Written by: Jesus Franco, Nicole
Guettard, Robert de Nesle
Directed by: Jesus Franco
Starring: Lina Romay, Pamela Stanford,
Guy Delorme
Fall is a great time for movie
shopping. Sales abound, and while a lot of times you have to sift
through a lot of crap to find the good stuff, great deals can be had.
Of course, sometimes you're just sifting for a specific type of
crap, as with tonight's movie. But now my shelves are overflowing.
I mean, they were before, but it's much worse now. Deep Discount and
Scream Factory spoiled me this year. A few months ago I shifted
everything in my movie library to fit on the three big shelves that
take up one wall of our dining room. After a couple of weeks of at
least one movie a day arriving in the mail, now the tops of those
shelves are all piled with unwatched stuff again (and I have some
movies from two years' ago Halloween sale that are still in the
plastic wrap). While on one hand I'm attempting to alleviate this by
disposing of some items of lesser interest on eBay, I figured on the
other I should, for a time, stop reviewing whatever random thing I
happen to have watched on Netflix and cover some stuff that I
actually paid money to own. So it's time to play a little game
called Justifying My Purchases.
I am about to make you want to see a
movie that, unless you're a rabid Franco completist, you probably
don't really want to see. Most of the movie is way too slow to be
good riffing material with friends (although the parts that are
bonkers are bonkers enough that you might be glad you had some
witnesses to corroborate what you think you saw), and way too slow to
give you much of a chance to stay awake until the crazy shit hits the
fan if you're alone, and features some of the least sexy lesbian sex
ever committed to film, so unless you have a couple of really
specific and weird fetishes, it's useless as an aid to making fapple
sauce. “So why the hell did you watch it?” you may ask. To
which I answer, “Have you seen some of the shit I watch? That's
just what we do around here.”
Patrick is a doughy European
businessman who has been summoned to visit an old acquaintance named
Lorna (who wears makeup that makes her look a good deal like Mimi
from the Drew Carey Show).
Well, more ordered than summoned, really. It's pretty clear she
holds some heavy stuff over his head. His daughter Linda discovers
that his “business trip”, as he told her and his wife Marianne it
was, is really to visit a woman with whom he'd had an affair. As
soon as he says the trip is going to be a drag for him she seems fine
with it though. Oh, it's going to be a bummer going to visit your
old mistress? Good, I hope you're miserable, dad. Get a hotel with
a pool!
I hope you're ready for some
nekkidness, because that's pretty much all you're getting for the
next half hour or so. Linda dreams about Lorna quite a bit. My
favorite is the one where Linda is in the bath. Lorna hops in with
her and they start 69ing. Lorna's contribution is to yet again lick
and play with Linda's pubic hair (the fondling, licking, and yes,
sucking of pubic hair is a major part of every sex scene in this
movie – don't ask me, I have no idea), while Linda repeatedly slams
her face into Lorna's ass. I mentioned the awkward and impractical
sex scenes in Female Vampire,
but they're perfectly plausible compared to the goofy stuff on
display here.
There's
also an unnamed (or at least, I never caught her name if they did say
it) woman in a mental institution who appears to be there because
she's in a state of constant sexual ecstasy. She's always writhing
around and moaning, and becomes more and more undressed as the movie
goes on. More on her later. I also can't find anything by way of
casting information to confirm this, but her doctor is Jess in a
cameo, he only has a couple of lines, and I am positive he was dubbed
by Trevor Baxter, who played Professor Litefoot in the Doctor
Who serial “The Talons of
Weng-Chiang” and the ongoing spinoff series of Jago and Litefoot
audio plays from Big Finish. I'd love to see him at a convention
some time so I could ask him. I bet it's not too often a fan comes
up and asks him if he did voice work for a Jess Franco movie.
While all this is
going on, Patrick has been trying to keep Lorna from getting near
Linda. So far all his efforts have gotten him is stabbed in the
shoulder with a conch shell and Lorna cursing his wife to die by
having crabs crawl out of her vagina (Another hilarious bit of
dialog, “Where did you catch them!?”, suggests that in Europe,
getting crabs from a sexual partner of dubious hygiene isn't just a
figure of speech. Incidentally, animal lovers may want to steer
clear as quite a few of them get stomped to death.). Finally, Lorna
appears to Linda in the flesh, and we get the entire plot of the
movie explained to us in about five minutes.
Patrick used to be
broke and struggling, and he made it worse by constantly gambling
away whatever money he could find in the hope that one day he'd
strike a jackpot and get out of his financial mess. Lorna spotted
him at the casino one day and seduced him. She's a witch, spawned
directly from Hell by Satan himself, you see. As it turns out,
Satanic witches and mules have a lot in common. They're stubborn,
bad tempered...and sterile. The problem with that is, she has to
pass on her spirit to a new body every once in a while to continue
living and serving her dark lord, but the only way she can is to have
a child. The only way she can do that is to seduce a man, then have
him immediately impregnate another woman. The resulting child will
be Lorna's new vessel when she reaches the age of 18. In return, she
will make Patrick rich and successful. He, of course, assumed she
was full of shit, but a naked woman was throwing herself at him, so
what the hell, right?
The time has come
for Lorna to stake her claim to her “lovely child” (EW EW EW!),
and for some reason this involves yet another round of incestuous
lesbian fondling followed by popping Linda's hymen with a huge marble
dildo! Lina Romay's huge, expressive eyes (What did you think I was
going to say? Get your mind out of the gutter!) really work to her
advantage here, as her sustained look of shock, horror, and pain at
discovering that she's been having wet dreams about her mom followed
by mom manifesting in her bedroom and ramming a great big stone
schlong into her is easily the best piece of acting in the movie. As
Linda lies on her bed, back arched in agony, the nameless woman
across town in the asylum goes into her biggest fit of orgasmic
thrashing yet, and the whole thing culminates in Linda appearing to
the woman, claiming to be Lorna, and fucking her to death.
It is my theory,
because I put far too much effort into justifying unexplained
bullshit in crappy movies, that this unnamed woman is sort of Lorna's
sexual Renfield. At some point in the past, Lorna tried to have
another child, something went wrong, and the resulting mess wound up
spending her existence masturbating in a padded room. She was kept
around as a contingency plan – better a fucked up body than no body
at all – but once Linda became Lorna's new vessel, there was no
more need for the other woman, and Lorna destroyed her. Or Jess
Franco decided two naked squirming women weren't enough and crammed
another one in there just because. I like my idea though.
Patrick visits
Lorna one more time to implore her to leave his daughter alone, but
he's too late. Her spirit no longer inhabits the old clown makeup
body. He returns to his hotel, broken and dejected, having lost his
entire family, to find Linda/Lorna sprawled naked on the bed. Things
have finally come full circle jerk.
Aside from a cash
grab because The Exorcist had raked it in, I have no idea why
this movie is called what it's called. What they should have done
was have Patrick employ an exorcist to help him save his daughter,
and called the movie Lorna vs. The Exorcist. Now that's
a title!
I warned you,
didn't I? I bet you want to see this movie now. That's the danger
with describing movies like, this; you will almost invariably make it
sound entertaining, because on paper all this stuff sounds like the
makings of a good time. Unless you're from Appalachia or have a
pubic hair fetish, there's not really a lot to appeal. Almost
nothing happens for the entire run time. The thing I got most
excited about was an unconfirmed voiceover appearance by an actor who
was in Doctor Who. Not that there's no fun to be had with it.
You could always put it on at a party just to make everyone really
uncomfortable.
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