Sylvia (Lina Romay) attends a spy party, which is not a thing I believe exists anywhere outside of the universe of a Jess Franco movie, and this soon takes her into a real espionage affair as she’s chased by Agent 008, Janos Radeck (Jess Franco) — and what is it with that Radeck name in his movies? — before hooking up with two men and going to a late night orgy.

So yeah — it’s kind of like After Hours also it’s Lina talking directly to the camera and telling you to come to see this movie multiple times so she can get rich and it’s charming. Like you want to hug her and tell her that yes, you’ll do everything possible to make this dream come true.

There’s also another cut of this movie, Heisse Berührungen, which was produced by Erwin C. Dietrich and scenes of this movie were edited into Justine and the Whip, along with footage from Shining Sex, by an editor perhaps even more demented than Jess Franco: Joe D’Amato.

It’s a movie where everyone loves Lina, like her three suitors who include a Communist rock star and a husband who is constantly getting sick and losing money gambling. I completely understand.

Andrew and Jon Erwin are Christian film directors, screenwriters and film producers who have made movies such as Woodlawn, I Can Only Imagine, Octover Baby and Mom’s Night Out. Andrew says that their goal: “Our focus is still firmly rooted within the church, but it’s focused out. And so our goal is to reach out beyond the church walls to engage a generation that’s walking away from the church — as an introduction to Christianity.”

That would be telling the story of Kurt Warner, who career saw him take the hero’s journey from undrafted free agent to a two-time Most Valuable Player and Super Bowl MVP. After playing at Northern Iowa from 1990 to 1993, Warner spent four years without being picked by an NFL team until signed by the Packers and released before the season started. He played three seasons of arena football for the Iowa Barnstormers before getting signed by the Rams.

Of course, this movie doesn’t really tell the entire truth, as it shows his first Rams game as the 1999 season opener against the Ravens. The truth is that it was actually the Rams’ week 17 game of their 1998 season against the 49ers, during which he only completed four of his eleven attempts for 39 yards. And Trent Green, who the movie claims is the established quarterback, signed after Warner, who was allocated to NFL Europe and brought back.

But does that matter to someone who doesn’t know anything about football? Zachary Levi (Chuck, Shazam!) is really charming as Warner, Anna Paquin is good as his wife and I’m always happy to see Dennis Quaid in a film.

If you do know football, having Ray Lewis be the bad guy of Warner’s first game in the NFL is pretty awesome. And regardless of how you feel about religion, the lesson that Warner learns — success is only found by how you overcome failure — is one that works no matter your belief system. The way that he becomes part of his wife’s family and cares for her children is exemplary and this film turned me into a fan of Warner the person.

American Underdog is now available on DVD from Lionsgate.

An exotic dancer named Paula (Paula Davis, Al Pereira vs. the Alligator Ladies) is dead and her lover Paula (Carmen Montes, Snakewoman) may be the killer. But who is good, who is evil, what is desire and what is pure madness?

This “audio-visual experience” is a Jess Franco movie through and through, yet it’s one with a score by Austrian pianist/composer Friedrich Gulda and plenty of video effects, as well as the strange knowledge that it’s based on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Perhaps Paula has tried to kill Paula five times already. It’s something that her doctor (Lina Romay in her last movie) tries to get the answers about, except that you know, the story is the first five minutes and then fifty minutes of sapphic interludes with video effects.

George Lucas made three horrible prequels and endlessly fiddled with the movies that were successes until even his fanbase started to tire of his meddling before selling it all and then complaining about it. As for Franco, he kept making and remaking the same films until he was in a wheelchair and left to just make movies filled with nothingness and ennui within four walls and filled with smaller casts. Yet I’d be on the side of Franco being the bigger success — certainly not monetarily, oh no, there’s no way we can go to Target and get a Perverse Countess or Red Lips or Dr. Orloff action figure — artistically because he kept shooting for an unreachable ideal yet started from scratch every time instead of resigning his paintings. The similarity is that both of these directors really should have been kept away from wacky transitions and digital special effects.

Then again, no character in Star Wars ever is a memory-loss impaired woman who marries a prince and then kills him when she recognizes his palace belongs to the devil. Then again, Franco referred to this as one of the two or three weirdest movies he made, so you can just imagine what that means.

Betsy Norman (Ursula Buchfellner, Sadomania) works at a Spanish hotel that’s really a brothel that draws in raincoaters worldwide for their BDSM shows. Shiela (Raquel Evans) and Ron (Antonio Mayans) have made a place where fantasies are catered to and its where Linda (Katja Bienert, who was in quite a few of Franco’s movies of this time) is tempted by this word of sin.

Known in Germany as Die Nackten Superhexen vom Rio Amore (The Naked Superwitches from Rio Amore), this movie has a wild disco soundtrack and a juxtaposition of summer vacation first love with enforced servitude, which is my shorthand for telling you that it’s a Jess Franco movie.

Made right after Bloody Moon, this is more one for the meal than one for the reel for Franco, but his obsessions come through. A warning though, that Bienert was underage while making  this movie, just as she was in several other movies she made with Franco such as Diamonds of Kilimandjaro, Lilian (la virgen pervertida), El lago de las vírgenes and Wicked Memories of Eugenie.

The Hot Nights of Linda AKA Who Raped Linda? is all about Marie-France Bertrand (Alice Arno), who goes to a small town to take care of the family of Paul Steiner (Paul Muller), including his disabled daughter Linda (Verónica Llimerá), who is abused by her sex-obsessed sister Olivia (who else but Lina Romay?).

Credited to J.P. Johnson — a jazz pianist whose name Jess Franco appropriated for this movie — this movie comes from a year in which Franco made thirteen movies and started and didn’t finish three more.

The introduction of Marie to this environment leads to, of course, sapphic encounters, mystery, mayhem and potentially murder. Also, Lina Romay and a banana, which is pretty much the most pure bottled form of the madness that is inside Franco’s mind.

At one point Olivia says, “It’s marvelous to live without a sense of time” and that’s the most perfect sentence to describe a Jess Franco movie and what it’s like to be a character within one of these movies.

You can get this from Severin.

Between a depressing life and a dead-end relationship with Penny (Jana Szabela), Dr. Jason Frankenstein (William Barnet) finds himself as the last of his family, stuck working in a hospital job that’s beneath him and far away from every finishing the experiment that his family has worked on for generations.

Fate has different plans when a very strange patient arrives and he gains the help of two drug-addicted paramedics and a nurse called Paula (Keelie Sheridan) who is quite eager to make life out of death, no matter how many people need to get murdered along the way. But when the creature they create (Michael Wetherbee) escapes, things get bad quick.

Robert Dix (Forbidden Planet, Frankenstein’s Daughter) came out of retirement to be in this movie, so that’s pretty cool. As for the film, it may move slow in parts, but it has an incredible degree of practical effects that blew me away, from the surgical moments to the look of its monster to blood spray and beheadings. Yes, two of them.

Director and writer David Weaver is making his first feature here and while there are some pacing issues, characters that seem to disappear and long stretches where you want something to happen, it also has some great effects from Jared Balog and Shawn Maloy, as well as the sheer power that comes from a moment when its Frankenstein’s Monster goes one on one with a bear, and if there’s anything Leslie Nielsen taught us, it’s that when a man fights a bear barehanded, it’s always the best thing ever.

I’m excited to see what Weaver makes next, because even with my minor issues with the movie, I stayed with it, which is way more than I can say for bigger movies with better budgets. Between the art direction, the look and having an actual idea, this movie begs for your attention.

The Last Frankenstein plays MidWest WeirdFest on Sunday, March 6 at 6:30 PM CST. You can get tickets and more information on the MidWest Weird Fest website. To learn more about the movie, visit the official Facebook page and the Gila FIlms website.

Patrick Mariel (Guy Delorme) decides to take his perfect family to the south of France on holiday, but before long, his wie Marianne (Jacqueline Laurent) and his on the cusp of womanhood daughter Linda (Lina Romay).

Yet before they even depart, threatening phone calls start coming in to their home from Lorna (Pamela Stanford), a woman from Patrick’s wild past who is either or noth the reason for his success and someone who has transcended mortality and become a demonic succubus, as a Jess Franco character often does. The deal that she made in blood with Patrick has come due and now, she’d rather take Linda than anything else.

Stanford was also in Franco’s Succubus, but here she’s coating her face in tons of makeup and unleashing small crabs on her victims and you know, you can’t say that Jess Franco doesn’t try to make it weird, you know?

Franco made this movie for producer Robert de Nesle, who put it out as a clone of The Exorcist, as happened often in the 70s, then re-released it with inserts and called it Luscious Linda, as if trying to figure out what Franco movie is what, as the director also made The Story of Linda, AKA Captive Women, as well as Who Raped Linda?

And because this is Jess Franco, he remade this movie in 2002 as the shot on video Incubus.

Dedicated to Jess Franco and Jean-Luc Goddard — man, talk about the literal furthest points apart — Austrian director Carl Andersen not only references the director, but uses an actress named Jessica Franco Manera who either was his daughter — which I think is complete kayfabe BS, as the only daughter I’ve seen listed for Franco is Caroline Reviere, his step-daughter from his marriage to Nicole Guettard.

That said, this movie feels like it could be one of his children, if he shot on black and white and had watched Begotten a few times while smoking jazz cigarettes. Manera plays Odile, who like a character from many a Franco movie has a sexual encounter with two showgirls and then loses all touch with reality, eventually finding her way to Elizabeth Bathory.

Andersen also made Vampiros Sexos, in case you wanted to know how much he loved Franco. And much like some of the darker trips Jess took, this movie seems determined to shock, so if anything offends you, perhaps you should consider this unwatchable. I mean it — there’s envelope pushing and then there’s setting the envelope on fire and shoving it up someone’s rectum (which I’m shocked did not happen in this movie).

The Cinema of Transgression doesn’t care if a movie about female vampires and menstruation and people urinating on the dead upset you, you know?

As the era of silent films ends, there are those that can’t make the transition to talkies. One of those actors is Dora (Mikaela, who looks like the epitome of Jess Franco obsession, save that she was possibly too classy to follow him down his path; she’s also in From the Orient with Fury and High Season for Spies as Anne Bardot, which is a great name), who has the public perception as the cold and cunning actress she portrayed on the big screen, not the decent woman who she truly is.

I say that, but then realize she’s part of a group of former actors and musicians who trick an African-American jazz group into taking a train to Siberia so that she and her friends can put on black face and crossdress at the same time — look, if Franco is going to offend you, he’s going to really offend you — and play the club dates that that missing band is missing.

It’s also Franco making Some Like It Hot which is just as weird as a movie with a vampire title only referencing the movie they’re making at the beginning of the movie.