The Diabolical Dr. Z (1966)

Jess Franco’s The Diabolical Dr. Z (1966) is an early career masterpiece. A Woolrich-ian noir revenge tale blended with elements of horror and sci-fi (and echoes of Franju and Lang), it’s a key transitional work in Franco’s filmography, with connections to his past films and premonitions of what’s yet to come. For those new to Franco, this is a highly recommended place to start.

The film begins as murderer Hans Bergen (Guy Mairesse) makes a daring escape from prison, only to collapse at gate of Dr. Zimmer (Antonio Jiménez Escribano). Bergen is taken to Zimmer’s laboratory, where robotic, spider-like arms clamp around his body and hold him in place while his body is prodded for experiment. Next, Dr. Zimmer and his daughter, Irma (Mabel Karr), interrupt the International Neurological Congress, where Dr. Zimmer reveals that he has continued controversial work begun by Dr. Orloff, and has discovered that the brain and spinal column control impulses towards good and evil, and that morality is part of our nervous system and not psychological. Zimmer has made a “Z-ray which can neutralize or stimulate these zones.” When he asks for permission to test on human subjects, the congress—lead by doctors Vicas, Moroni and Kallman—scorn Zimmer, who immediately dies of a heart attack. His daughter vows to carry on with the work.

Daughter of Dracula (1972)

Jess Franco’s Daughter of Dracula (1972) was part of a new wave of revisionist gothic horror in which classic tales were rebirthed for more modern sensibilities and more lenient censorship strictures. Made in the wake of Hammer’s Karnstein Trilogy, Franco similarly borrows sapphic influences from Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla, but seems more distracted by various narrative and stylistic possibilities rather than settling into a single, focused direction. Despite not being cohesive, its fractured sensibility has its own innate fascination, particularly for devotees of the director.

Luise “Karlstein” (Carment Yazalde, as Britt Nichols) visits her dying mother, who informs her that she is a descendent of Count Dracula, and gives her a key to the castle to find the crypt for herself. Exploring the family estate for herself, Luise encounters Dracula (Howard Vernon), who bites her, turning her into a vampire. When victims begin turning up in town, the local law doesn’t believe the legend, however Karlstein family secretary, Cyril Jefferson (Franco), and a journalist, Charlie (Fernando Bilbao), are convinced that the curse of Dracula has returned.

Neurosis (1983)

In Neurosis (1983), Jess Franco reimagines Edgar Allan Poe’s Usher mythology as a deeply personal metaphor for his own artistic legacy, resulting in one of the auteur’s most haunting, empathetic, and personal works. 

Alan Harker (Antonio Mayans)n is summoned to the remote castle of his former instructor, Dr. Eric Usher (Howard Vernon). Aware of his rapidly diminishing mental and physical state, Usher has called for Harker to help him with his experiments to revive the corpse of his deceased wife. Years ago, his experiments–which required the blood of fresh bodies–resulted in him being banished from the medical university. Usher’s physician, Dr. Seward (Daniel White), believes that Usher’s confessions of medical murder are hallucinations. In his wanderings, Harker discovers a dungeon full of captive women. But in the morning, the castle’s housekeeper (Lina Romay) assures him it was only a dream. Is Harker, too, falling prey to madness?

Nightmares Come at Night (1970)

A hallucinatory, erotic, and ominous vortex, Jess Franco’s Nightmares Come at Night (1970) is a beguiling movie of entrancement, and one of the purest expressions of his personal artistry. Evoking the doomed, criminal love mysteries of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, whose novels were adapted as Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques (1955) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), Nightmares Come at Night centers around a love triangle in which one player is oblivious of the game in which they are being played.

Nightclub dancer Anna de Istria (Diana Lorys) suffers from bad dreams in which she commits murder. As the movie begins, she awakens from one such dream with blood on her hands. Her lover, Cynthia (Colette Giacobine), originally asked her to move in with her and promised to launch her career, but now thinks that Anna is going crazy. Anna confides in Dr. Paul Vicas (Paul Muller) who, unbeknownst to her, is in cahoots with Cynthia, using Anna’s growing mental instability as part of a sinister plot. Meanwhile, a criminal (Andre Montchall) spies on them from next door while he waits for the loot, along with his girlfriend (Soledad Miranda).

The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein (1972)

The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein (1972), Jess Franco’s riff on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein mythology, is fond, irreverent, inventive, surreal and–as its title indicates–erotic. In short, it’s an undiluted dose of Franco psychedelia.

Shortly after bringing his monster to life, Dr. Frankenstein (Dennis Price) is murdered by Melissa (Anne Libert), a mostly nude bird-woman hybrid, and the hunchbacked Caronte (Luis Barboo), who steal the monster for their own master, Cagliostro (Howard Vernon). The doctor’s daughter, Vera Frankenstein (Beatriz Savón), is a knock off the old block, and brings her father back to life just long enough to find out who killed him and took the monster. Before she can avenge her father, however, Vera is kidnapped by Cagliostro, who intends to use parts of her for a companion to the male monster. While the local authorities seek out the missing Vera, Cagliostro uses Frankenstein to whip prisoners in the villain’s fiendish erotic spectacles.

A Virgin Among the Living Dead (1973)

Contrary to its salacious title, A Virgin Among the Living Dead (1973) is among Jess Franco’s more somber, moody works, and one of the most unusual and original takes on the zombie genre. It’s also among his strongest, most personal films. A meditation on death, isolation, and loneliness, Franco explores the lengths to which one will go to maintain human (or, in this case, inhuman) connections.

The story begins in typical gothic horror tradition: on her way to her family’s remote estate to hear the reading of her father’s will, Christina (Christina Von Blanc) stops at an inn, where she is warned to stay away from the cursed place. Basilio (Franco) arrives to pick her up. Arriving at the mansion, Christina finds her estranged relatives exceedingly eccentric. She’s visited at night by a ghastly woman who implores her to leave. Basilio wanders the halls at night with a severed chicken’s head. She also suffers nightmares in which her dead father visits her. Meanwhile, the neighbors claim that her house is abandoned. Little do they realize that is indeed inhabited–but by the undead.

Exorcism (1975)

Cult auteur Jess Franco stars in Exorcism (1975) as Mathis Vogel, a defrocked priest who now makes a living writing erotic stories for porno mags edited by Franval (Pierre Taylou). After overhearing Franval and his secretary/girlfriend Anna (Lina Romay) plan a Black Mass-themed orgy, Vogel mistakenly thinks the Satanic ceremonies to be real, and begins stalking and purifying the orgy’s participants–by murdering them. 

Alternately erotic, surreal, and menacing (and often all at the same time), this is one of the strongest Franco films I’ve seen thus far. The narrative is fairly cohesive and straightforward, and gives structure to Franco’s pscyho-sexual environs. 

The opening sequence, of two women enacting an S&M performance on stage for an audience, introduces a key theme of the movie and of Franco’s work as a whole: the intertwining of performance, role-playing, voyeurism, and eroticism. Nearly every encounter in the film, whether sexual or not, involves some element of performativity. Whether its two lovers expressing submission and domination, or a college-educated cop competing with his street-wise superior, Franco seems interested in the extent to which people are always acting, and whether even the most seemingly “normal” elements of our reality are, in some ways, fictional fantasies of their own. 

The version of Exorcism streaming on Kino Cult is sourced from varying prints, and some scenes show minor damage (such as scratches), and certain sequences inter-cut between different prints in order to deliver the most complete version of the film possible. Despite this, the colors are strong and not faded, making this an overall very attractive presentation of the film. Kino’s Blu-ray also includes a cut-down version called Demoniac (exclusive to the disc, not streaming), which focuses more on the horror elements of the film, and includes alternate footage and less nudity.  

Streaming on Kino Cult, or available on DVD/Blu-ray.

–Cullen Gallagher

Demon Squad (2019)

Not every movie selected for MST3K is a cinematic stinker, and one of their most recent riffs is a perfect example. Demon Squad (2019) is a terrific noir-horror hybrid whose ingenuity, creativity, and humor overcome (and overshadow) it’s small budget. Paranormal Investigator Nick Moon (Khristian Fulmer) has been hitting the bottle too often since his divorce, but he is offered a chance at redemption when Lilah Fontaine (Leah Christine Johnson) hires him to find a lost dagger that once belonged to her missing archaeologist father. The case leads Moon into a demon-filled underbelly of the American South where rivals forces all want their claws on this dagger, which holds deadly, inhuman powers.