ARROW BLU RAY RELEASE: Madame Bovary (1991)
Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary has been made numerous times, as early as Albert Ray’s 1932 film Unholy Love to Jean Renoir, Gerhard Lamprecht and Vincente Minnelli making their own versions. There are three BBC series — in 1964, 1975 and 2000, as well as Hans Schott-Schobinger’s 1969 version (starring Edwige Fenech!), Alexandr Sokurov’s Save and Protect, the Hindu […]
ARROW BLU RAY RELEASE: Inspecteur Lavardin (1986)
The sequel to the 1984 film Cop au Vin, Inspecteur Lavardin finds the detective (Jean Poiret) demoted to investigations in a small coastal town due to his investigation techniques involving dunking suspect’s heads under water. This brings him into the case of a murdered Catholic writer named Raoul Mons, who has been found dead on the beach […]
ARROW BLU RAY RELEASE: Cop Au Vin (1985)
The original French title of this movie — Poulet au vinaigre — means vinegar chicken, but poulet also means cop, so it’s a play on words. The detective film that results, the first several appearances of Inspecteur Jean Lavardin (Jean Poiret), takes the notions of the genre and gives it the spin that director Claude Chabrol […]
JESS FRANCO: The Vengeance of Doctor Mabuse (1972)
Dr. Mabuse! Master of disguise and telepathic hypnosis! A man able to switch bodies through possession, usually using televisions! The leader of a society of crime! The king of blackmail! A Jess Franco villain if I’ve seen one! Mabuse first appeared in Norbert Jacques’ 1921 novel Dr. Mabuse the Gambler which became a movie directed by […]
JESS FRANCO MONTH: La noche de los sexos abiertos (1983)
So yes, if there is a Jess Franco cinematic universe, it’s one in which governments have decided that erotic dancers make the perfect spies and are always given the most dangerous missions, like how Moira (Lina Romay, who else) is the only person who can solve the riddle of the Nazi gold when she’s not […]
Laguna Ave (2021)
Russell (Russell Steinberg) was a musician but then an accident cost him his hand, so now he lives in a Los Angeles apartment complex with his girlfriend Rita (Stephanie Brait) and he’s just lost his last job because he keeps falling asleep at work. And then he sneaks back in and leaves a dump on […]
JESS FRANCO MONTH: Tendre et perverse Emanuelle (1973)
There have been so many Emanuelle movies by so many of my favorite disreputable filmmakers, from Just Jaeckin’s original in 1974 to Joe D’Amato’s always entertaining Black Emanuelle films with Laura Gemser to science fiction takes such as Emmanuelle in Space and Emmanuelle Through Time, as well as two by Franco, this one and Emmanuelle Exposed. The original film […]
JESS FRANCO MONTH: Les cauchemars naissent la nuit (1970)
Movies take a lot of work. And yet Nightmares Come At Night only played at a single theatre in Belgium and was considered a lost movie until 2004. So all that sweat and energy and anxiety took years for the world to see. And what they saw was a movie that finds Jess Franco giving in […]
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