Based on the writings of the Marquis de Sade — that can be said about a lot of other Jess Franco movies — this is all about the rich Martine de Bressac (Lina Romay, but really Candy Coster, because she has on her blonde wig), who has just returned to her husband Marques Armando de Bressac (Armando Borges) after spending some time away and by away, I mean that she was in a sanitarium.

Yet when she gets home, she learned that her husband has been sleeping with men and women, but mostly with a nun named Norma (Susan Hemingway, who is also in Franco’s Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun) who has conspired with Armando to murder Martine and live off her money.

The only problem is that Norma is also in love with Flor (Mel Rodrigo), the bisexual boy that Armando is also lying with, so things are complicated.

Lit by candles, scored by Franz Liszt and a flirtation with the supposed death of Martine and even a Bay of Blood double stabbing and you have a movie that looks, feels and plays better than a lot of what Franco would do in the decade to come. Soft focus and lens flares make this look like a trip through a dream, but one that’s trapped in a home where everyone wants something carnal of their own and the death of its protagonist, who can be overcome and murdered by orgasm if the desire is pushed to its limit.

This is the only Franco movie I’ve seen that balances a sapphic encounter between Coster and Hemmingway with a male on male love scene between Borges and Rodrigo.

You can get this from Severin.

Garçon chiffon is directed and written by — as well as starring — Nicolas Maury, who I only knew from Knife+Heart. He plays Jérémie, an actor whose career and love setbacks cause him to move back home to live with his mother Bernadette (Nathalie Baye).

You know how Lucio Fulci hated actors? Well, he wasn’t wrong.

I kid, I kid.

Meyer goes from losing that film role and getting thrown out of his boyfriend’s apartment — well, the guy may have been cheating on him — and back home, where he attends the funeral of his father, who has just committed suicide by shotgun. Perhaps having a multiple gun salute was not the best of ideas for the funeral, huh?

Can our hero win back his lover? Or will he just flirt with other men? The one thing that I can agree with this movie is that a dog can definitely make your life better.

I understand that a French art film that has a lot to stay about depression may not be in my wheelhouse, which is usually films in which clergy members turn into possessed beings, but if this is more your speed, you’ll like this. Maybe this is a blind spot for me.

As of February 25, this is playing on video on demand from Altered Innocence, as well as the following theaters:

Jess Franco kept coming back to the Red Lips, this time to create a pornographic parody of them and this time, Lina Romay plays some kind of spy who programs women by placing a microchip up their asses, which reminds me of how James Shelby Downard shared in his book The Carnivals of Life and Death: My Profane Youth: 1913-1935 that when he reconnected with his first love after years apart that she had been co-opted by the labyrinth of sex-magick-occult-conspiracy that plagued him for his entire life, he reached down to her rear end and she had a series of wires and computer chips the likes of which we wouldn’t see for many decades hanging out of her posterior.

Carmen Carrión, who was in Franco’s Alone Against Terror and The Sexual Story of O, appears, as does Rosa María Martín from Lilian and Mari Carmen Nieto from Mansion of the Living Dead and La sombra del judoka contra el doctor Wong. Amongst all the spy on spy hardcore scenes, Antonio Mayans plays a gay character.

With Lina’s limited role in this movie, I wonder if she really did co-direct this movie.

In 1975, Jess Franco was shooting a remake of his 1969 film, De Sade’s Justine. But as these things happen, he ran out of money and all he had to show for it was a few sex scenes starring his obsession, Lina Romay.

So the producers of this film thought long and, well, hard and decided that only one person could save this movie and make it something releasable. And sleazy. And they decided to seek out the one man who could potentially out perv Jess Franco.

Ladies (who am I kidding) and gentlemen, Joe D’Amato.

Justine (Romay) is a stripper in love with a songwriter who can’t deal with her need for sex from anyone at any time. It goes back to that feeling that I’ve always had about sex objects in film. Most men think that they’d be able to handle that kind of life, but satisfying a sex addict isn’t always a sustainable life choice. So Chris starts drinking and his life falls apart and in turn, so does the existence of Justine, which is always in danger of being snuffed out by her own hand.

Using the unfinished movie and scenes from Franco’s Shining Sex and Midnight Party, D’Amato, all set to music from the Black Emanuelle films.

I don’t know if you understand how happy this makes me.

After inviting her childhood friend to make love one more time — as well as shave themselves to return to their innocent past — Justine recounts the sordid events that have led her here, at the end of quite literally her rope, a rope that also circles the neck of her lover, leaving himself behind for her to find, to fondle one last time and blow her brains out in a way that only Jess Franco (and D’Amato) could bring to us.

Franco shows up as a client that is deathly afraid of the power of Lina’s sexuality and you can completely understand how he feels. This is someone just in the periphary of her carnal car crash and unlike the manly men that surround her, he understands that no arms can ever truly hold her except those belonging to choir invisible.

At once a greatest hits package of Lina making love and a square up reel of the downside of all this excess, this movie is a mess, but it’s a glorious mess. It’s my mess and it’s freaking me out.

The third movie released in the U.S. as Dracula vs. Frankenstein (after Naschy in Los Monstruos del Terror and Al Adamson’s memorable movie), Jess Franco’s Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein follows his Christopher Lee-starring Count Dracula, with Howard Vernon taking over the role and being controlled by Dr. Frankenstein (Dennis Price). Their mutual enemy ends up being Dr. Jonathan Seward (Alberto Dalbes), who has already staked Dracula in the heart once and turned him into a dried-up little bat that he pins up in a collection.

Luckily — or unluckily for everyone else — Frankenstein bathes that bat in the blood of a nighclub dancer, which in the world of Jess Franco is the most perfect blood of all. Somehow, this is also a movie where Dracula never speaks.

It isn’t until the end of the movie that a gypsy beckons a werewolf to come attack the caste, because when we’ve come this far, you know, why not. And the Luis Barboo-played monster looks like an Azrak Hamway rack toy World Famous Official Super Monster than anything that Jack Pierce created.

Starting with 15-plus minutes of absolute silences and featuring characters often given words via narration, this movie shows that Franco had the good sense to reuse Bruno Nicolai’s soundtrack score from Justine and use Museu Condes de Castro Guimarães as a set, the same place where Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun would be filmed.

Best of all, Britt Nichols (also known as Carmen Yazalde), who shows up in other Franco movies like Daughter of Dracula and The Demons, brings glamour to her role as a lady vampire.

Dolls for Sale is another Al Pereira (Howard Vernon) movie and this time, the detective is hired by a woman who simply wants him to break into a location and take an envelope. Of course, this leads to a murder and Al going deeper and deeper into a sleazy world that no one ever escapes.

That downward spiral takes Al so low that he stabs Lina Gordon (Glenda Allen), the woman who used him, who has just killed another woman (Anne Libert). But the reason why is that Al has learned that she was born a man and for some reason, his mental state just can’t deal with that, knowing that someone so seductive could be masculine under her feminine mask.

There’s a roughness that feels lived in, a sleaziness that feels authentic and a sexuality that feels brazen, thanks to Kali Hansa as Leona. I’m shocked that Al Pereira emerged from this story to appear in several more Franco films, but I often wonder if the Franco Cinematic Universe is a multiverse, where there are multiple Al Pereira, Red Lips, Dr. Orloff and Cathy/Lina aspects all living different lives, slightly off and all struggling to escape with their sanity intact and never their innocence.

This feels like worlds colliding as Jess Franco not only got Michele Bauer (Beverly Hills High, Chickboxer) and Linnea Quigley (do I have to even give you any of her numerous credits?) in this movie, but he pairs them with Analía Ivars, Pamela Sheppard and his muse, Lina Romay. This made me beyond excited, even if the final product is, well, a One Shot Jess Franco movie.

Lina is Tarantula, a woman who seduces other women and traps them in her web so she can show up in her spider form, which is basically a stuffed spider toy with her head superimposed upon it. It’s gleefully one of the worst effects I’ve ever seen.

Sheriff Marga (Bauer) is the kind of cop that only wears a bikini and holster with a leather jacket and I think that perhaps my dislike for the police is misplaced. Maybe not, as she’s convinced that everyone but the real criminal is repsonsible, like Mari-Cookie (also Romay) and mother and daughter team Teri and Amy (Quigley and Amber Newman from Lust for Frankenstein and Pleasurecraft).

There’s a moment in this movie where we see how Tarantula was conceived from the POV of inside a vagina that gets spider eggs laid within it. I’ve never seen that before.

The only bad thing I can say is that somehow, Jess Franco had Linnea in a movie, didn’t get her nude and she then did a naked commentary track for the DVD. That’s really something.

Judoka Shadow versus Doctor Wong finds Jess Franco in a genre he never attempted before or after: the martial arts movie, perhaps ten to fifteen years late.

Dr. Wong (Franco) has killed Mr. Jung, but the shadow of Bruce Lyn (Jose Llamas) appears and demands revenge. Literally a shadow. That wasn’t some kind of turn of phrase.

Meanwhile, two secret agents Phillip Morris and Maggie (Albino Graziani and Lina Romay) are investigating the murder just as Wong seeks to kill off another enemy.

Featuring footage from the Taiwan movie Nu ying xiong fei che duo bao(Seven to One) and with Franco doing a high pitched and nearly shut eyed Asian stereotype as the lead villain, I have no idea why this was made, but it’s not the only Dr. Wong movie that Franco would make.

Franco made 19 movies for Golden Films International and there were no constraints other than budget. Why anyone thought that Franco — not a director of action — could make a Brucesploitation movie is the kind of thing that keeps me writing about movies.

Jose Llamas, who played the Bruce of this movie, if not the poster, became Pepito Tiésez and appeared in several adult movies including El ojete de Lulú (Lulu’s Asshole), Las Chuponas (The Suckers) and Para las nenas, leche calentita (For the Girls, Warm Milk), all directed by Franco. Sadly, he died of AIDS at some point in the 80s.

As for Dr. Wong, I direct you — or implore you to avoid — Dr. Wong’s Virtual Hell.

How many times can Jess Franco make a movie? Well, this time, he’s taken Lorna the Exorcist in the midst of his video era, so if you saw that, you already know the twist and I can spoil it. And if you didn’t, maybe go watch that.

Johan (Carsten Frank) is a successful artist whose surreal work has made him rich, but that’s all because of Lorna (Fata Morgana, Vampire Junction), a mystery woman that he made a deal with back when they had a BDSM relationship twenty years ago. You know how it goes, right?

One night, when she had Johan at the literal edge of orgasm, she made him promise his daughter to her, like some kind of carnal Rumpelstiltskin, a fact that his wife Rosa (Lina Romay) has no idea about and that his adult daughter Lucy (Carina Palmer, The Profane Exhibit) is about to discover for herself.

Let me tell you, these One Shot Franco films are dangerous territory. They’ll make you wish for the quality of his 70s films, which often make you pine for the quality of his 60s films. Maybe even his 80s and 90s films. But yet I made this infernal plan to watch as many of his movies all in one month and you know, I can still find things to love here, like the weird masks and that moment that happens in all his later movies where he just decides to stop telling a story and concentrate on long synth songs that have women rub all over each other in slow motion, as he rubs his hands together and says, “You’ve come back for more, hmm?”

Man, Franco sure got some mileage out of that Daniel Brown music from The Perverse Countess.