So yes, this is the same cast and crew as Vampyros Lesbos and pretty much the same story as Venus In Furs and Ms. Muerte, but look, if Soledad Miranda made a movie where all she did was eat soup, I’d watch it.

This time around, she’s Mrs. Johnson, the widow of a scientist who was doing some, well, perhaps unethical experiments with human embryos that led to a medical committee rejecting his work and leading to his depression and suicide. So she does what any of us would: she hunts and kills everyone that caused this to happen.

Yes, one by one, Prof. Jonathan Walker (Howard Vernon), Dr. Franklin Houston (Paul Muller), Dr. Doneen (director Jess Franco) and Dr. Crawford (Ewa Stromberg) are all part of her revenge, with a side of a love scene between Johnson and Crawford because there’s no way that Franco would have Miranda and Stromberg in the same movie and miss that.

Before this movie was even released, Miranda died as a result of major head and back trauma from a car crash. She left behind a son, a husband and thirty movies in ten years, as well as a hole in the life of Franco, as she’d been the muse behind some of his best films.

In this movie, she is the center of the world, a dark-eyed shadow of a woman destroyed yet willing to take that pain and give blow for blow, scorn for scorn, doom for doom — with interest compounded liberally.

At just 80 minutes and with some incredibly arty angles and a great soundtrack — something else this has in common with Vampyros Lesbos — this is prime Franco.

Luisa (Carmen Yazalde, who is billed as Britt Nichols, and also shows up in Franco’s Jungfrauen-Report, A Virgin Among the Living Dead and Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein) learns from her dying mother that her family — the Karlsteins not the Karnsteins — are all vampires and their leader, Count Karlstein still lies in half-dead, half-alive stasis in the crypt of their castle.

This being a Jess Franco movie, Luisa is soon taking her cousin Karine (Anne Libert, Sins of the Flesh) as a lover with just as much gusto — in front of a holy cross — as she throws victims to the Count (Howard Vernon), who stays in his coffin all of the time.

Franco also shows up as vampire killer Cyril Jefferson, who takes over the movie as the two main characters suddenly are no longer the leads. It also becomes a giallo, so a movie that feels like two films at once was ironically shot at the same time that Franco was making two other movies.

You can watch this on KinoCult.

In a world of hot tags and listicles that opine on the worst sequels ever made, worries over whether this movie is too woke or not enough woke, and the argument that it’s either the worst or best movie, the truth is movies are awesome because you make your own mind up — do it, it’s great — as to what a good or a bad movie is.

My opinions are just that. Mine. And Texas Chainsaw Massacre is as good a slasher as we’re going to get in 2022, which is a left handed compliment. But it’s also not a good Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie. But then again — but, but and but — there haven’t really been that many good sequels to the original.

Taking a page out of Halloween, this movie asks you to wipe your memory clean of the first sequel — Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, much like Halloween 2, is one of my favorites and asking you to forget it and making this film attempt to supersede it is a tall order — and establishes a new timeline, the fourth timeline for this series.

Let’s break it down, with a tip of the bloody flesh mask to Bloody DIsgusting:

Original: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The New Generation

Remake: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Reboot: Leatherface, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Texas Chainsaw

Legacy: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, this movie

Of those movies, I can tell you that the original is, obviously, a movie that blows away any movie that will ever be in this franchise. Yet I adore the audacious middle finger that is Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and the WTF Illuminati heart of Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The New Generation. The other films, well, they make each new release better with how bad they get.

After the release of Leatherface in 2017, Lionsgate had plans for five more sequels, which frightens me, but the studio lost the rights. Legendary got them and had Fede Álvarez and Rodo Sayagues(whose Evil Dead is considered a good remake and their Don’t Breathe did well at the box office) to write and produce a sequel. Ryan and Andy Tohill were set to direct, but were replaced by David Blue Garcia (Tejano) who made this from a script by Chris Thomas Devlin (this is his first movie).

Much like every sequel made in the 2000s, this was made in Eastern Europe, with Bulgaria doubling for Texas.

Mark Burnham plays the sixty-year-old — at least! — Leatherface and Olwen Fouéré takes over for Marilyn Burns as Sally Hardesty, who should probably be yelling “Evil dies tonight” as she’s the exact same character as Laurie Strode in Halloween and Halloween Kills.

Entrepreneurs Melody (Sarah Yarkin) and Dante (Jacob Latimore) have decided to transform Harlow, Texas into a new Austin, bringing along Melody’s sister and survivor of a school shooting Lila (Elsie Fisher) and Dante’s girlfriend Ruth (Neil Hudson). While working with one of the locals, a gun owner and total opposite to these characters named Richter (Moe Dunford), the team works to clean up the town before investors arrive. That means kicking out an older woman, Mrs. Mc (Alice Krige, a welcome actress any time), who dies moments after being evicted, bringing her charge Leatherface (Mark Burnham, Lowlife) out of hiding as he rides with her to the hospital. Yes, it doesn’t go well. Yes, he goes wild on everyone. Yes, it’s actually pretty great and the kills look cool, thanks to some solid practical effects.

From then on, Leatherface gets his saw and becomes a killing machine, even referencing Jason, seeing Mrs. Mc’s face as he goes wild on a bus full of influencers — no matter how much I dislike some of this movie, it’s hard to hate a film in which multiple social media types get gorily dispatched — and stalks the sisters.

Let’s get the good out of the way: the wokeness of this movie, which so many worried and gnashed and argued, is just to set the table. And the closing credits look astounding, showing a visual style and color palette that should have informed the entirety of this movie. And hearing John Larroquette introduce the movie makes me so happy.

But here’s my problem: every other good Texas Chainsaw has made you physically sick thanks to the decay and rot and bone and gristle and, well, cannibalism on display. The set of Chainsaw Massacre 2, a Civil War theme park that has died and been resurrected as a bone-strewn temple to putrified flesh, and the original farmhouse are horrifying places. Indeed, the first Chainsaw is a movie that would have no interest in being part of, a torture test for cast and crew that they barely survived with their lives and sanity.

This movie has none of that, substituting geysers of arterial blood for the really disgusting stuff. And when you think of it, there’s not much gore in the first movie. We all know that, actually. Yet it remains filled with menace and makes you feel that feeling just on the edge of throwing up when you find a dead animal half-eaten on your porch. It’s visceral, it has staying power, it’s the end all be all that all horror that came after must compare itself with.

Beyond referencing Friday the 13th, this film feels so oddly familiar in the way that it recycles imagery. The hands of the influences trying to escape is very Dawn of the Dead. I could handle that reference if two scenes didn’t feel completely cribbed from The Strangers: Prey at Night. The sisters being trapped in a bus bathroom and the aftermath of them crashing the truck are so close to that movie — which I realize not many people saw — that it can’t be a coincidence.

The close of the film erases what has been so important to the first two films: the catharsis of one character barely escaping, as she screams in terror or victory over those who had oppressed her. I get it — the survivor in this film is no Sally or Stretch. But the whole point of the ending feels lost for a gotcha ending. And the post-credits sequence is relatively pointless.

It’s strange that for a movie that claims to erase the sequels, this feels a lot more like the 2003 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre than a brave new take on the series. This is the new way that movies happen. Speak badly about everything in the past, then do the exact same thing. If it worked for Michael and Jamie Lee…

It really has no idea what it wants to say. If Lila has gun trauma, she gets over it really quick when she has to. There’s never a conflict there. There’s only an alpha predator senior citizen with a chainsaw and enough badly sketched blood-filled victims to dispatch.

I kind of laugh at the audacity that the filmmakers claimed that they used old lenses to get the look they wanted while wasting Daniel Pearl footage at the beginning of this movie. But hey — the original movie was art. Everything else has been a cash-in, either feeding the direct video appetite or now, the need for new movies to stream.

Then again, was this ever meant to be a slasher? The original exists before the slasher and this goes more for straight up murder and less stalk and slash. I mean, far be it from me to decry the genre that I’ve watched hundreds of movies within, right?

And hey — Leatherface isn’t even the scariest Sawyer family member. This movie forgets that.

There’s enough here to like, but not when you can just do it right and watch good slashers in the short time we have on this Earth.

An Edgar Wallace movie.

Yes, Jess Franco really did do it all.

Based on Sanders of the River, Lina Romay plays Paquita la Fina, a showgirl who gets involved with secret agents — one of Franco’s favorite stories — and Professor Abert Von Klaus (Howard Vernon), who has hidden the blueprint for a nuclear weapon inside a music box. And Antonio Mayans as a CIA agent and no budget for stunts.

I kind of like that Franco was trying different things and not strictly making sexual films — at least in 1982 — and pushing himself.

Blood On My Shoes may not be a well-known or even thought of Franco movie, but it’s a double-cross spy movie years after anyone cared about these things.

You have to give Franco some credit for being an iconoclast.

Widowed mother Holly (Sienna Guillory, Jill Valentine from the Resident Evil movies) finds herself facing a crisis of faith over, well, faith when her teen daughter Betsey (Jessica Alexander, Glasshouse) undergoes a divine moment and claims that her body only exists to serve a higher power.

Could this be real? Or is the family still dealing with the suicide of Holly’s husband and the father to her children? And since Betsey found her father’s body, is she feeling the loss most of all as she cuts herself off from popularity and friends and even life?

And then one night, Holly finds herself lured into the woods, enchanted and now can’t stand to be around food, refusing to eat and never losing weight, making doctors question their medical training. In fact, she soon grows to actually fear even being in the same room as any nourishment, which is a problem, as Holly deals with the pain by making huge feasts that her sister Isabelle (Ruby Stokes) happily devours. And Holly’s mother June, played by Lindsay Duncan, is incredible and brings another type of pain to the story.

So what is behind all this? Mental illness? Possession? Depression? All of it? None of it? I’m tempted to use the cliche that the filmmakers want to have their cake and eat it too, but the truth is that this movie never really settles on any one reason. That said, it’s a stark meditation on loss and how that takes us to some incredbly bad places.

Director Ruth Paxton (making her first full length film) and writer Justin Bull (who wrote and directed Merge) ask what obsessions after loss are healthy — is getting really into figure skating as bad as having a glimpse at the apocalypse and losing your mind? — and which aren’t. The home that this all takes place in feels like the dark homes of people you’ve dated for brief moments and had time intersect to bring you into their family life for holidays and trap you inside places they knew so well and you found alien, foreboding and escape worthy.

It’s strange because this movie seems to be so sure of what it is in the first hour, then gradualy loses its faith within itself to take the film to where it needs to go. The hard part is that the start of the movie, the build and the dread is so great that the fact that it doesn’t stick a landing hurts worse than a typical movie. So many modern movies seem to have this same malady — the end should be as important as the beginning, after all.

A Banquet is available in select theaters, on digital plaforms and on VOD from IFC Midnight.

Lina Romay was once married to actor Ramon Ardid, who had introduced her to Jess Franco, who was using him as a still photographer on his movies, and having his wife increasingly appear in the role Soledad Miranda once had, that of the central focus of his camera, mind and crotch’s obsession.

After the death of Miranda, Franco was still grieving. Sure, he was married to Nicole Guettard — and would be until 1980 — who worked as a script consultant on his movies and even was in a few of them, the team of Franco and Romay would slowly grow from professional to something more after her marriage to Ardid broke up in 1975 and ended in divorce in 1978, even though Ardid continued working with Franco until 1980.

Franco and Romay would form a team for four decades of work, living together from 1980 until her death and finally getting married in 2008. She’d appear in more of his movies than anyone else and even as she ages, Franco never ceases to find her beauty and explore it, sometimes with zoom lenses that feel gynecological. But who are we to put our hangups on their love? How rare is it to find someone that you share like-minded feelings about art and sex and stay with that person nearly forever?

This time around, Lina is Las Vegas showgirl Cynthia, whose routine has impressed Alpha (Evelyne Scott) and her slave Andros (Guettard). Of course, this leads her into their bed, except for all the epithets that you can throw at Jess Franco, he’s no mere pornographer.

That’s because Alpha is from far beyond our pitiful planet and the lovemaking closes with Cynthia being covered with a sparkly lotion that forces her to do the bidding of Alpha and Andros, which goes from carnal acts to killing those that know too much about them, which includes Dr. Elmos Kallman (Olivier Mathot), Dr. Seware (Franco) and spiritualist Madame Pécame (Monica Swinn).

I can’t even imagine that this movie was once intended to play movie screens, places that would become altars for the worship of what Franco found most holy, Lina Romay’s sex displayed big, bold and covered in glitter up there on the silver screen, plot and normalcy be damned.

Franco’s obsession — beyond Romay — is always women who have the power to kill through physical, vampiric or sexual means. Empowered by this alien substance, Lina/Cynthia has become biblical verse writ large — “I am come a light into the world, that whosoever believeth on me should not abide in darkness” as well as the words of the Bhagavad Gita, as recited by Oppenheimer, as he watched the death cloud he has created take physical form — “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Sex can kill and it can take a talkative young woman freely giving of her body and transform it into the literal angel of death, using the lifegiving power between her thighs to snuff out anyone that must be destroyed.

The nuclear frisson of the lust and love and obsession and eventual lifelong partnership of Franco and Romay would knock both of their marriages apart and probably wasn’t easy for anyone in either of their families, but when you discover that kind of love that the Bible only ascribes to the Lord — “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst into the sky that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One.” — woe be to anyone who was in their way.

Unlike some cultists, Franco wanted the entire world to worship with him, to partake from what he saw as perfection. Shining Sex indeed.

You can get this from Severin.

At this point, Jess Franco was making movies like Women in Prison, Barbed Wire Dolls and Ilsa the Wicked Warden that have a similar story and interchangeable actresses and acts of depravity.

This time, Madame Arminda (Lina Romay) has been sent to prison but is broken out by the rich businessman Radeck (Vítor Mendes), awhose daughter Martine (Martine Stedil) has been kidnapped. Radeck thinks Arminda is behind it all, so his assistant (Franco) tries to kink the truth out of her, but she won’t crack.

This time around, things take on an almost noir feel as the truth is that Arminda and Martine were lovers until drugs made her forget her past and work in the brother, thinking that she’s a slave, and then a rival gang kidnaps her, so Radeck kidnaps their leader Ebenholz and gets Arminda to torture him and then, well…look, it’s like Shakespeare. Everyone dies.

There was no money anyways. And Radeck didn’t even love his daughter. So why were we even here?

Another Franco movie made for Swiss producer Erwin C. Dietrich, this is also known as Swedish Nympho Slaves, which is a title that demands that you watch this movie. I really wonder about this period in Franco’s filmmaking, because so many of these movies feel like they’re stitced together from other movies and shoots that had no purpose. That’s because that’s totally how they were made.