In his 2000s movies, Jess Franco often features the same actresses — Fata Morgana, Carmen Montes, Rachel Sheppard and always Lina Romay — and the story doesn’t matter. An all-female remake of Franco’s 1986 film El mirón y la exhibicionista, this has a voyeur watching a new young couple and dealing with her ex, played by Romay.

Made by Jess’ Manacoa company, this is near formless as all it contains is posed male gaze approximations of what Sapphic love entails. We’re paying — whether through lack of art or by the old fashioned way of cash — for an elderly Jess to engage in whatever women he and Lina want to see frolic. I guess at least I should be happy that he figured out a way to get paid for it rather than paying for it.

At least the soundtrack that he created with Daniel White is catchy. This goes along with Jess Franco’s Perversion, a second movie that has more of the same but at least a conclusion. I wonder if Jess was approximating the VCA model which gave us one movie as two films, like Party Doll-A-Go-Go, a formless American movie that I’m sure that he would have just adored.

If you have 191 minutes to watch slow video effects and women writhe, it’s your call. I did it, but I am following that mantra that you have not seen a Jess Franco film unless you see all of his movies.

Great box art, though.

Queen of the Tabarin is the first film that Jess Franco made for producer Marius Lesouer and the first film that Soledad Miranda would appear in for Franco, although her role is so small you may not even see her.

This is the story of Lolita (Mikaela, who was also in Franco’s Vampiresas 1930), a street singer who comes from very modest beginnings, busking with her uncle (Antonio Garisa) and Miguel  (Juan Antonio Riquelme) while her brother collects the donations from people who walk by. She dreams of a better life, so she sneaks into a big costume party and sings for the Countess.

That’s where she meets Fernando (Yves Massard), the Countess’s son who acts as if he were poor. She falls for him but he’s already spoken for. Despite him being shot in a duel defending her honor, she moves on to Paris, where she gets singing and finishing school lessons, becoming the rich star she was always meant to be while the recovering Fernando tries to win her back after renouncing his promiscuous ways.

Franco’s third major film after We Are 18 Years Old and Labios Rojos, this was originally going to be directed by León Klimovsky. This is very much a for hire job, as this was a vehicle for Mikaela, but the cabaret would feature in so many future Franco films.

Directed by James Cullen Bressack and written by his father Gordon, this is a story within a story, as the film depicts George (Maurice LaMarche, the voice of The Brain from Pinky and the Brain, a show that the elder Bressack wrote 16 episodes of) and Charlie (Charles M. Howell IV, Gordon Bressack’s real-life writing partner), two writers working on a new story that could be a movie or a play, a piece of art or a movie that will play for genre audiences.

George is at the typewriter, stealing ideas from greater works, while Charlie keeps telling him how he’s guilty of creative theft, as the story they are telling appears and changes as the film about literal art theft — a Picasso — plays out even as one character, Richard (Tyler Christopher) is replaced by Cooper (Kristos Andrews) — as he invades the home of Bridgette (Galadriel Stineman). Then there’s a man dressed as a chicken (Spencer Breslin), the ghost of Marilyn Monroe (Theresa Ireland), a medium (Carla Collins), the neighbors (Sally Kirkland and Michael Galio) and more all appear and dare continually remake and reshaped as their authors keep fighting as they write.

By the end, as the director appears and explains how this movie is a tribute to his father and a remembrance of him. It’s pretty striking and makes this movie mean so much more.

In the latter years of Gordon’s life, he spent much of his own time and money writing and putting on plays, with his son wondering why he didn’t make them into movies that might make money. It’s interesting that the son has now put his own money into the movie which was inspired by the talk he had with his dad. As someone who struggles to reach the legacy of his father, I really felt this and a rewatch will make so much of it even more poignant.

Several sex workers have been killed and the populace is in a panic as a serial killer is on the loose. Then, a woman named Hélène Picard is executed for the crimes, yet within a few weeks, they start all over again as a mysterious woman is seen with the victims moments before they are killed. Meanwhile, the man who executed Hélène, Louis Guilbeau (Claude Merlin) begins a relationship with the woman who arrested her, Solange (Solange Pradel), yet he may not be who he claims to be.

A Woman Kills was directed by Jean-Denis Bonan, who was dealing with censors being enraged by his first short film, A Season for Mankind, which meant that producer Anatole Dauman was unable to find distribution for the film for 45 years until Luna Park Films brought it back to life in a new restoration.

What emerges is a film at the center of arthouse and grindhouse, yet leaning to the former. It has the POV shots of a slasher, yet the look and feel of the French New Wave mixed with German expressionism all with a short running time and a soundtrack that makes the whole thing feel ill at ease. In short, I loved it, a film that presents how the thriller or krimi may have become a genre of its own — in an alternate timeline — in France instead of Italy.

Look for a Jean Rollin in a small role!

The Radiance Films blu ray release of A Woman Kills — the worldwide blu ray debut that features a 2K restoration of the film from the original 16mm elements — comes with a number of exclusive newly-commissioned and archival bonus features such as audio commentary by critics Kat Ellinger and Virginie Sélavy; an introduction by Virginie Sélavy; On the Margin: The Cursed Films of Jean-Denis Bonan, a newly updated documentary program featuring director Jean-Denis Bonan, cinematographer Gérard de Battista, editor Mireille Abramovici, musician Daniel Lalou and actress Jackie Rynal; several films by Jean-Denis Bonan: La vie brève de Monsieur Meucieu, Un crime d’amour, the incomplete Tristesses des anthropophages, Mathieu-fou and Une saison chez les hommes; the trailer; a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by maarko phntm and a limited edition booklet featuring new writing on the film by author and scholar Catherine Wheatley, writer and broadcaster Richard Thomas on the short films, writing on gender identity tropes in A Woman Kills and the horror film, an interview with Francis Lecomte, the French distributor who rescued the film, newly translated archival reviews and film credits. You can get it from MVD.

Remember a few weeks ago when I watched La cripta de las condenadas? This is supposed to be a hundred years later. Fata Morgana is still in control of these women — Carmen Montes from Snakewoman, Eva Palmer from Jess Franco’s Perversion and actresses who only appeared in this film and its sequel: Marta Simoes, Olivia Deveraux and María Traven — who are trapped in what should be a crypt but is really Jess Franco’s apartment and man, what was it with the seventies, sex and wicker? And this is thirty-some-odd years later?

I’m putting to the test that theory that you’ve never seen a Franco movie until you’ve seen them all. Somehow, he convinced these women to writhe all over his big shaggy carpet and in bed and, yes, on that wicker and made it seem like the angel of death was coming for them through some words pasted in parts if you could remain awake to read them, that is.

That said, if you can get a career doing what you love — and we have to imagine that like Sisyphus had to love the rock, Franco loved zooming in tight on pubic mounds — then you’re a success. Jess made money from this and succeeded from beyond the grave by having people like me watch movies like this.

A remake of Plaisir a trois, an earlier film by Jess Franco that was inspired by the work of the Marquis de Sade, this finds Antonio (Antonio Mayans) as the would-be master of his house who states that everything is permitted for the sake of pleasure. He brings Julia (Lina Romay) home to meet his wife Martine (Rocí­o Freixas) just as she is released from the insane asylum, as he plans on using her mental illness to finally be rid of her and run away with his young lover. Seeing as how this movie ends with him strangled and then intertwined within one another’s thighs, well, things don’t seem to work out.

Juan Soler plays Fenul, the mute servant who exists merely to come into love making scenes and play the guitar and Elisa Vela is Marta, a maid, but the three people that matter the most are Antonio, Julia and Martine.

In 1982, Franco returned from France and Germany, places where he’d finally escaped the censorship of his origins. Now that General Franco — no relation — was gone, those standards lapsed and he indulged by making at least twelve movies in this year alone.

In this, Franco extends his takes and also while this seems to be a sexy softcore movie on the surface, underneath it is all doom. No one is making love for pleasure but instead for power or to try to keep from being destroyed or to just find something, anything in this wicked world to hold on to. Sexy movies where no one can really get aroused is a weird genre to be into, yet here I am.

Tilly Monterey (Tammin Sursok) is the Compliance and Outreach Manager for The Animal Discovery Institute and she finally gets to be in charge of her own project, helping The Crystal Bay Penguin Sanctuary in Australia get itself out of a financial mess. She takes her sister Gemma (Madeleine West) with her and you know it, soon falls for head zoologist, the hunky Fletcher Grant (Jason Wilder). But will all that be enough to save this place in just a week?

Director Christine Luby seems to specialize in these kinds of oceanic stories with The Curious Case of Dolphin Bay and the Netflix series Dive Club in her IMDB resume. This was written by Annelies Kavan.

I have to say, this movie promises love and penguins and delivers both. You’re not going to get much conflict and you’re going to get some cute penguins waddling about. In a world of darkness and cruelty, I see that as a winning proposition.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Journalism student Tasha Brooks (Keeya King) is trying to get on the staff of the student newspaper, but Clancy (Keara Graves), the editor, says that she needs a major story to make it. Here’s an idea: the Tau Theta Nu sorority had a death last year during rush week, so she decides to be a pledge. This involves getting challenges via an app and live streaming what happens. It starts so simply but gets dangerous and as you can imagine, the sorority has some pretty dark secrets.

Clancy tries to talk Tasha out of this, as she was part of the pledges in the past when Sophia Mathis died. She knows just how wrong things can go and doesn’t want Tasha to be part of it. Tasha thinks she can handle it. Yet when another of the pledges, Jayda (Mary Ditta) dies from a cocaine overdose, it seems like Clancy might be right.

Or, you know, if you know these college frat or sorority movies, Tasha is being set up. If you’ve seen The Skulls, you can imagine what happens.

Directed by Alpha Nicky Mulowa and written by Jackie Logsted, who started her career as a writer in elementary school creating The Sisters 8 series with her mother and father. She also wrote two books with her mother for Penguin Random House — The Great Gatz and Joint Custody — and sold this script while she was still in college.

You can watch this on Tubi.