This is Jess Franco’s last movie, or so they say on IMDB, but then how did Revenge of the Alligator Ladies get made in 2013?

Three alligator ladies — Carmen Montes (Snakewoman), Irene Verdú and Paula Davis (who was in Franco’s Paula-Paula) — have come to find detective Al Pereira, the hero of several Franco films. In fact, actor Antonio Mayans had played Pereira in Botas negras, látigo de cuero; Diamonds of Kilimandjaro; Lilian; Two Spies in Flowered Panties and the two late Alligator Ladies movies. Pereira was also played by Olivier Mathot in Midnight Party, Howard Vernon in Les ebranlées, Eddie Constantine in Attack of the Robots, Conrado San Martin in Agent 77, Franco himself in Downtown and Lina Romay even played a relative of Al, Alma Pereira, in Paula-Paula.

This movie is charitably a mess and more of a series of scenes in which Al insults — and at the same time encourages — the alligator women to keep having Jess Franco sapphic pleasures and I use that phrase because I don’t believe that any women have ever indulged in one another as they do in a Franco movie.

There’s also a moment where Jess and crew show up in a mirror and instead of editing that out, he starts giving orders to the actors. This becomes an entire movie, A Ritmo de Jess. But come on, let’s cut the man some slack. By this point, Lina Romay had died from cancer and Jess was probably lost. So if he wanted to make a movie where some women got naked in a hotel conference room and bedeviled one of his longest running characters in a film that wants to be meta but is really just a One Shot softcore movie with a little bit of story, so what? Could you imagine if Jess was your grandfather, out there in a wheelchair with a Yankees hat yelling at women to scissor harder?

Jess said that this was a “happy movie about happy people” and it seems like just about everyone was willing to indulge him. So that makes me happy, even if I feel party in the indulging by forcing myself to sit through this.