1975 saw two movies titled The Mark of Zorro, one from Italian director Franco Lo Cascio that starred George Hilton, and this film, directed by Marius Lesoeur with uncredited directing help from Alain Payet and Jess Franco. There was also the big budget Alain Delon movie that same year, directed by Duccio Tessari, that was such a huge deal that it became one of the first Western-produced films to be exported to the People’s Republic of China after the Cultural Revolution where more than 70 million viewers watched it.

This is not that movie.

This was made in France with French actors, pulling footage from La venganza del Zorro* like Godfrey Ho and with Franco regulars Howard Vernon as the Governor of California and Monica Swinn as his daughter, well…this won’t be the best Zorro movie that you’ve ever seen. Speaking of Zorro, he’s played by Clint Douglas, who only made two other movies.

You have to give Eurocine some credit for trying to cash in, but if anyone was fooled, well, they deserve to get the ZZ on both cheeks of their life.

*Which was co-written by Franco.

Sylvia (Lina Romay) attends a spy party, which is not a thing I believe exists anywhere outside of the universe of a Jess Franco movie, and this soon takes her into a real espionage affair as she’s chased by Agent 008, Janos Radeck (Jess Franco) — and what is it with that Radeck name in his movies? — before hooking up with two men and going to a late night orgy.

So yeah — it’s kind of like After Hours also it’s Lina talking directly to the camera and telling you to come to see this movie multiple times so she can get rich and it’s charming. Like you want to hug her and tell her that yes, you’ll do everything possible to make this dream come true.

There’s also another cut of this movie, Heisse Berührungen, which was produced by Erwin C. Dietrich and scenes of this movie were edited into Justine and the Whip, along with footage from Shining Sex, by an editor perhaps even more demented than Jess Franco: Joe D’Amato.

It’s a movie where everyone loves Lina, like her three suitors who include a Communist rock star and a husband who is constantly getting sick and losing money gambling. I completely understand.

The Hot Nights of Linda AKA Who Raped Linda? is all about Marie-France Bertrand (Alice Arno), who goes to a small town to take care of the family of Paul Steiner (Paul Muller), including his disabled daughter Linda (Verónica Llimerá), who is abused by her sex-obsessed sister Olivia (who else but Lina Romay?).

Credited to J.P. Johnson — a jazz pianist whose name Jess Franco appropriated for this movie — this movie comes from a year in which Franco made thirteen movies and started and didn’t finish three more.

The introduction of Marie to this environment leads to, of course, sapphic encounters, mystery, mayhem and potentially murder. Also, Lina Romay and a banana, which is pretty much the most pure bottled form of the madness that is inside Franco’s mind.

At one point Olivia says, “It’s marvelous to live without a sense of time” and that’s the most perfect sentence to describe a Jess Franco movie and what it’s like to be a character within one of these movies.

You can get this from Severin.

Women Behind Bars feels like a movie you may have seen before and that’s probably due to the fact that Jess Franco seemed to make the same movie over and over. Diamond theft? Women going to jail? More to the point, Lina Romay thrown in jail? Yes, I’ve seen it, you may have seen it, but I’m going to keep watching these movies because in a world that makes no sense, the movies of Jess Franco that make no sense make sense.

In “Stop Making Sense,” David Byrne sang “Don’t touch me I’m a real live wire,” and hey, Lina kind of lives that in this movie, Lina doesn’t just the zoom in with the camera nearly so deep into her private parts that you can see her soul, she also has them zapped with electro shock therapy. I mean, you always hurt the ones you love, and Jess Franco should have invented a new word for love for how he felt about Lina, and still here we are watching her body shake and shiver as she approximates what it had to feel like to get some volts up her lady business.

I mean, is this movie Jess Franco makes Swamp Diamonds? Sure, maybe. Yet even Roger Corman would say, “Maybe this needs some budget,” and Jess wouldn’t be listening because he’d be shooting an endless image of a sunset.

Speaking of hurt, Jess plays a gangster that wants those diamonds and so he roughs up Lina to the point that you’re sure that the camera went off and they had really great sex after. And hey — the man that Lina kills is her Ramon Ardid, who was her husband at the time and man, awkward. You ever had an emotional relationship with someone that ends up becoming real and want to shut the rest of the world out and only have your reality exist of just the two of you? Ramon’s been on the wrong side of that.

I mean, outside of a few sapphic scenes and that electrocution, this movie is more a crime film than a women in prison movie, so leave it to Jess Franco to take a movie that seems to promise sleaze* and edging you.

*To be fair, it’s still sleazy enough to be a section 2 video nasty.

As Harvey Dent said, “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”

Lina Romay would agree, as she went from Sylvia, the heroine in this movie, to the bow and arrow carrying villainess of the remake of this movie, Tender Flesh.

Sylvia is on vacation in the south of France and wants to meet up with a guy named Tom who just so happens to work for Count and Countess Zaroff (Howard Vernon and Alice Arno), who like to play games with beautiful young women. Then, they shoot them with bows and arrows and eat them, as you do.

There’s also Bob (Robert Woods) and Moira (Tania Busselier), who procure young women for the Zaroff estate and are allowed to partake of the pleasures of the flesh and I don’t mean just penetrating it.

There are some astounding locations here, as the house was shot between two Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura-designed structures, Xanadu, which was in She Killed In Ectasy and La Muralla Roja. This adds to the production, as so many of the later shot on video Franco films are missing the lushness of his filmed movies.

There are insert shots in some cuts of this film, but Franco didn’t intend for those to be in this movie.

Anyways. this is the kind of movie that Franco could and would and did make over and over again. That said, it works and the basic tale of rich people hunting the lower rungs of society is always one that presents a great framework to hang a movie on.

St. Elizabeth’s Refuge seems like a place that helps the downtrodden women of Victorian England by placing them into the homes of the upper class where they gain fulfilling careers that last for their entire lives. Or, you know, they disappear forever.

Now, a rebellious charge named Leonore (Sandra Mozarowsky, Hitler’s Last Train) is trying to discover the secrets of this place and when a movie starts off with a girl’s brain being opened up and sliced against her will, you know that there’s nothing good here. Once her friend Sylvia (Victoria Vera, Monster Dog) becomes one of the missing, her mission becomes even more necessary.

The headmistress Miss Wilkins (Norma Kastel, Tender and Perverse Emanuelle) and her assistant Miss Colton have no problems whipping the girls into shape or pushing them into the unloving arms of Dr. Krueger (Dean Selmier, The Blood Spattered Bride).

More of a gothic romance than the exploitation movie that the first scene may leadd you to believe, School of Death takes its time to give you the rewards you’re looking for. But they’re there and worth the time.

Director Pedro L. Ramírez also made The Fish with the Eyes of Gold, a giallo more concerned with mystery than kills. If you liked that, well, this will be your speed. I kind of love that this movie sets up a totally pervy premise — sex slaves created through brain surgery — and then it’s pretty much a movie that could play on TV.

The Mondo Macabro blu ray of School of Death is the first time that this movie has ever been released on disc. It features a 1080p presentation from a new 4K restoration of the original camera negative, as well as commentary by Kat Ellinger. You can get it from Mondo Macabro.

Also known as Sexy Erotic Jobb — yes, that’s how it’s spelled on the poster — this movie has Count Roland (Fred Williams) leaving behind his boring life to a rich wife to become a butler to the also rich and famous, which allows him to go back to his youthful days of being on top or under or behind anything in kneehighs.

I always wonder about Franco movies, when we see the set and the crew and Jess himself directing at the end, are we having a meta “We began in a fairytale and we came to life, but is this life reality? No. It is a film. Zoom back camera. We are images, dreams, photographs. We must not stay here. Prisoners. We shall break the illusion. This is Maya. Goodbye to the Holy Mountain. Real life awaits us.” The Holy Mountain moment or is Jess just saying screw it or is this his tribute to all the times that boom mics appear in film?

That said, if you want to see what France’s 42nd Street looked like in 1975 — presumably shot with no permit out of a car window, the way it should be — then the last ten minutes of this are for you. The rest is a light comedy and at no time do you worry for your sanity and what kind of Franco movie is that?

Can Al Pereira (Jess Franco) ever catch a break? Stuck in Puerto Rico, down on his luck and broke, he finally gets a job seeing if Carlos Ramos (Eric Fauk) is cheating on his wife Cynthia (Lina Romay), who soon falls into bed with our detective hero and pins the murder of her husvand on him, as he was the last person to see Carlos alive.

Yet when he explains this to the police, they offer to bring him to meet with the dead man’s wife to confirm the story. That’s when the truth comes out. She wasn’t his wife. Olga (Monica Swinn) is, yet she still clears his name.

And soon, Cynthia is back in his life all over again.

Is this Jess Franco’s Chinatown? No, no. It’s just an excuse to use the the pulp detective framework to get down and dirty, featuring numerous dance moments and Lina drinking a Coke in a way that will instantly induce puberty or work better than any little blue pill.

Also, Adrian on Letterboxd shared the lyrics to the song that Lina sings, “Keep It Cool,” and man, it’s really something else, sung phoentically in something approaching English. I’ll summarize a few lines:

“Keep cool, if I come to you,
Keep cool, if I’m kissing you,
Keep cool, if I’m sucking you,
Keep cool, my love, my sweet, keep cool…”

The Great Chase is a blast. Etsuko Shihomi — Sister Street Fighter herself — stars in a spy film from Norifumi Suzuki (School of the Holy Beast, Roaring Fire, ten Torakku Yarō movies which are caper films in the world of dekotora, highly decorated trucks) that was exactly what I needed on a winter day filled with post-holiday ennui.

She plays Shinobu, an agent charged with stopping drug smugglers who put their heroin into the bodies of dead girls, a gang connected to her father, who was framed for a similar crime five years ago and died in prison. This mission involves battling bad guys who can smash rocks on their heads, one with killer playing cards, another with a whip and singing female wrestler Mach Fumiake, a real Japanese pro wrestler who was also the Kilara leader in Gamera Super Monster.

Shinobu is also super famous as a race car driver and even has her own fan club, plus she seems to be some kind of Buckaroo Banzai-esque polymath, as she’s also a master of disguise and a martial artist. This brings her up against Onozawa, a man who enjoys arrdvarking while dressed in a cat suit as he listens to Mozart under a photo of Hitler and his gang of men dressed as nuns moving drugs though a convent who totally must have been exchanging tips in some kind of drug gang peer group with the baddies in They Call Her Cleopatra Wong.

This movie doesn’t want to be normal. And that’s why I love it. In my dreams Suzuki made a whole bunch more movies as Shinobu.

Make your day great. Watch this on YouTube.