Jenny (Susan Hemingway, whose entire acting career consists of being in Jess Franco’s Voces de muerte, Erotic Symphony, Two Female Spies with Flowered Panties, Elles font tout, Women in Cellblock 9 and Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun) is the virginal daughter of a prominent industrialist.

Tom (Didier Aubriot) and Lorna (Brigitte Lahaie, a woman that Jean Rollin described as perfect; she’s in so many films but let’s go with Faceless and Fascination) kidnap her and sell her into white slavery, but once they learn what she’s really worth, they steal her back and ransom her to her father.

Stephen Thrower says that this movie is Jess realizing just how boring making sex on film is and feeling trapped. How strange and sad is it that he’d have nearly thirty more years to go and that this can be a high point against where he’d go in the years that follow?

The Jess Franco Cinematic Universe is a proven fact. Here, we can see an aphrodisiac gas that traps women in sexual servitude, which also happens in Shining Sex and Blue Rita. It’s the feeling that that gas gives that leads to the title of this film, which is either I’m Burning Everywhere or Burning Up Inside.

The second moment of the JFCU is when Al Pereira shows up, played by Jean Ferrère.

This is one dark and grimy film, a movie that feels like the scummiest porn you’ve ever seen and yet doesn’t show anything explicit. It just feels rough, it feels wrong, it feels greasy and slimy and gross. Then again, any excuse to spend time with Lahaie is worth it, right? And I say all of the above with admiration because how else would I have watched 69% of all Jess Franco movies by now?

Emily Hagins made Pathogen when she was just 12 and I’m so excited that she’s kept making movies. She directed and wrote this possession film, which has heartbroken Will (John Michael Simpson) move into a big house all by himself when he gets dumped by Amy (Paige Adams). It’s too good to be true and that’s because the family who was there before made a deal with a demon named Demonous to save their daughter’s soul. Now, Will is dead meat. Or is her?

Will’s friend Patrick (Jeff McQuilty) wants him to move on and tries to fix him up with Aimee (Olivia Ducayen), who as fate would have it used to cast ghosts from homes to pay for college. Of course, Demonous is a much bigger problem than just an everyday specter.

The big problem happens when Amy ends up coming over and romance rears its head, leading to a night of pasta and passion. Yet when our hero wakes up, well, it’s not to his lover. It’s to — you knew it — the demon.

I had a lot of fun with this movie. There are too many cakes, too many jobs for Will, too much danger and it all works. It’s a movie that doesn’t seek to destroy and humiliate its characters and by the end, you enjoy every single one of them. I’m even happier that Hagins didn’t lose her love of horror or her ability to transform the expected into something so much more.

Mercedes the Muse (who directed, wrote and produced this, as well as starring as Toxie), Irie Divine (who is Lilith) and Knotty Peach (Athena) are three women rolling through a post-apocalyptic future — well, is Tromaville ever not currently in the midst of the end of everything possible? — and dealing with misogynistic men by dispensing ultraviolence.

“Men Will be Shocked! Women Will Understand!” is a great tagline. And I appreciate the film’s low budget versus high budget look, feel and ethos. I mean, this is a movie where a werewolf goes down on a woman and gets to unleash green jizz on her thigh and that’s probably the least offensive thing in. it.

So what’s the problem?

The problem is me. Because I want to love this movie and I can’t stand Troma and I know, I know, I have to get over it. At some point after the second Toxic Avenger movie, they settled into making movies that were knowingly dumb, as if they were in on the joke instead of making movies that could exist on their own merits. And I get it, I’m the death of fun and I often try not to even mention these kinds of things because I’m a curmudgeon and judgey and I’m making it my goal to not ruin other people’s joy.

So I feel like it’s some kind of growth that I liked this movie. I love the hi def black and white with blasts of color looks, the effects are funny and the story — when it isn’t zooming all over the place like a coked out 80s director trying to be the Dark Brothers, it’s got a decent story. Also, yes, the girls are gorgeous and empowered and that empowerment means that ladies can poop and pee on Aryan supremacists too, thank you very much.

I’d go so far as to say that when Mercedes the Muse makes another movie, I’ll watch it. It takes a lot of talent to get me over Lloyd Kaufman starting a film and you should take that as a supreme compliment.

I promise to try and keep being positive.

The blu ray of this film also includes an introduction by Lloyd Kaufman where he drowns himself, which led to me giving this an extra three stars, as well as a cast and crew commentary, a making of, a featurette on The Three Muses, the LA Premiere Q&A session, footage of the premiere at The Balboa Theatre, trailers and American Cinematheque honoring Troma and I never want non-profits to lose their funding, but that seems like a good reason why.

You can get this from MVD.

EDITOR’S NOTE: There’s another take of this movie here.

Italians are the best at making sword and sorcery movies, end of the world films and, of course, giallo. Mondo, too. And yeah, cannibal movies.

Except, well, this is French.

The film shares footage with Jess Franco’s Mondo Cannibale, as well as a number of locations, cast members and even dubbing talent in the English version. It also has Sabrina Siani show up in a bar scene, which is a step down from being the white queen of the cannibal tribe, but that tribe footage seems interchangeable between films. In fact, there are some actors that show up as three roles, so the French believed in green filmmaking since before we knew what that was.

It’s weird seeing the parallel earths between these films. Pamela Stanford might be Al Cliver’s wife, who gets eaten in Mondo Cannibale — or Cannibals, which confused me enough that I watched it twice forgetting that I had already written about it — is now a major player in this movie.

This was directed by Alain Deruelle, who mainly made adult films and was assisted in making this — just imagine if he didn’t have help — by Olivier Mathot (who wrote The Panther Squad) and Julio Pérez Tabernero (the director of Sexy Cat). Deruelle also took Franco’s Barbed Wire Dolls footage, filmed a little bit more, threw in some Captive Women 4 and a dollop of Hitler’s Last Train and re-released it as Les gardiennes du pénitencier (Jailhouse Wardress).

As for the script — man, I want to see how many pages that thing is — it was written by Tabernero and H.L. Rostaine, the writer of Countdown to Esmerelda Bay, Maniac Killer and Franco’s Golden Jail.

This gets in everything you expect from exploitation: a failed theft, a gang of criminals, a hideout and, there you go, an assault on one of the female characters and then, the cannibals arrive and what a sorry lot they are. French white male cannibals, all slow motion eating a pig carcass.

There’s bad and then there’s this movie bad. It’s amazing that Deruelle ever saw a movie, much less directed one.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Based on the Octave Mirbeau novel Le Journal dune femme de chambre (Diary of a Chambermaid), this movie begins with Celestine (of course, Lina Romay) escaping a brothel as the police close in and end up in the country home of one of their clients, Comte de la Fraguette and, as you can imagine, they end up converting the entire home to the pleasures of, well, pleasure. Some of those folks are men, including Howard Vernon as a horny old man — go figure — and some are women, such as Franco regulars Catherine Laferriere, Pamela Stanford and Monica Swinn, a survivor of so many of Franco’s prison films.

That said, if you can get past all the lovemaking, the acts of darkness, the corking of onions, the schnoodlypooping, the unicorn pondering, the biblical knowledge seeking and the locking of legs and swapping gravy, you will discover that there’s a point in this: Celestine is here amongst the rich and pampered to preach her truth of living free.

There’s a review in Time Out of this movie that states, “An object lesson in how potentially liberating material can be manhandled into heavy-handed voyeurism treading an unresolved line between the Pasolini-inspired bawdy romp and Buñuelian subversion.”

This is someone that watched Lina Romay embodying a comedic ideal while at once being an object of sheer desire, a person that has no idea of what fun is and wanted to impress you because they read about Salo in a book.

Forget that.

I don’t think even Celestine could bonk said writer into being able to have a moment’s fun.

Directed by Max McGuire (who like any director of the streaming era has a split between horror and holiday movies in his resume) and written by Ellen Huggins (The Ex Obsession), this is the story of Kate Kelsey (Nola Martin) whose husband Matt (Liam Toobin) is killed and because she has a popular vlog — A Good Wife’s Guide to Murder — she becomes the prime suspect that the police are investigating. After all, they owned a restaurant called Mendaville together, he may have been having an affair and, yes, every episode of her show she breaks down her ten rules for killing your husband and getting away with it.

Adding to the conflict is the fact that Lenore (Tenille Read), the wife of investigating detective Peter Thompson (R Austin Ball), is more than just best friends with the Kelseys. She might have been getting even closer to Matt than she’s letting on.

Matt was getting around, also sleeping with an employee named Lisa (Zenna Davis-Jones) who is killed moments after that secret is let out. Can Kate and her assistant Brit (Bukola Ayoka) figure out who did it? And was it someone close to her, like Brit? Or her former best friend who had a whole trunk of sex toys that she was using with her husband? What about her combination lawyer and PR guy who was bullied by her husband in high school?

Or is it…someone else?

Of all the recent Tubi movies, I think this is one of the better ones I’ve seen. I loved how it played with the conventions of true crime. Also: I live with someone who watched Forensic Files on an endless 24 hour repeating cavalcade of dead husbands, so I fully know there is no way I will survive any of this. So I relate as I laugh and enjoy what I watched.

You can watch this on Tubi.