Linda Vargas (Montserrat Prous) works a showgirl number with Maria Toledano (Kali Hansa, The Night of the Sorcerers) before picking up Ortiz (Manuel Pereiro), seducing him, calling the cops and killing herself by slicing her own throat, which implicates him in her murder.

His wife, Rosa (Jacqueline Laurent) attempts to learn the truth and discovers from Countess Anna de Monterey (Anne Libert, The Demons, A Virgin Among the Living Dead) that her husband assaulted Linda when she was just a young girl, going from drugs to, well, the title is Sinner: The Secret Diary of a Nymphomaniac, so you can guess the rest.

Made after the death of Soledad Miranda and before Franco would fall for Lina Romay, this comes from the more serious side of Jess Franco, feeling like it was inspired by the structure of Citizen Kane, which makes sense more than the absolutely formless movies he’d make later in his career.

The worst thing is that Jacqueline Laurent was fired from her position as a drama teacher at a private high school because of this film. Her students learned that she had appeared nude in this film — made 39 years before — and the school’s administration claimed that this and other erotic thrillers made in the sixties and seventies posed a distraction.

Under the hypnosis of Fabian (Daniel Katz), Irina (Lina Romay) has been performing a nightclub telepathy routine where she walks around the audience and he can see through her eyes. But every morning, he wakes up from horrifying nightmares that she’s killed people because, you guessed it, she has.

Using most of the cast and locations of The Sexual Story Of O, the theme from Female Vampire and the story of Voodoo Passion, Franco uses this psychic conceit to do what he really wants to do and that’s put his obsession into as many sexual moments as possible.

Whether you know it as Night of 1,000 Sexes or Night Has a Thousand Desires, this definitely is on the good side of the Franco equation, with gorgeous scenery, women and ideas, all working together to create the otherworld dream vibe that I love so much from the director. The soundtrack is full of moaning, Lina walks toward camera like a ghost of desire and the evil Lorna (Carmen Carrión, Black Candles) is a formidable menace for our heroine to come up against.

There’s a moment in this where Fabian would rather read The Necronomicon than conjure up some horizontal magic with Irina and look, I’m super into magic and ritual but I would pass up an audience with Crowley for the opportunity to touch the hem of Lina Romay’s garment but she’s often nude.

EDITOR’S NOTE: We originally watched this movie on May 14, 2021 and are happy to bring it back for this month of all things Franco.

You know, there are times when you get the Jess Franco who is obsessed with sex and times when you get the jazz-loving, Old Hollywood fan Jess Franco and this would be the latter.

This Eurospy affair stars Eddie Constantine as Al Pereira*, who is hunting down a series of bronze-skinned and horned-rim glasses-wearing killer robots commanded by Lady Cecilia Addington Courtney (Françoise Brion, probably the only person to be in movies like Le Divorce and Otto Preminger’s Rosebud, as well as a Franco film) who is using computers to destroy Europe.

So yeah, Jess shows up playing jazz piano, but don’t worry. Plenty of BDSM and mind control lurk right around the corner, instead of appearing full frontal and center. Perhaps the strangest thing about this movie is that it was shot in color and released in black and white. And that it’s nothing like the Franco movies that people dislike his movies harp on.

You can get this from Kino Lorber and watch it on KinoCult.

*Franco would return to the character in the films Les Ebranlées, Downtown, Botas Negras, Látigo de Cuero, Camino Solitario, Al Pereira vs. the Alligator Ladies and Revenge of the Alligator Ladies.

Melissa (Lina Romay) is a paralyzed woman who is being taken care of by her two sisters, who all lost their father (Antonio Mayans) at a young age. However, only Melissa can still speak to the father, who guides her to kill those who killed him.

A remix remake of The Sinister Eyes of Dr. Orloff with no nudity or sleaze — what!?! — that has one interesting thing: Mayan’s daughter Flavia is young Melissa with dark hair, crosscut with Lina in blonde wig as the grown-up version.

But seriously, at this stage in his career Franco was just redoing his older movies with less enthusiasm and budget. I wonder why? What had he missed the multiple times he’d already made these movies that he thought he could improve? Or was he just happy in the repetition, making movies he already knew worked and not wanting to break any new ground?

How many times can you make one movie? Well, if you’re Jess Franco, the answer is a bunch, because there’s 1975’s L’éventreur de Notre-Dame AKA Exorcism which was also remade as the adult Sexorcismes. There’s also another cut called Demoniac, because Franco realized that some day weirdos would obsess over his movies online.

Four years later, Franco Xeroxed his own work and added new footage to make this movie, which starts with Mathis (Franco) arriving in Paris and taking his blade to prostitutes and women who enjoy sex to save souls. He was thrown out of priest school because he’s insane and attacked a nun, so now he’s trying to get his story “The Return of the Grand Inquisitor” published in The Dagger and the Garter magazine.

While meeting with the owner of that sleaze zine, Pierre Franval, Mathis becomes obsessed with a secretary named Anne (Lina Romay) who is a lesbian in love with her roommate Rose, a fact that he learns by being a voyeur and that she also arranges sex-filled fake Black Masses by tying up and torturing a dancer named Nina, who is played by Franco’s real-life stepdaughter Caroline Riviere because, well, it’s a Jess Franco movie.

Of course, the psychodrama of the Black Mass isn’t real, but to Mathis it is, so he becomes the Inquisitor of his fiction, killing everyone and anyone involved. The tradeoff is that while we get some great shots of Franco with Notre Dame behind him, Lina’s role is significantly reduced.

I love that Stephen Thrower broke down on the blu ray how this all came to be. The movie comes at a period of life when Franco had been through great change. He’d divorced his first wife Nicole Guettard and, as these things happen, Romay had also divorced her husband Ramon Ardid. After making multiple movies in Switzerland for Erwin C. Dietrich and the death of friend and producer Robert de Nesle, Franco was back in Spain and burned out. Eurocine decided that they could take Exorcism and get production company Triton to pitch in some money to make Las Chicas de Copacapana and Two Spies In Flowered Panties, as well as this movie.

Somehow a slasher movie with not much blood and a sleazy movie without as much sex — yet still full frontal nudity — this is a weird case of a movie that has enough versions that you can just about make your own cut.

I know it’s not exact, but I was struck by a moment in this film that recalls Messiah of Evil as a character stans in a hallway and we’re struck by just how alone she is in spite of being in a very public place.

Mansion of the Living Dead

Messiah of Evil

It’s not a perfect match, but the feeling is right and I’m struck that at times, Jess Franco can render a great horror mood. Other times, he’s moving the camera so wildly that you wonder if he’s going to ever focus on something happening.

Several waitresses — including Candy Coster, who we all know is Lina Romay in a blonde short wig and love her even more for it — visit an out of season resort hotel, only to find that long-dead monks have come back from the dead, watched a few Amando de Ossorio movies and start luring the women one at a time to the basement where they’re assaulted and then murdered to the sound of bells, the wind and an otherworldly song. So yes, pretty much the Blind Dead with dried shaving cream for makeup.

Also, for some reason, Eva León from Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll is chained to a wall by Antonio Mayans and taunted with promises of food.

Somehow, someway, Candy is the reincarnation of the witch who cursed the monks all those years ago and perhaps she’s also the one that can free them, except she’s kind of busy making out with Lea (Mari Carmen Nieto, The Sexual Story of O) and hiding that fact from their friends Mabel (Mabel Escaño, Wicked Memoirs of Eugenie) and Caty (Elisa Vela, Cries of Pleasure), thinking that they’d be judged, but then those two are also getting down.

Look, Lina gets possessed, goes wild and ends up making out with an evil monk, which releases everyone from their curse and…yeah. Look, this movie is pretty much exactly what I seek out and often I’m using movies as drugs to erase my consciousness, so go in with that knowledge.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Jess Franco is an acquired taste. As of January 19, 2018, when I wrote the original review of this film, I had not yet learned to love his movies. So here’s an experiment: the 2018 take on the film and the 2022 version. Let’s see if we learn anything.

2018 version

Anne (Lina Romay, muse of this film’s director, Jess Franco) is a performance artist who specializes in recreating Satanic rituals and spicing them up for old rich folks to savor. She also writes for a magazine, Garter and Dagger, that appeals to people who like this kind of dreck.

Turns out that Mathis, one of the writers at the magazine (yep, Franco himself), was a priest kicked out of the church for following Old Testament beliefs instead of Vatican 2. After overhearing Anne and her assistant planning a Black Mass (not an actual one, more like a sex party, which come to think of it, why is a man of the cloth working for a porn magazine? And wouldn’t an orgy be just as bad as a Black Mass?), Mathis kills each and every person involved.

There’s another cut of the film, Demoniac, which is just death and gore with none of the sex. It’s 69 minutes long. And there’s another version called Sexorcismes that remakes this film with added hardcore footage, including Franco himself showing up for the party. And Franco remade it again as El Sádico de Notre-Dame.

Under any title, this movie is the absolute shits. It fails at horror. It fails at being sexy. It fails at being interesting. It even fails at being an Exorcist clone because it has nothing to do with exorcism!

Look — when I tell you a movie is bad, trust me. It’s bad. Real bad.

Seriously — I found a movie about Satanic sex crimes boring. If that’s not a recommendation to avoid, I don’t know what is!

2022 version

Consider this three movies in one: Sexorcisme is the hardcore version, which also has two versions, coming in at 71 and 82 minutes. And then there’s The Sadist of Notre Dame, a remade version that came out just a few years later, with Franco shooting new footage five years later to add greater character motivation. And there’s a really cut down version, Demoniacs, which ironically has a running time of 69 minutes.

Then there’s the original, Exorcism AKA L’éventreur de Notre-Dame.

You could see this as confusing, but I like to think of the films of my favorite exploitation directors as grand puzzles that demand solutions.

Made during the height of the demon possession film cash-in cycle, this finds how Jess Franco would make one of those movies and of course, he runs hard and fast in the other direction, as this movie feels like the 70s I knew I’d never escape alive.

So when I look back at my old review, I realize that either back then I was judging Franco’s movies against normal films. Or perhaps I really have Stockholm Syndrome and have started to completely accept everything Franco makes as something better than it should be.

Instead of realizing that this is boring, if we concentrate on a normal film narrative, one must embrace the sheer wildness of it all, as Lina Romay plays Anne, a performance artist who makes great money staging fake Satanic rituals in the time when such things were considered transgressive art and not reasons to fear a dark Luciferian underground out to rule the world. But tell that to Mathias Vogal (Franco), a former priest who has lost his sanity and sees what they are doing as a true Black Mass that he must decimate by finding every woman involved and conducting a one-man Spanish Inquisition.

Of course, Franco brings the sleaze and has some fine instruments to conduct his symphony, including Monica Swain as a sadist who yells, “You’re as disgusting as a leper’s sores. You make me vomit!” and Catherine Lafferière as Martine.

Any movie where Franco plays a deranged priest who says things like “Yes I have a chapel in my house, what’s strange about that?” and obsesses over his sins while spying on women as they make love and then murdering them, I’m very much for. Also, the same dude writes Inquisition fiction ala Penthouse Forum for his real job, which is insane, but such is the universe of Franco. There’s aso a momebt wen he stares out into the early day outside his window and you can nearly see two shapes of him, his physical and shadow form and it truly shows us the divided nature of his character,

As for the Sexorcisme cut, how badly do you want to see Jess Franco’s fuck style? Because there he is at the end of the film, giving Lina a tongue bath and man, you’d expect doubles to be use for all of this reshot footage and nope. It’s all of the cast and you even get to see little Jess in footage that in no way matches up with the rest of the movie. The fact that that sex scene between Jess and Lina exists kind of breaks the movie, because in the original cut, he’s praying in Latin just as much to keep his lust from taking over his body as he’s trying to get Satan out of her.

This is what we call emotional maturity, friends, when you care about the story more than seeing Lina Romay in a non-simulated sex scene.

You can watch this on Kino Cult.

The Demoniac cut of this movie is also on the ARROW PLAYER. Head over to ARROW to start your 30-day free trial. Subscriptions are available for $4.99 monthly or $49.99 yearly. ARROW is available in the US, Canada, the UK and Ireland on the following Apps/devices: Roku (all Roku sticks, boxes, devices, etc), Apple TV & iOS devices, Android TV and mobile devices, Fire TV (all Amazon Fire TV Sticks, boxes, etc), and on all web browsers at https://www.arrow-player.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joseph Perry writes for the film websites Gruesome Magazine, The Scariest Things, Horror Fuel and Diabolique Magazine; for the film magazines Phantom of the Movies’ VideoScope and Drive-In Asylum; and for the pop culture websites When It Was Cool and Uphill Both Ways. He is also one of the hosts of When It Was Cool’s exclusive Uphill Both Ways podcast and can occasionally be heard as a cohost on Gruesome Magazine’s Decades of Horror: The Classic Era podcast.

Writer/director Robert Adetuyi’s Trouble Sleeping is an entertaining near-miss on several accounts. Not chilling enough to rate as a suspenseful thriller and not biting enough with its dark comedy elements, the U.S./Canadian coproduction feels like it is staying safe in middle ground, walking a fine line between being predictable, which it is, and outright boring, which it is not. 

Vanessa (Vanessa Angel) is plagued by visions of her deceased husband Charles (Billy Zane), who committed suicide. Having remarried to Alex (Rick Otto), a colleague of Charles in a university psychology department, she is troubled even more by the imminent return home of her stepson Justin (Kale Clauson), who has just spent four years in a psychiatric facility after having discovered his father Charles’ body — and who is a mere 10 days away from inheriting millions of dollars, on which Vanessa and Alex have dangerous designs. Adding to the intrigue is August (Ingrid Eskeland), a graduate student who moves in with the trio to research her thesis on Charles’ life.

To murder and be rich, or to not murder and live off of what Justin will give them? That is the question that the increasingly paranoid Vanessa and the id-driven Alex have to ponder. 

Adetuyi’s direction is fine; stylish with flavors of neo-noir. The screenplay has some bumps, though, including, as mentioned earlier, being rather easy to figure out, and having some occasionally clunky dialogue.

The ensemble cast all give serviceable-to-commendable performances, though their characters never give the actors much with which to stretch. Justin, for example, is a somnambulist and isn’t far off from that emotionally when awake, while Vanessa may get miffed and jealous, but more often than not stays rather cool-headed while doing so.

Trouble Sleeping has been dormant since its completion in 2018. It’s certainly not bad enough to warrant waiting that long for a release, especially when compared to many films in its subgenre, but viewers will likely have more feelings of déjà vu from watching it than they will restless nights of insomnia.

Trouble Sleeping was released on February 15, 2022.

EDITOR’S NOTE: I think this was the movie — we first watched it on January 2, 2018 — where I started to understand Jess Franco. And here we are, many movies and zooms later.

Sure, Jess Franco is just making a new version of The Awful Dr. Orloff with this film, but with bigger stars and plenty of gore. And when you’re looking for a movie to watch at 4 AM — and I often am — it certainly does the trick.

Dr. Frank Flamand (Helmut Berger, The Damned) is a plastic surgeon surrounded by gorgeous women who walk arm in arm to his fancy car. But a former patient wants revenge, so she tosses acid at him. Instead, she catches his sister, Ingrid, directly in the face, ruining her gorgeous looks.

Fast forward to a modeling shoot in Paris, where Flamand’s assistant Nathalie (Brigitte Lahaie, The Grapes of Death) drugs and abducts Barbara Hallen (Caroline Munro, Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter, Dr. Phibes Rises Again). As she locks her into the basement of the doctor’s clinic, Nathalie gets into an argument with Gordon, a maniac who lives down in the basement and chops off women’s arms for a hobby.

Still with us? Then let’s go to New York, where Barbara’s dad Terry (Telly Savalas, Lisa and the Devil) is searching for his daughter, turning to Sam Morgan (Chris Mitchum, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Tusk, Bigfoot, Chisum) to help find her. He first travels to a Paris morgue, where her body supposedly is, but the headless victim is not her as it’s missing a mole.

Flamand and his sister meet Dr. Orloff (Howard Vernon, who played Orloff in six of his seven films) and learn how they can cut off Barbara’s face to replace Ingrid’s thanks to a Nazi scientist named Dr. Karl Heinz Moser (Anton Diffring, who played numerous Nazis in his career, including in Jerry Lewis’ long lost The Day the Clown Cried). Plus, Franco’s longtime muse, Lina Romay, appears here as Orloff’s wife. When the doctor returns to his office, he learns Gordon has cut up Barbara’s face.

Morgan beats up Barabra’s photo director before a bouncer makes him leave. He has to call Terry with some bad news — his daughter had been working as a prostitute.

The doctor finds another face donor for the surgery, but Moser destroys it. That means they need to find yet another victim, during which Barbara’s credit card is traced to Flamand’s clinic. Morgan starts surveillance and notices that Nathalie is wearing Barbara’s clothes.

He arrives at the clinic and takes out Gordon, but is overcome and locked into the cell with all of the girls. The villains leave them bricked up and with their air running out.

But Sam has sent Barbara’s dad a message, who gets ready to rescue everyone. And then…the movie ends.

Yep.

The original ending of the film had Sam saving the day, but Franco wanted to make it different and leave it open as to whether Sam and Barabara survived. Why? Why ask.

Oh yeah — I almost forgot. This film is replete with surgical horror, like faces being sliced and lifted off, needles into eyeballs, scissors into throats and much, much more. If only it lived up to the promise of its poster, but that said, it’s grimy and seedy fun if you can’t find anything else.