Culture Shock 04.04.13: Jess Franco leaves polarizing legacy

The first time I saw "Vampyros Lesbos," I fell asleep, which is surprising on two counts.

Jess Franco

First, as the title indicates, this is a movie about lesbian vampires, and normally I never fall asleep during movies about lesbian vampires. Second, "Vampyros Lesbos" is a film by Jess Franco, and Franco's films are usually, if nothing else, interesting.

Franco, a Spanish filmmaker who directed, by some counts, more than 180 films, died early Tuesday. He was 82.

In America, Franco enjoys little name recognition outside the circle of cult cinema aficionados. Unfortunately, one of his worst major films is probably his most widely seen: 1969's "The Castle of Fu Manchu" became fodder for the third season of "Mystery Science Theater 3000."

It's hard to keep up with all the films Franco made because he made so many, often issued under multiple titles, and he directed many of them under pseudonyms. But his better-known films have made him a polarizing figure. Almost no one who has seen Franco's movies is neutral about him. They love him, or they hate him. The closest thing to a middle ground where Franco is concerned comes from those critics who divide his films into two groups: the ones they love and the ones they hate.

And Franco never made it easy. Even his most ardent fans admit he could go a little too far with his mania for zoom shots.

At best, Franco was an uneven filmmaker, but he was almost never boring. Except for "Vampyros Lesbos," but here I'm in the minority; most Franco fans regard it as one of his best films. You definitely have a polarizing filmmaker when even his fans disagree about which are his best and worst films.

Franco burst onto the horror and exploitation scene with "The Awful Dr. Orlof" in 1962. "Orlof" — sometimes spelled "Orloff" — was Franco's answer to Georges Franju's classic "Eyes Without a Face," released two years earlier. Franco would return to the character many times throughout his career, culminating in what was Franco's last good film, 1987's "Faceless" featuring Telly Savalas, Caroline Munro and Brigitte Lahaie.

For a director who seemed bent on erasing the line between art house and schlock, Franco collaborated with a lot of talented performers. He directed Herbert Lom in 1969's "99 Women," the prototype for the women-in-prison genre; elicited the most bizarre, over-the-top performance of Jack Palance's career in "Deadly Sanctuary" (aka "The Marquis de Sade's Justine"); and teamed with Christopher Lee on numerous occasions, including 1970's "Count Dracula," a tedious but unusually faithful adaptation of Bram Stoker's "Dracula."

Franco also may be the only director who claimed to have had no difficulty working with Klaus Kinski, whom Franco cast in "Deadly Sanctuary" (as the Marquis de Sade) and in his surreal thriller "Venus in Furs," which, despite the name, has nothing to do with book.

In one interview, I recall, Franco said he simply shot take after take until Kinski, exhausted, gave the performance Franco wanted. Who knew the trick to dealing with Kinski was so simple?

Most of what I think are Franco's best films are the ones he made with producer Harry Alan Towers. They include "Venus in Furs," "99 Women," and 1970's "Eugenie."

Those three starred Towers' wife, Maria Rohm, but Franco's two muses were Soledad Miranda, star of "Vampyros Lesbos," who died in a car wreck in 1970 when she was just 27, and the woman who would become his longtime companion, Lina Romay, who starred most memorably in 1973's "Female Vampire." They eventually married and stayed together until her death early last year.

For Franco there was no stopping. He kept making movies until the end.

His last film, "Al Pereira vs. the Alligator Ladies," opened in Spain last month.

Just a (Manhattan) gigolo

In June 2001, actress-turned-newscaster Andrea Thompson (Babylon 5, NYPD Blue) became an anchor for what was then called CNN Headline News — now HLN, which sounds more like a homemaking and lifestyle channel than a news channel. This caused a minor scandal because 1) Thompson was a newsreading newbie, and veteran TV newscasters like to pretend reading a teleprompter requires journalism experience, and 2) Thompson had appeared nude in some movies back in the 1980s and '90s.

Despite its reputation for being "liberal," the mainstream news media in America is actually full of insufferable prudes.

While Thompson had done full frontal as recently as 1997's A Gun, A Car, A Blonde, in which she played "The Blonde," the movie that generated most of the heat was her first, an Italian-made bit of softcore Eurotrash called Manhattan Gigolo (1986).

At the time, Manhattan Gigolo had been released only on VHS, and the tape, a relic of the mom-and-pop-video-store era, was out of print. A few years ago, this all-but-forgotten flick — which would be completely forgotten if not for Thompson's involvement — finally made it to DVD, and, thanks to Netflix, I now know what all the fuss was about.

First things first: Manhattan Gigolo is a bad movie. If not for the sex and nudity — and I'll get to that — it would be perfect material for Mystery Science Theater 3000. The bare-bones DVD from Televista doesn't help: The picture is murky and dark, the presentation is a cropped pan-and-scan, and if it looks like the movie was copied off the old VHS release, that's because it probably was.

Can you believe they charge nearly $25 for this bootleg-quality crap? They're clearly counting on lots of guys being desperate to see Andrea Thompson naked — as if the Internet doesn't make that easy enough.

Manhattan Gigolo is like a bad Italian horror movie of the same era, except it's sorely lacking in gloved killers, zombies, zombies fighting sharks, or a director capable of overachieving with sub-par material. It also lacks the flair of other Italian softcore sex films. Director Amasi Damiani is no Joe D'Amato, and this is no Black Emanuelle flick.

I guess this movie might be competently edited and shot and it's just impossible to tell from the washed-out, VHS-duped presentation. But I doubt it because it has a scene where from one camera angle it's broad daylight while from the other it's pitch black. Continuity is not a strong point here.

The plot involves two friends, Johnny (Gianni Dei, known to Eurohorror fans for occupying the title role of Patrick Still Lives, the Italian knock-off "sequel" to the classic Australian exploitation flick Patrick) and Rudy (Aris Iliopulos, known to nobody for nothing) who have come to New York from Italy to seek fame and fortune as actors. This leads them to cross paths with actress/model Leslie (Thompson), who immediately takes a liking to the two. So at about 17 minutes in, we get the steamy three-way that caused such a commotion when Thompson joined Headline News. What follows is 6 minutes of enjoyable Skinemax-level erotica. It's the highlight of the film but certainly no cause for moral indignation, no matter how flexible the young Ms. Thompson is.

Unknown to Johnny and Rudy, however, their tryst with Leslie was staged for a voyeur, with Leslie pocketing the money. (Why does the most popular model in New York need an illicit side job, anyway? Shut up, that's why!) And Leslie is all for doing it again, this time giving Johnny and Rudy a cut. Johnny has moral reservations, but not enough to bail, even as his career really starts to take off. (If you think this seems ironically like Thompson's real-life experience, stop over-analyzing now.)

Naturally, it all goes bad, with professional jealousies and obsessive voyeurs who want to do more than watch all playing out predictably. There's also a bit more skin: a staged "rape" scene for one of the voyeuristic clients, another three-way interspersed in the middle of a montage, etc. But it's all pretty tedious stuff.

Did I mention all of this is told in a flashback from the back of an ambulance where Johnny, injured and possibly dying, and Leslie reminisce about how they met and fell in love? No? Well it is.

The sex scenes are the least embarrassing thing about Manhattan Gigolo. They come off well compared to everything else. Even with all the terrible acting surrounding her, Thompson seems especially bad. She is emotionless to the point of seeming constantly dazed, and, adding insult to injury, her voice is dubbed by someone else.

But to cut her some slack, this was her first film and she was probably the only native English speaker on the set. No wonder "confused" is a charitable description of her screen presence.

Thompson was much better on Babylon 5 — and reading the news on TV, for that matter.