Rachel (Rachel Sheppard, Mari-Cookie and the Killer Tarantula and nearly every Franco camcorder release from this era) is an American on holiday in Spain who loves horror movies enough to buy a t-shirt with the image of a female vampire, which is all Countess Irina von Murnau (Analía Ivars, also pretty much a Franco stock player) takes over her dreams, much like, well name the Franco female vampire movie of your choice. Can the warnings of Marga the Gipsy (Lina Romay) keep her safe?

Is there a bottom to this very deep barrel of Franco? Does the song repeated over and over and over wear on you? Do the video effects feel like ones done on public access shows? Or do you feel charmed with Franco himself shows up as a merchant?

I mean, who knew a threeway with an enchanted dildo was the right way to kill a vampire? I wonder what Bela Lugosi would have thought about that?

Gina (Lina Romay) and Tina (Christie Levin, Broken Dolls) are female private eyes who go from smuggling artwork to a kidnap and murder case, all while just trying to make enough money that they can get out of the business.

Why yes, Jess Franco is making Two Undercover Angels again.

There’s a rich guy who chains his wife up and makes his own snuff films and hey, if he dies, he dies, and the girls get rich off him but then wreck their car and wake up and it’s all a dream, so then they tell you — the viewer — how to hire them.

This was one of the One Shot movies that Franco made and man, there’s a Geocities quality website for when this came out and this makes me like this movie way more than I did before I saw the site.

Some people decry the quality of this movie. As for me, it makes me think of how lucky Jess Franco was. He found not only a way to get his partner to make out with younger women while he watched, he was able to make money — well, never enough — from it.

Directors John Bernardo and Steven E. Mallorca said of this film, “Sexually abused at 12 years old by a priest in his New Jersey parish, Dave Ohlmuller set out on a sprawling solo bicycle ride from Chicago to New York to inspire other survivors to come forward and tell their own stories, as well as educate the masses (and himself) on the impacts of this scourge. Along this 700-mile journey, Dave meets other survivors abused by coaches, teachers, family members, and like Dave himself, Catholic priests. Through these interactions and common stories, Dave tries to find a way to connect and heal, mile by mile, as he heads back east towards his childhood home.

A ”peloton” is a cycling term that simply means a group of riders. But Dave Ohlmuller started his journey as a peloton of one. Like so many sexual abuse victims, he believed he was alone in his despair. At the end of this journey, he realized he is now part of a much greater whole, a true Peleton of One, dedicated to helping the millions of survivors of childhood sexual abuse in this country and across the globe.”

On his two-week and nearly three-hundred-mile journey, Dave seeks to meet others while seeking to find some answers for himself. As he connects with activists, politicians and others who have been through the same issues that he’s faced, Dave continues to make his own path through life, no matter how painful it is.

This movie inspired me and showed that even if someone faces major trauma, they can still work toward finding a better path in their lives as well as enlightening the lives of others. It’s not an easy watch, but an essential one.

A Peloton of One is playing virtual theaters and will be available on demand and on VOD March 11 from Global Digital Releasing.

Women Behind Bars feels like a movie you may have seen before and that’s probably due to the fact that Jess Franco seemed to make the same movie over and over. Diamond theft? Women going to jail? More to the point, Lina Romay thrown in jail? Yes, I’ve seen it, you may have seen it, but I’m going to keep watching these movies because in a world that makes no sense, the movies of Jess Franco that make no sense make sense.

In “Stop Making Sense,” David Byrne sang “Don’t touch me I’m a real live wire,” and hey, Lina kind of lives that in this movie, Lina doesn’t just the zoom in with the camera nearly so deep into her private parts that you can see her soul, she also has them zapped with electro shock therapy. I mean, you always hurt the ones you love, and Jess Franco should have invented a new word for love for how he felt about Lina, and still here we are watching her body shake and shiver as she approximates what it had to feel like to get some volts up her lady business.

I mean, is this movie Jess Franco makes Swamp Diamonds? Sure, maybe. Yet even Roger Corman would say, “Maybe this needs some budget,” and Jess wouldn’t be listening because he’d be shooting an endless image of a sunset.

Speaking of hurt, Jess plays a gangster that wants those diamonds and so he roughs up Lina to the point that you’re sure that the camera went off and they had really great sex after. And hey — the man that Lina kills is her Ramon Ardid, who was her husband at the time and man, awkward. You ever had an emotional relationship with someone that ends up becoming real and want to shut the rest of the world out and only have your reality exist of just the two of you? Ramon’s been on the wrong side of that.

I mean, outside of a few sapphic scenes and that electrocution, this movie is more a crime film than a women in prison movie, so leave it to Jess Franco to take a movie that seems to promise sleaze* and edging you.

*To be fair, it’s still sleazy enough to be a section 2 video nasty.

After the death of Victor Frankenstein (Dennis Price) at the hands of perhaps immortal mystic wizard Cagliostro (Howard Vernon) and Melissa, his blood-thirsty blind bird woman (Anne Libert), the metallic monster of Frankenstein is torn between his master’s killer and the daughter who has inherited his mantle, Dr. Vera Frankenstein (Beatriz Savon).

Shot in the same time and place as Dracula, Prisoner Of Frankenstein — Franco reminds me of the friend that invites you to help him move, offers pizza and beer, and then also asks you to install all his new appliances and oh yeah, can you fix the hot water heater and help me paint while you’re here — this is the kind of movie where the villains power their plans with the whipped bodies of the young and beautiful because, well, they’re perfectly willing to admit that along with their evil aims that they have no shame in enjoying a little bit of violence — actually a lot — with their sex.

The plan is to find a mate for the monster and the perfect person may be village mystic Madame Orloff (Britt Nichols AKA Carmen Yazalde), but the chivalrous Dr. Seward hopes to save the day. This being a Franco movie, I don’t see that happening.

So many questions, like why Frankenstein is painted silver; why Cagliostro has the polymath power sheet of being near-eternal, a mentalist, a maker of human-animal hybrids, a lover of BDSM and orgies, and hypnotism, making him the kind of supervillain that Alex Jones might believe is a real person; and if this is the movie Franco saw in his head when he watched Universal and Hammer movies, because now I can’t unsee it when I watch those movies.

You can watch this on KinoCult.

Reverend Thadeous Sutton (Bill Shaw) and citizens have gathered for the hanging of Frank Clements, who curses the preacher and all of his family before he dies. A century later, that curse — and the undead gang — continue to haunt the preacher’s grandson and his family. And when it comes to bad hombres who can’t be killed again, things look pretty rough.

Directed by Alan Stewart from a script by Clay McBride (who wrote Look Who’s Toxic, another movie Stewart was involved on) and James Desmarais, this film pits a Vietnam vet, a woman interested in the history of the Clements outlaws and the professor who is the grandson — also played by Shaw — of the preacher from the opening of the film.

Shot on the Western set and using cowboy actors from Texas Safari Ranch in Clifton, Texas, it’s kind of weird that the bad guys look nothing like the cover and are killed with normal bullets, but hey — it’s a low budget regional horror movie that somehow got a video release and then was brought back for today’s boutique video rediscovery market.

The actual blu ray is great, with extensive commentary that shows how a movie like this could be made and make money. The extra features are way more interesting than the actual film and allow me to recommend this, as there’s a lot of great information within this release.

Ghost Riders comes from the producers and writers of Action U.S.A. and is now available on blu ray. It has commentary from director of photography/producer Thomas L. Calloway, writer/producer James Desmarais and moderator Steve Latshaw, a documentary featured named Bringing Out the Ghosts: The Making of Ghost Riders, Low Budget Films: On the Set of Ghost Riders, a photo gallery and trailers. You can buy it from MVD.

The German title for this movie, Necronomicon – Geträumte Sünden (Necronomicon – Dreamt Sins) is metal as fuck and when you get right down to it, isn’t Jess Franco the same way? I feel like him like I do about Venom. Most Venom songs sound the same, but man, they all sound pretty good and while they aren’t the best musicians, they lucked on to some really great riffs and really, isn’t that what we’re looking for?

Franco’s first movie outside of Spain, this was his hope that he’d escape all the rules and censorship by working in Germany. The script was three pages long, which feels like two and a half pages too long for a Jess Franco movie, and the funding didn’t come through, but producer Pier A. Caminnecci paid for the rest and had an affair with lead actress Janine Reynaud despite her husband Michel Lemoine being in the cast. And that’s how a Jess Franco movie gets made.

American-International Pictures released this movie in the United States under the title Succubus and when Roger Ebert reviewed it, he called it “a flat-out bomb. It left you stunned and reeling. There was literally nothing of worth in it. Even the girl was ugly.”

Reynaud, who was also in Franco’s Kiss Me Monster and The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail, plays Lorna Green works in an S&M club where members watch fake deaths from the whip, the cross and yes, sex. And as Lorna continues to dance, she takes on the role of the femme fatale not just on stage, but in reality. But what is reality, after all, in a Jess Franco movie, particularly in 1969 when he had something of a budget, was shooting on film and some youth?

That said, if he had one of his muses in this, like Soledad Miranda or Lina Romay, I fear it would have been even wilder.

At once a mannequin movie and a film about a woman that may have killed someone and can’t remember and it’s driving her insane — oh man, two of my favorite themes — and it gets wild, like you’re drunk at a party and end up at another party and talking in the kitchen to someone and then someone hands you some pills and you wind up standing in the cold in the middle of a major city and the snow and rain and wind are in your face and you close your eyes and open them to heat and the most gorgeous and demonic creature you’ve ever seen is dancing mere feet away from you and you’re just a mere mortal and you want to touch their garment and jazz is blaring and you’re sure you’re in your bed but you’re so fucking far from home.

All hail Jess Franco.

EDITOR’S NOTES: We originally covered this movie on January 24, 2021. It’s Jess Franco month so et’s talk about it again.

Alain Payet — working under the name James Gartner* — mostly worked in adult films and supposedly directed this, but a few minutes in and you realize that no, you’re watching another Jess Franco movie, which is even more apparent when you realize that even though he didn’t put his name on as a director, he used two aliases for writing (story by Jeff Manner, screenplay by A.L. Mariaux) and Lina Romay shows up as one of the Amazon guards.

Man, this movie is — as is obvious — a mess, but it’s also about Liana Simpson (Analía Ivars, Panther Squad, Franco’s Lust for Frankenstein), whose parents were killed by the Golden Temple Amazons — we get to watch it more than once — and she was raised by the creatures of the jungle before getting her chimp Rocky and a witch doctor named Koukou (Stanley Kapoul, who is also in The Perils of Gwendoline in the Land of the Yik-Yak, which is a much better movie of the same genre).

There’s also Antonio Mayans (who was in Revenge of the Alligator Girls and directed its sequel), William Berger in a loincloth, Emilio Linder from Christina and Monster Dog, Alicia Príncipe (The Erotic Story of O) and Eva León (Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll, Bahía Blanca) as Rena, the leader of the Amazons, who has an all gold everything matchy matchy fashion ensemble.

There’s also the same deathtrap from Erotic Rites of Frankenstein, so this has that going for it.

Look — you’re gonna like Jess Franco or you’re going to be bored into insanity or if you’re me, you’re going to zone out and use his movies to improve your positive mental attitude and use his tics — long pauses, plenty of scenery, a near-total disregard for how to tell a story — to get closer to Nirvana. Join me, I guess.

*On Letterboxd, Kyle Faulkner drops some science on me by stating how Payet came on board when Eurocine bought this movie, took a bunch of Franco footage to reedit and added shots of women on horseback. This actually played theaters, which is destroying my brain.

You can watch this on Tubi.

A painful breakup sends Grace (Emily Redpath) to Liv (Sarah Alexandra Marks) and Edward’s (Louis James) country manor. Before she even sets foot in their home, a neighbor (Blake Ridder, who also directed and wrote this) tries to warn her. But about what?

Well, Grave and Edward aren’t getting along too well. And Grade wonders, is it her fault? After all, she did sleep with Edwae the last time she was around them. And then she notices the bruises all over her friend.

For a debut movie with three young actors and a director making his first full-length film, Help works way better than it has any right to. It’s tense, it has some twists and it tells its story well.

Help is available On Demand and digital from October Coast.