I have been trying to do a month of Jess Franco movies — here’s the Letterboxd list — and I hit a wall at 184 out of 200 movies. That’s because several of the films on the list are impossible to find. They are:

• The Ticklers
• Claire
• Las Tribulaciones de un Buda Bizco
• Las chuponas
• Lola 2000
• The Tree from Spain
• Las Playas Vacias
• Oro Espanol
• El Destierro del Cid
• Estampas Guipuzcoanas Número 2: Pío Baroja
• A Man, Eight Girls
• El Misterio del Castillo Rojo
• El Huesped de la Niebla
• Voces de Muerte
• Girl With the Red Lips
• Sida, la Pesta del Siglo XX
• In Pursuit of Barbara
• El Abuela, la Condesa y Escarlata la Traviesa
• Blind Target
• Montes de Venus
• Lascivia

I realize so many of these are lost films, but if you have them, reach out to bandsaboutmovies@gmail.com

Then I was thinking, what else can I watch? I remembered this amazing list from Gregory Joseph on Letterboxd: Movies Jean Rollin and Jess Franco Might Like If They Were Still Alive. This seems like a great way to finish out the month.

Directed, written and produced by Josephine Decker, Butter On the Latch is the story of Sarah (Sarah Small) and Isolde (Isolde Chae-Lawrence), who meet up at a Balkan music camp in the woods of California days after Isolde calls Sarah and tells her that she is lost in a house that she can’t escape from. Once they reconnect, they drift, as they are both attracted to another person, Steph (Charlie Hewson).

Shot by a three-person crew — Decker, cinematographer Ashley Connor and sound recorder M. Parker Kozak — this takes one of the songs about dragons wrapping themselves in the hair of women and burning the forest and transforms it into the paranoia one feels when they lose a friend who perhaps has become too close when someone comes between you. How close do you have to be to a friend before they become more than one when the stories you tell one another become not tales but foreplay? Was it Isolde on the other side of the phone? Or is it Sarah hearing from herself?

Beyond having attractive women who are pretty open about their carnal encounters, this has chanting songs that feel like they’re getting you high, a woman losing her mind and moments where the film seems to blur out, obscuring what we’re watching. I can only imagine that Jess Franco would have been into every moment of that, even if this was way too chaste for him. But what wasn’t?