JESS FRANCO MONTH: La cripta de las condenadas 2 (2012)

I can hear you thinking—if you even care about Jess Franco’s very late period shot on digital video in a hotel room era—”Didn’t you already talk about La cripta de las condenadas?” Yes, I did. Yes, I referred to The Crypt of the Damned as “Jess Franco in one or two rooms watching women writhe around and zoom in and out of their curves for 90 minutes or so.”

This has the same cast: writer and cinematographer Fata Morgana (she also made Montes de Venus with Franco), Carmen Montes from Snakewoman, Eva Palmer from Jess Franco’s Perversion and actresses whose careers were in these two movies: Marta Simoes, Olivia Deveraux and María Traven.

This is supposed to be a hundred years after the first movie, but it’s the same idea other than images of a cemetery. Was Jess learning from 1990s VCA who would take one movie — Party Doll-A-Go-Go, for example — and break it down into two parts, even though it didn’t need to be?

There’s music by Daniel J. White, alongside Bach and Ravel. This is basically Jess getting to film nude women and then crawling all over his apartment, then selling it,t probably based on his name. But who are we to deny him the ability to see and film women, much less get the most out of the zoom feature? Are we to do as we always do and add to the blank slate that is a Jess Franco movie and find some meaning, some profound lesson here? I don’t think this is for getting off. It’s too slow, too moody, too strange. But hey, whatever gets you there, I guess. Some old people make home movies of their grandchildren, Jess Franco studies labias. Such is life. Is it a bad time to watch women kiss? If that’s boring to you, perhaps Franco’s entire work — point to the sign: you must watch every Franco movie to understand Franco — is not for you.