Friday, 13 January 2012
Some random 4.30 AM Jesus Franco questions
What are your favourite and least favourite periods of Franco's films? And why? Do you find that there are individual films within them that you like and don't like / like less? Is it just an all-encompassing Francoverse where the more you watch, the more you see the connections, perhaps a bit like Frank Zappa's xenochrony and conceptual continuity in his music?
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5 comments:
My favourite is definitely the Towers-era films: '99 Women', 'Eugenie...Perversion', 'Venus in Furs' and 'The Bloody Judge' - I like Franco with a budget!
I also like the Miranda titles (and 'A Virgin Among the Living Dead'), but anything I've seen post-1980 is, for the most part, rather dire.
I tend to view the films as discrete films, though, rather than as 'periods'.
I like his gothic horror period of the early 60s. The Awful Dr. Orloff, Dr. Orloff's Monster and my absolute favorite, The Diabolical Dr. Z. I also like much of his late 60s/early 70s stuff, such as Eugenie, Eugenie de Sade, Venus in Furs, Succubus. Not sure how many of those were Towers productions.
I haven't enjoyed much of his from the 80s (though Faceless is a guilty pleasure) or 90s (which IMO are all terrible).
I think the early 80s is a very underrated Franco period. Movies like EUGENIE 80 or the neon-gothic EL SINIESTRO DOCTOR ORLOFF are imho among his best works. They were made cheaply but I think Franco had a lot of creative freedom at this time - and it shows in the films.
I think the more movies of his you see the more you can see the authorship of Franco and appreciate the details in his work.
- Hannes
I'd agree some of the Franco titles from the 80s work OK: 'The Sexual Story of O' is interesting (given Franco departs from his usual cast), and 'Mansion of the Living Dead' has some nice horror touches amidst the dross.
I lean toward his early horror films - the ones where he still felt he needed to actually tell a story that had a definable beginning, middle and end. Not that I dislike his later period films but he seemed so capable of using the genre in a fresh way in those early films. I don't feel his later work falls down because of low budgets but because without the restraint imposed by having to create a coherent narrative he tends to too often make a mess.
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