young lad she meets while out skinny-dipping (this kind of situation being par for the course in a Jess Franco movie) also proves reluctant to visit the house, while a strange old man they meet outside a nearby chapel opines that death is upon everything in the immediate locality. Me, I’d have been on the big silver bird for Heathrow or Gatwick at this point, but our heroine is incapable of taking a hint. The disturbingly erotic hallucinations she’s been having don’t convince her to relocate either, and even when the ghost of her father (Paul Muller) shows up to warn her she’s in grave danger of having her soul claimed by the Queen of the Night (Anne Libert), she stubbornly stays put. Although, to be fair, the Queen of the Night is a bit of fox. 

Anyway, what passes for the narrative leaps randomly between:

- Abigail and Basilio plotting against their richer relatives/employers respectively;

- Carmence throwing out a definite Sapphic vibe in Christina’s direction;

- hints that the entire household are vampires, ghosts or Satanists;

- Christina enduring visions of her eventual fate as a sacrificial offering.

Franco succeeds in maintaining an atmosphere of ambiguity – are Christina’s dreams/hallucinations genuine second sight, evidence of mental instability or the result of sexual hysteria? – but whether this achievement was by accident or design is hard to tell. Judged on most of the usual critical criteria, the film’s a mess and no doubt about it.

Acting? Von Blanc is gorgeous but her performance is trance-like; Nichols spends the movie directing a thousand yard stare just off camera as if to warn Franco that if she’s asked to flash her boobs just one more time, he’s getting a slap that’ll leave a mark; Vernon gives the typical Howard Vernon performance of any piece of Euro-shlock he’s even been in, which is to say he seasons the scenery, lightly grills it, gives himself a side order of fries, tucks in the napkin and wolfs in down like he hasn’t had a square meal in months.

Editing? Well, some of the shots match.

Music? Bruno Nicolai’s score veers from atonal brutality to bossa nova cheesiness with no respect for anyone’s sensibilities.

Cinematography? Please, no more zoom. Pleeeeeeeeaaassssse!

Script? It contains the line “Why did you shatter the ebony phallus?” The question isn’t even rhetorical. 

Reviewer’s exit line? That’ll be the one above. Thank you very much and good night.

WINTER OF DISCONTENT: Seven Women for Satan

A hunting dog stares moodily into the middle distance. A man on horseback thunders across a misty field. A naked woman runs like hell. From these elements, director Michel Lemoine fashions a not particularly suspenseful three and a half minute opening sequence. Then pulls the rug. It’s a daydream, which our protagonist Count Boris Zaroff (Lemoine, starring as well as directing) snaps out of as his secretary asks him to sign some papers. The day’s business done, Zaroff drives home to his newly acquired castle, picking up attractive hitchhiker Stephanie (Maria Mancini) en route. She rather naively tells him that she’s left home for no particular destination and that no-one’s expecting her. Hands up anyone who rates Stephanie’s chances of making to the end credits alive. Anyone? Anyone?

Advertised upon its release as “the French film banned in France” (it wasn’t), ‘Seven Women for Satan’ is the English-language market retitling of ‘Les week-ends maléfiques du Comte Zaroff’. The original title makes it sound like a slab of gothic; the English moniker like a giallo. Both assumptions are way off base. With its largely plotless noodlings, the architecture porn of its soft-focus castle setting, and its dichotomous aesthetic of nudity aplenty but little actual sex, the closest point of comparison is the work of Jean Rollin.

And there are moments where Lemoine very nearly captures that Rollin feeling: a woman disappearing into a lake as billows of mist drift across the screen; a woman enraptured by her reflection, turning away from a wall of mirrors and drawing back the gauze around a four poster bed only to be confronted with herself lying there supine and seductive; a couple waltzing through a deserted stables, a small drop of blood appearing on the back of the woman’s dress, the wound soaking through the material more and more each time her partner whirls her back into frame.

There are, unfortunately, just as many moments where the hand of Jess Franco or Joe D’Amato could easily have been the guiding force. Moments of utter crassness (the African statue that comes to life – racial stereotypes ahoy!) and/or complete ineptitude (a supposedly tense moment where someone is mauled by a dog, only it’s pitifully evident that the dog is actually nuzzling them in the friendliest manner imaginable). There’s an extended scene where a victim-in-waiting tries to persuade their partner that they’ve witnessed a murder only for the evidence to disappear; it plays out like an Abbott and Costello sketch but without the comedic talent. There are also two scenes where the victims are so complicit it’s impossible to root for them, including that most frustrating of cinematic lapses of logic: a character on foot, being chased by someone in a car, who runs desperately alongside a glade of trees without it ever apparently crossing their mind that simply veering into the trees would prevent their antagonist from running them over.

The narrative suffers, too, from a wooden protagonist in the form of Lemoine’s Zaroff, a man who looks like Cliff Richard’s evil twin …

… and is imbued with all the emotional complexity of a particularly short plank. A man whose idea of a chat-up line is “Would you like some champagne to help you dream pleasantly? Or would you rather that I pour it over your body and sip it slowly as if your substance were of crystal?” (The following scene, where he wastes a perfectly good bottle of champers and doesn’t sip it so much as slurp noisily whilst contorting himself into uncomfortable looking positions, is utterly unerotic. If you’re after a sex/alcohol combo, the J&B/Silvia Dionisio’s navel set-piece from ‘Waves of Lust’ is where it’s at.)

Then we have Zaroff’s Machiavellian manservant Karl, played by the eternally creepy Howard Vernon, a man blessed with the singular ability to deliver an over-the-top performance without actually doing anything. Whether it be staring bug-eyed off camera or walking in crab-like manner from point A to point B, there was always something forced, something unnatural about Vernon. Here, he plays a character who is trying to assuage the guilt of his father for the sins he committed as Zaroff’s father’s partner-in-crime by driving Zaroff Jnr to similar psychotic excesses. The logic behind this fails me, but as the film progresses Karl discovers that Zaroff’s obsession with his dead wife Ann (Joelle Coeur) is a more destructive force than any of his machinations.

This, more than anything, is where ‘Seven Women for Satan’ goes off the rails. If it had just been about Zaroff’s grief-stricken crack-up, it could have been a minor T&A classic. The nonsensical Karl-related subplot, which resolves in a groaningly hackneyed last-minute “twist”, is as perfunctory as it is unnecessary. Oh, and as far as the title goes, I make it six women and not a single reference to Satan.