Last Caress/Blackaria

Last Caress / Blackaria

Directed by: François Gaillard and Christophe Robin

France, 2010

72+70min

Distributed by: NjutaFilms

Leather and razors and blood, oh my!

Remember AMER? Remember the fucking awesome Justice tracks Phantom (1+2) built around that Goblin Tenebre sample? Remember all those splendid Gialli you spent hours watching until they all melted into one? Well here’s a twosome of movies that combine everything that you liked about all the above and deliver two fabulous concoctions that really should be in the collection of anyone who claims to like European cult cinema.

First out, is Last Caress, which sees an eclectic bunch of kids, arrive at a mansion to spend the weekend with Catherine’s [Julie Baron] cousin, but she’s nowhere to be found – we the audience already know her fate, as that’s what the initial attack and ordinary world all establish. We know it’s Giallo territory, we know it’s going to be violent murder, and the bomb under the table has been set. So the eclectic gang, consisting of Catherine, her painfully skinny artist friend, a guy dressed as a reservoir dog, and guy who looks like one of Steve Martin and Dan Aykroyd’s "two wild and crazy guys", Oh and then there’s Sélène [Joanna Imbert] the sexy mute!

With nothing better to do on a dark night in a large mansion they’ve never been in before, they have a little séance, which drifts deliriously through some very Lucio Fulci imagery into some prime nunsploitation… You see, this is a smorgasbord of delirious tributes to the world of low budget exploitation films.

The set up at the start of the film makes for the main narrative. The killer is in the mansion, hiding in the shadows, searching for the “lost painting” that we’ve already seen him murder for, will he find it, what’s so important about it and how will Catherine and her mates survive the weekend are the subplots that push the film forth.

François Gaillard and Christophe Robin bring out all the tools from the shed out for this one, Black leather, spiked gloves that tear through skin, wires garrotting throats, young flesh hanging on meat hooks, cat and mouse games…carnage and torment in the most stylish way.

It’s Lucio Fulci meets Juan López Moctezuma, Dario Argento meets John Carpenter, Tobe Hooper meets Luciano Ercoli, Norifumi Suzuki meet’s Bruno Mattei… and then there’s the Demon that turns up at the end…oh my… I need to sit down; my head is about to explode.

Then on to Blackaria, which literally flies of the screen, screaming David Cronenberg, David DePalma and Emilio Miraglia hurling us into nightmares, wet lesbian dreams and razorblade wielding psychos.

The narrative of Blackaria is basically Angela [Clara Vallet] who suffers from erotic nightmares where she encounters a strange woman and her quest through the movie is to solve the puzzle of her identity, come to an insight what she saw when she found the neighbour murdered, and squeeze in as many Dressed to Kill homages as possible.  It’s dreamy, its erotic, its violent… and drenched in blood soaked special effects that will make you squirm.

Of the two, I’d easy say that Blackaria is the better because of it’s Gialli / DePalma visuals, yes Last Caress uses Giallo traits and symbols to, but it’s in Blackaria it comes to a fantastic multiorgasm, where narrative stricture is disrupted time and time again as Angela moves in and out of her dream state – not to unlike A Lizard In A Woman’s Skin…

You get the picture; François Gaillard and Christophe Robin have assembled a rosary of murder set pieces, cinematic homages and iconic moments in their very own magic brew. And why not, it’s like listening to a hip-hop album for the first time and going “ah, there’s that”, “Oh cool, they took that too” “Hey, I love that beat” and so on, but with visuals. Damn, if I still drank, these movies would be my new drinking game… each time you can identify a referent, take a swig. 

Someone said online that I’d lap this up like a crack addicted prostitute and it’s true, I did lap it up like a crack addicted prostitute all three hours of it, Last Caress, Blackaria the two shorts Die, Die my Darling (See Semi-naked Nazi chick in knife fight!) and Under the Blade (a Giallo concentrate) and as I wrote this text and made screengrabs I listened to the Double Dragon soundtrack which is on the second disc… it’s definitely the Ultimate Edition. I really loved the hell out of this; this is exactly what an homage-movie should be like. It works on it’s own two legs, but at the same time is an ultimate remix for the initiated.

A superb release, some great movies and a well spent three hours, if nothing else a visual party-tape for horror fans, and make sure to stay through the end credits of Blackaria  (and Last Caress) for the “Thank You” list, it will all make perfect sense then. All the directors works referred are listed and Anita Strindberg; The Uncrowned Swedish Queen of Italian Cinema.

These trailers may be censored, but the NjutaFillms discs are uncut!

The Bunny Game

The Bunny Game – [Revisitied]

Directed by: Adam Rehmeier

USA, 2010

Horror/Thriller, 76min

Distributed by:  Autonomy Pictures

Horror is all about provocation, emotional turmoil and being offensive. Add a goofy character or some sick jokes and you have tension relievers that allow the audience to take a breather before the next shock and awe assault. Add some exaggerated sexual content, and you have a different kind of relief where hormones rush to your brain getting you all excited, before the next shock and awe assault hits making the synapses collide and create an unsettling confusion in your mind. It’s still relief from the tension of the drama on screen… but remove the relief, and slowly add damage to injury, add torture to pain, add pain to suffering and you end up with a dark, nihilistic film that sticks in your mind and strangles you slowly like invisible hands choking you in the dark. You will end up with a movie like The Bunny Game.

I really like movies that go past the norm, movies that push the bar. Frequent readers know that I like dark movies that push beyond generic horror traits. The Bunny Game is such a movie. It is unique, it is dark, it is nihilistic and it’s one of a kind.

This is a movie that has lived it’s own life, defining a UK ban, living though festivals, screeners and rare European DVD’s. Finally it receives the release it deserved almost two years ago when it first hit the scene. It’s a movie that deserves this BluRay release, because this is a stunning movie.

Despite watching it earlier this year on a screener, before the Swedish DVD release, which lead to me writing a piece on the film here, this BluRay/DVD combo was a movie that I really wanted to revisit as soon as I had the package in my hand. The Bunny Game on BluRay is a whole new experience, it’s like removing a filter between audiovisual media and reality. The image is painfully crisp, the audio is perfection, and watching the movie in the total darkness it’s as if I’m in the truck with Rehmeier, Rodleen Getsic and Jeff F. Renfro The intensity of the movie is even more harrowing, he agony, the frustration, the horror is if possible even more intense.

I’ve read several interviews with Adam Rehmeier before and after my initial viewing of the film, I’ve even conducted my own interview with Adam for a forthcoming book, but I never tire of hearing him talk about his experience making The Bunny Game, and that’s one reason to pick up this release, as the disc comes with a interesting audio commentary track featuring Rehmeier and leading actress Getsic. A commentary which plays out like a true confession of a trip into hell and back via the small details that we still have to uncover and examine.

Out on BluRay and DVD now from Autonomy Pictures, The Bunny Game is required viewing and an important part of modern horror. This is a movie too intense to be missed, and despite being my third viewing, still knowing most of the beats, the experience is still a rough one. It’s like a roller coaster that never slows down and is ALL bump, grind and shake. The Bunny Game is a provocative, offensive, emotional movie that will leave you in turmoil.

The Sounds of Ninja Dixon.

One of my great friends, supporter, mentor and fellow geeks, Ninja Dixon has finally started to let his way cool, sleazy and growly radio voice be heard...

Check out his audio review HERE and hear the great man talk about one of his most cherished films, the infamous COMMANDO MENGELE!

Night of the Demon

Night of the Demon

Directed by: James C. Wasson

USA, 1980

Horror, 92min

Distributed by: CodeRed.

Hailed by some as the "Best Bigfoot film of all time", if not the "single best movie" ever, James C. Wasson’s Night of the Demon has a hell of a lot to stand up too… Well, it’ sure as hell isn’t one of the best movies ever, but it’s got several really great examples of crap storytelling a lot of weird shit goes on, and the cheap and cheerful effects which are part of the whopping death toll make up for a lot of the bad, because if there’s one thing that I like predominately, it’s passion. Night of the Demon has a lot of passion, and really want’s to be a great horror flick. It tries a bit too hard, but it’s a damned entertaining little oddity that certainly manages to make the 93 minute runtime shoot past in no time at all.

Doctor Nugent [Michael J. Cutt] is hospitalized with serious injuries. At his bedside stand Doctors Paxton [Eugene Dow], Harris [Don Hurst] and Inspector Slack [Terry Wilson] who bid Nugent to tell his story… the story of how he and several of his student’s took a trip into the wilderness to search for clues to the reason behind the death of one of the student’s father. Nugent claims that all the stories they have heard about strange things going on in the woods are true, there is a beast living up there in those woods, and the beast is responsible for the deaths of all his students…

Then the trouble starts, the hospital scene leads to a flashback of Nugent rallying up a couple of bucky students for a weekend expedition. They take off and set up camp – in broad daylight – outside some really lame park ranger’s cabin before Nugent starts telling “bigfoot” stories… which in turn lead to yet another flashback within the flashback. Just about every pastime scene is presented in flashback form, for no apparent reason, as the attacks could have taken place in the real time of the movie. But the main problem is that almost every flashback scene is lead up to by a piece of really shitty dialogue along the lines of “oh, yeah, that like those two girl scouts who went missing…” or “that young couple who went missing from their van…” etc. etc. before fading into a flashback. All that’s missing is that tingly wiggly sound Wayne and Garth used to make each time they had a past tense story to tell.

This is obviously an annoyance, and it get’s worse, a lot of pointless exposition is simply shitty conclusion work presented in really bogus dialogue such as “oh so those people what we saw must have been part of that strange cult we heard of before we came up here…” kind of stuff. It’s annoying, but definitely worth seeing as this is a textbook example of what not to do… despite the high entertainment value.

Yes, I said strange cult above, there’s a Cultist subplot concerning cultists who worship the bigfoot, there’s a outrageous father, and cult leader subplot, who keeps his young daughter under lock and key to keep her away from the groping hands of horny young men, and there’s the absolutely delirious – but superb – subplot concerning “Crazy Wanda” [Melanie Graham], her deceased mutant baby and a surreal “rape” scene that definitely makes the movie growl in the night. A lot of the subplots, are unfortunately come off as just being tossed in, and few of them really tie into the main story – such as the sinister cop who stalks the kids, is part of the cult and whom one expects to become something of a secondary protagonist, but just vanishes from the story… it’s a shame, because some of the sub-plots are as mentioned fucking outrageous and undoubtedly pretty unique. Although the introduction of the subplot cluster, is done in a really effective way, through crosscutting rapid sessions of interviews with townsfolk, just as Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myric did almost twenty years later in The Blair Witch Project 1999. This is kind of what made me muster up the effort to write about this movie at all. I’ve always claimed that most movies will contain at least one great moment where it all comes into focus, where it all drops into place and the intended vision of that segment really snaps into place. The introduction of Cult, Cult leader and Crazy Wanda are such moments, and it makes up for a lot of poor storytelling stuff that goes on in this film. 

Let’s talk about the "violent" special effects.  Well, perhaps not too violent, but kind of low-budget effective special effects, and bloody hell do the special effect’s woman, Susan Brott, work her ass of on Night of the Demon. There’s somewhere near nineteen deaths in the movie, and at least fourteen of them are on screen carnage! It’s all a right laugh, but at the same time the further the movie gets, the more dark the violence becomes, at first there’s simple splort-splash scenes, but the last act is pure diabolical hell. The last act becomes something of a siege movie, when the band of youths – and Doctor Nugent - are held captive in a small mountain shack whilst the Bigfoot strikes at them one at a time. So the road to the last act goes via schlocky gore gags, to a biker having his knob ripped off, to the final carnage where highlights include being thrown on a saw, cutting a huge gash and then watching the Bigfoot pull out the intestines, an almost Argentoesque pane of glass throat slicing moment and a face being hideously disfigured as it’s pushed into a hot fiery stove…

Oh, I almost forgot, the movie does have an initial attack to establish genre and the main protagonists – the beast, and introduce its unique Bigfoot vision. The initial attack focuses on the bloke who’s daughter is part of the Nugent expedition, and it’s him we witness being attacked and killed in a rather “H.G. Lewis toned” attack. The subjective camera lurks forth, he grimaces and from the armless silhouette shadowed on his tent the torn off arm splatters the entire fabric with red goo… but it doesn’t stop there, as it’s just about to go from hyper kitsch to really neat opening titles. The blood pours from the gaping wound where the man’s arm once hung, and flows across the soil, creating a small river of blood that finally ends up filling the footprint of The Bigfoot! I like it, and this is the kind of dorky, cheesy tone that this movie delivers en masse. Not deliberately funny like a Troma movie, but accidentally funny, as it just happens to become funny under the circumstance.

The star of the movie could be Bigfoot, played by Shane Dixon -who went on to be a stuntman in Hollywood, and this despite the fact that Sasquatch mostly wobbles around looking like a flea-market Chewbacca suit, and is revealed way to early for my tastes.  Director James C. Wasson only ever made the one movie, this one. The video artwork used to sport a warning for scenes of extreme and explicit violence… which probably felt like a kick in the bollocks when it shortly after it’s release found itself being seized and prosecuted as one of the films on the infamous British video nasties list – which just goes to show how outrageous that list actually was. Just a few years ago the Iver Film Services original VHS, with their Oscar statue mimicking logotype, would put you back close to a hundred quid. In 1994 the movie was passed with almost two minutes cut from the flick…

But what I really like about this little flick is that there’s an almost Edward D. Wood Jr. vibe to the film. I love the passion of Wood’s film making, I don’t lay any value into his filmmaking skills or get into that whole shit flicking discussion. The guy had passion in his films and his storytelling, and that’s a lot more than one can say about a lot of other films in this genre.  I find the same energy in Night of the Demon. Certain actors are pretty all right, and others kind of really not all right; some of the actors could definitely come from the realm of amateur porn, and I’d be surprised if there isn’t someone out there who’s shouted out “Oh look it’s whatsherface from that movie!” in the campervan shagging scene, but all of them – and the crew – at least give off an aura of believing that they are making a masterpiece. For a one shot moviemaker James C. Wasson at least had the right attitude, drive and passion, and perhaps in some ways Rubbermonsterfetischism and  NinjaDixon are right, perhaps this is a masterpiece in it’s own little way.

No Reason

No Reason

Directed by: Olaf Ittenbach

Germany, 2010

Splatter/Horror, 74min

Distributed by: NjutaFilms

It was raining, the thunder was roaring outside the window, and my kids where wanting to watch some damned cartoon movie for the umpteenth time… patience was low, tension was in the air… but they won, the got their animated movie and I redrew to the kitchen table to with a sigh. Until I realized that this was a perfect time to stick one of those “no, you can’t see what I’m watching” movies on my laptop and get some video time put down to use.

A naked woman, who we later will come to know as Jennifer [Irene Holzfurtner], holds what appears to be an official of some sort at gunpoint. He begs for his life and tells her that he’s got a wife and child at home. She cries out that she also had a child, before they start to struggle. He beats her with a 2x4 that he’s grabbed from a pile of rubble, and she pulls the trigger of the gun, blasting bloody holes in his wide torso. She stares blankly into the void before turning the gun against her own head and pulls the trigger, sending her brain matter splashing across the screen. Now this could easily have been the climax of the film, but it’s not, this is merely the beginning and Jennifer’s death is merely the start of her torment, and the journey that will kick us head over heals.

There’s something really interesting in No Reason, something that makes me put Ittenbach in a whole new light. I’ve previously primarily seen Ittenbach’s movies as good old, German Splatter, with all the trimmings.  I’ve talked about German Splatter as a niche before, and all the traits that come with it: Demonic possession, campy acting, bodily fluids, decapitations, eye gouging’s, genital mutilation, the cynicism, the dark comedic undercurrents, and profound nihilism, child deaths -I didn’t know one could put squibs on toddlers - it’s all there. But for some reason there was more to this one than I’d noticed in earlier Ittenbach movies.

It’s possible that Ittenbach has always had these finer storytelling tricks in his work – well, I know that some of the basic ones have always been there – but I’ve never really seen them stand out like this before. No Reason (which could be somewhat of a trick title) really impressed me and definitely shined a whole new light on Ittenbach.

In short form I’d say that No Reason is a kind of Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy inspired tale where Jennifer is forced through several layers of hell – the colour codes [Red, Green, Blue, Yellow to produce a final stage] – to find the true reason for why she’s submitted to this torture.  -While in this hell, she encounters the masked man, “the black one” as he’s called in the film who also has an obvious referent to H.P. Lovecraft with that Cthulhu inspired mask he wears. There’s also moments of Nakagawa Nobuo’s Jigoku, Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, Dante’s classic descent into hell and back, and the strong colour schemes made me think of Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, his Wife and Her Lover. I also like the way that Ittenbach poses questions about life, death and the paths that we chose as humans. It’s also these colour schemes and the choices that lie therein that determine our fates in the after world in the philosophical discussions that Jennifer and the “Black Man” have. The strict colour lighting also gives a great effect as the tremendous violence of the RED level becomes so much more profound when the whole screen is saturated in deep red, and one can’t really distinguish gore from lighting. It creates an ominous effect.

German Splatter films top trait is delicately prepared as home movie footage starts off the movie. This builds the “ordinary world” where Jennifer as a child has all the love, affection, concern that a child could possibly have, her parents have the best possible though of their child and have already dreamt up scenarios of what she’ll be when she grows up… this taints everything that we see with Jennifer from here on, as the movie starts with such positive boost of values.  It’s within the loving values of the parents dreams and ambitions for their daughter, contra what we know at the end of the movie, not forgetting the last harrowing minutes of No Reason, that showcase the wonderful cynicism that is a vital trait to the German Splatter genre!

It’s a pretty strong movie, and unlike your regular German Splatter, this one does mess around with the viewer. I’d like to call it something of an empathetic head-butt, because we have been through this decent with Jennifer and have obviously become empathetic with her. It’s odd, as this rarely happens in German Splatter where characters are restricted to a few key scenes and then packaged with wraparound carnage and death. In No Reason, Jennifer is a physical participant in every single scene, hence the automatic effect that we empathize with her… and because she’s taking this ordeal for the noble reason of being reunited with her child.  By putting her through this ordeal with an item/object/totem of desire presented as the trophy at the end, one charges the search with positive value. It’ becomes a noble quest and we can empathise with the search, we want Jennifer to be reunited, we want her to be reunited so that we can get closure to the story being told. We want her to be reunited so that we can see why the reason of her ordeal. The human mind tries per automatic to solve, understand, interpret mysteries, questions, actions and events, and we also want answers to what, why and how Jennifer ended up in this scenario.

So when the last act finally comes around Ittenbach has been playing an emotionally sadistic game with us. But it’s a good one, and I liked it a lot, which is obviously why the movie get’s a high rating than the average German splatter flick. I hope this flirtation with deeper themes holds up and that we will see more of it in the films to come.

Another favourite corner stone makes an appearance in No Reason too, Guilt! There’s a reason why Jennifer is put through her ordeal, and I’d easily write it off as guilt. She’s well aware of her deeds in the past, and that’s why she ends up where she ends up, in a nightmarish state where guilt forces her to deal with her backstory. Again, it really liked it, and it certainly put a whole new spin on the way I look at Ittenbach movies from now on.

Irene Holzfurtner, who's naked practically the whole movie, does a fantastic job as Jennifer, all the angst and torment that is associated with post-war German cinema, is channelled right through this woman. Her pain leaves an impression, and I’m thrilled to see her slated for two Ittenbach films this year. Where the hell have the Germans been hiding this woman? The movie also features a last scene cameo from New Zealander Timothy Balme, who you should recall from Peter Jackson’s Braindead.

I have to tip the hat to editor Jonathan Martens’ disruptive and eclectic editing. Normally the whole philosophy of editing is to never let the audience feel, or become aware of the cuts, as it interrupts the flow. Being a former editor myself, I personally hate sloppy editing, as it’s quite often just a testament to idle hands. But when used as a style, a trait or a gimmick that works in favour of the movie, I’ll hail it unconditionally. After all, rules are written in order to be broken. So where the norm would crave straight continuous edits, No Reason, goes for the complete opposite when depicting hell and the blitzkrieg of edits really push the movie into hard terrain. With the deconstructive, flow interrupting style of edits the experience of watching the movie becomes even more uncomfortable.

No Reason stands out amongst German Splatter. Within it’s realm it’s innovative, yet stays true to the traits that define the niche. The colour codes are an attention-grabbing device and one could presume that this is Ittenbach paying homage to the lighting schemes of Mario Bava and Dario Argento’s Suspiria. You need no reason to like the movies of Olaf Ittenbach. Really you don’t, you take them for exactly what they are, delirious pieces of violent cinema, with some outrageous effects and a fury unlike non other. No Reason has a really interesting narrative, which I find made this a well worthy of the time spent watching it. Such is the magic of Olaf Ittenbach, the unconquered Goremeister aus Deutschland!

Sinner: The Secret Diary of a Nymphomaniac

Sinner: The Secret Diary of a Nymphomaniac

Original title: Le journal intime d’une nymphomane

Directed by: Jess Franco

France: 1973

Drama/sleaze/thriller, 87min

Distributed by: Mondo Macabro

What a wonderfully lurid little title this is, seductive, enticing, captivating and damn right enchanting. Part of their great re-mastered Jess Franco releases, Sinner is yet another, first on DVD, from Mondo Macabro. Watching it once again reminds me of the brilliance of Franco, and why he deserved every ounce of that Goya Lifetime Achievement Award he was presented with a few years back.

It’s recently become that I find myself laughing along with each Franco release that comes out on DVD. Because every damned Franco release has the obligatory “One of his finest/best/weirdest/etc". quotes on the front. It’s funny because it’s always true! Every damned movie one sits down to watch has that Franco magic that just pulls you in and has you happily going along for the ride, and buying into whatever territory he want’s to take you to. No wonder the damned Franco DVD’s are something of Pokémon’s in the eyes of his enthusiastic followers, you simply can’t stop until you have them all.

Sinner: The Secret Diary of a Nymphomaniac is the exquisite tale of a young woman’s decent into cesspool of sexual depravity, and the series of events that force her to take a drastic exit from this world… after first taking her cunning revenge on the men who shaped her.

Without wasting time, the opening shot establishes that familiar Franco territory, the act/show being performed on stage for an enticed audience in a nightclub. Linda Vargas [Montserrat Prous] is performing with Maria Toledano [Kali Hansa] on stage whist the audience sip champagne and cocktails.  Where many Franco stage performances are revealed to be acts, the tables are changed here and what follows the performance is instead an act of sinister vengance. Linda joins one man in the audience, Mr Ortiz [Manuel Pereiro], entices him into buying bottle after bottle of champagne – making up a grand total of ten bottles, before they drunkenly leave the sleazy parlour and move to a seedy hotel room instead – another rather frequent Franco location. They start making out, but he passes out, and where one would expect Franco to go one path, he takes a completely different one, as Linda calls the cops, reports the murder of a young woman, and then slits her throat. As she lies bleeding to death on top of Mr Ortiz the cops bust in the door and arrest Mr Ortiz… ok, they blatantly walk in as if in a Monty Python Piranha Bros sketch, which bit actors portraying police often do in Franco flicks. It’s a grand set up, it comes completely unexpected and Sinner: The Secret Diary of a Nymphomaniac has its hooks deep into me at this point. I’m ready for the journey and desperately want to know how Franco is going to play this one.

 A brief cameo by Franco as Inspector Hernandez later, and the ball is upp and running. Mr Ortiz claims his innocence and his wife Mrs Ortiz [Jacqueline Laurent, who later ended up in several Torgny Wickman skin flicks!] refuses to believe the outlandish claims that her loving husband has murdered some two-bit prostitute. She takes it upon herself to pursue the truth, and make justice for her husband. This is a superb designation of the characters arc, which will change severely as the film progresses.

This is where the novelty of Sinner: The Secret Diary of a Nymphomaniac turns up, the search for the truth, becomes a post-mortem telling of Linda’s life. Mrs Ortiz goes to Countess Del Anna Monterey, who starts retelling how she met Linda, and the story is set in motion. I love the fact that it’s told in a non-linear fashion, it strikes me that several Franco pieces are done in this way. Linda moves to the big city where she quickly falls prey to sexual predators, Mr Ortiz being the first to violate her fragile tender frame.

There’s a great tone of guerrilla filmmaking throughout Sinner: The Secret Diary of a Nymphomaniac, definitely in the vain of the filmmakers whom Franco sought inspiration from, as he’s got Gérard Brisseau roaming around locations armed with his hand held camera as if it where a documentary shoot.  The funfair segment early on in the movie feels like a genuine piece of grabbing the moment, and the curious stares towards the camera sum it up with their “what the hell’s going on here” glances. It’s also a key scene to the movie, which lingers on for two long, is remarkably subjective for a Franco film, and provides the moment of corruption that will take Linda from childhood innocence into curious female sexuality when Mr Ortiz spoils her by buying cotton candy and the molesting her on the Ferris wheel.

Hence becomes Linda’s hatred of mankind, which leads her into her lesbian relationship with the Countess, but soon the Countess isn’t enough and Linda starts being intimate with everyone she set’s her sights on, especially men forbidden through marriage, making each promise of togetherness be merely words with no meaning. Linda searches on and meet’s raunchy exotic dancer/amateur photo model Maria Toledano, whom she falls for instantly. Her relationship with Maria leads to her participating in photo shoots, forcefully drawn into pornographic photo sessions, which in turn leads to drugs to numb the pain. The otherwise stone cold Mrs Ortiz starts to see that there’s more to this young girl than just being a dead prostitute.

So far, the story has been told to Rosa Ortiz by the Countess, now focus shifts, and Rosa seeks out Toledano to learn more about the young woman who’s death is pinned on her innocent husband. But at the same time this last act also reveals a lot more about Mrs Ortiz and the kind of conservative woman she actually is. Her meeting with Maria Toledano is awkward, Rosa obviously feels out of place when Maria tears off her clothes proclaiming that she hates wearing clothes.  A stern contrast to Mrs Ortiz, who hasn’t even seen herself without her clothes on and only makes love to Mr Ortiz with the lights out, says a lot about her, and perhaps why Mr Ortiz was running around after hookers.

Maria progresses to tell Mrs Ortiz about Linda, and it’s revealed that Maria has in her possession the journal of Linda. Now the insight is right from the heart and soul of Linda as the two women read the entries painfully jotted down by Linda. These pages tell Linda’s childhood, why she left the countryside and came to the big city, how her life changes as she encounters men who only want to use her as a sexual plaything, and also of how she narrowly escapes a jail sentence for drug offences due to a kind-hearted doctor who takes her in, in an attempt to cure her and set her back on the right track. This Doctor is played by Franco backbone, Howard Vernon. Despite Linda basically begging the good Doctor to shag her, he resists, and instead of looking at her as a piece of meat, he treats her with respect and gives back her value as a woman. But old habits die hard, and after a late night out, smoking dope, making out with men and women, Linda is confronted by the good Doctor who screams out that she’s betrayed his trust, and there for he will treat her as the nymphomaniac she is. This is the climax experience that leaves her in despair, when she later performs on stage with Maria Toledano she spots Mr Ortiz in the crowd, and knows how she must seal her fate.

The ending images of the movie, show Rose Ortiz, not only discovering new sides to her own sexuality, but also coming to a painful insight, and by taking the journey she’s become empathetic towards Linda, with whom she now can relate to. By backtracking Linda’s tracks she metaphorically done the same journey, and she too can feel the betrayal by man, and directly through her husband. A ghostly voice pleading to her, awakening guilt in her, triggers her to take sides with her sister in pain, and she seals the fate of her husband there and then.

A brief analysis and storytelling resume would go like this: Sinner: The Secret Diary of a Nymphomaniac is an exploitation gem that uses an Investigation plot to study the post-mortem character, Linda’s, degeneration. It also uses the insight that comes with the “investigation” to evoke empathy within the  “investigator” and affects her into a change of heart. The roles have altered; the victim and perpetrator have changed places. Poetic justice has been created and fates have been sealed.

Being another of the almost dozen films Franco wrote and directed in 1973, Sinner leaves no one disappointed. Again he’s working with Robert du Nesle‘s CFPC (Comptoir Français de Productions Cinématographiques) - who also produced Countess Perverse and Lorna the Exorcist –and all three edited by Gérard Kikoïne, back in Paris. The soundtrack is just a delightfully delirious as the one for Countess Perverse, although Jean-Bernard Retitaux is this time around teamed up with superstar, Vladimir Cosma. I’m still determined that someone release them as soon as possible, they are absolutely awesome, and actually surpass Hübler and Schwab’s pop-kitsch tracks for the German films.

Again, one is struck by the high quality of the production, smart use of simplistic plot and recurrent actors. It shines through when Franco is happy with his cast and crew, as there’s definitely soul in his output of this time. I’m curious to the fact if shooting hardcore films a few years later – as such was the novelty, and competing market of the time - didn’t artistically challenge filmmakers like Franco, Rollin etc. That’s not what they wanted to be shooting, and I’m certain that even they had fine ideas of where eroticism and porn cross, and how far they could go without crossing that line. Going beyond those boundaries must have affected ambition and passion for their trade, and I feel it shines through on those movies. The savvy that makes them shine is missing.

Unfortunately Sinner: The Secret Diary of a Nymphomaniac also suffered the same fate as Countess Perverse and Lorna the Exorcist and was following it’s initial run, crammed packed with hardcore shots, given a new title and tossed out onto the porno circuit, something which is when given the original versions at hand an atrocity, as they have an original story and narrative to them. I could compare it to if someone fixed an obscenely large plaster cast knob to Venus de Milo, or breaking up the frame of Mona Lisa and adding a crudely sketched snatch to the painting. It’s apparent that Franco had a strong vision of the movies shot at this time (as I’m certain he had with the most of his films), and interweaving unsophisticated hardcore shots definitely wrecks that vision. Luckily for us, Mondo Macabro are presenting the movies in their intent versions, and I don’t really see the point in those German box sets with each of the variant versions, as any version other that the Franco one, isn’t a Franco movie!

Sinner: The Secret Diary of a Nymphomaniac is basically a “countryside lass getting gobbled up by the sinister cogs of the big city” story, and it’s not really anything that we haven’t seen before in the sexploitation circuit. Films of the niche ranging from Hardcore 1979, Christiane F 1981, 8mm 1999, the cheap knockoffs, Hanna D, the girl from Vodel Park, 1984, Snuff Killer 2003 etc. have all been down that path. The big difference is found in the way Franco chooses his leading ladies. Franco’s movies could easily have been simple sleaze fests, but I’ve realized that a majority of his leading ladies have one thing in common, and it’s a vital ingredient to Franco’s films. Sinner was shot between the tragic death of Franco muse Soledad Miranda and before he firmly planted his lens on Lina Romay. I find Montserrat Prous, who starred in a half dozen films for Franco during this time period, to fit the formula perfectly. It’s all in the eyes! The movies where Soledad, or Lina, or Montserrat and so on, are the unfortunate victims, there eyes all contain a sadness, a depth, a vulnerability which makes the audience empathize with them. I also see this being the main reason why his later films totally miss the connection with the audience that these early works do, as they lack this vital ingredient. The vulnerable female muse that we are accustomed to seeing in Franco’s films. I’m absolutely determined that this is a vital part of the Franco formula! I even remember one drunken night back in the age of VHS calling up a mate and bemoaning how awfully rotten the antagonist was treating Lina Romay in one of the many Franco movies he'd duped for me.

Do yourself a favour, go out and pick up Sinner: The Secret Diary of a Nymphomaniac today, as this is one splendid movie in the annals of Jess Franco, and I will always be captivated by the simple fact that this Spanish genius directed so many fantastic, and career wise, landmark movies in the year of 1973.

Oh, and don't forget to pick up the Jess Franco mixtape from the right side bar... one hour, fifteen minutes of delightful Franco soundtrack in one nonstop mix, and you can challenge yourself to naming the scores and the soundbites... Enjoy!