Keeping our European theme intact, this month's edition of Foreign Fear Friday makes a quick jaunt from France to Spain, this time celebrating the demented work of Jess Franco. Born as Jesus Franco Manera on May 12, 1936 - the polemic Madridian, who touts over 60 aliases and has some 180 directorial credits under his belt, is perhaps best known for his scintillating brand of horror-erotica; often tethered to a specific vampire subgenre. To deem the cult director exploitative is a vast understatement, this guy flat out offends, doing so unapologetically. At times tasteless, sordid, unforgivably misogynistic - Jess Franco is that rare breed of filmmaker whose work knows no moral limits. The man shuns commercial appeal and for that, we at OMGHorror proudly doff the hat.
Just to let you know what kind of iconoclastic madman we're dealing with, Franco released the very first 'mainstream' horror film to receive an X-rating with 1967's Succubus. But if it isn't the sexually charged vampire flicks like his 1971 film Vampiros Lesbos (perhaps his best known work), Franco is busy exploring all kinds of other lurid taboos and salacious subject matter. In his halcyon days, Franco attracted to 'women in prison' films, sussing the repressive ills and horrific nature of institutionalism. Films like 99 Women, Women Behind Bars and Ilsa the Wicked Warden are just a few of prime-outlandish examples of such a lascivious subgenre that the Spaniard fostered back in the day. But he doesn't just direct. Franco writes, shoots, lights, often acts in his own pictures; stamping a fun, self-reflexive print on his overall body of work.
With an unrivaled prolificacy spanning from the '60s through the '80s, Franco specialized in churning out a glut of low budget horror entries, sometimes 5 or 6 a year. Given the law of averages, it's only normal to have a few hit or misses here and there, and that's certainly the case with Franco. Some of his films are flat out bad, irredeemable in every fashion. But when he's on, the guy is nailing bulls-eyes with balls-to-the-wall horror sleaze that hardly fails to entertain even the most casual film-fan. It's not like Franco is or was without merit altogether, why else would Orson Wells adopt his help for the battle scenes in his own 1966 film Falstaff? Sure Franco's an acquired taste, but no one can refute or dismiss how impressive his level of productivity is and continues to be. While somewhat hampered by his age these days, Franco isn't deterred from making films into his seventies, his latest effort being released in 2005 under the title: Snakewoman.
With literally hundreds of Jess Franco films to pluck from, the one we want to highlight really comes down to accessibility. Not palatability, because the sheer notion is antithetical the Franco spirit (although our choice is probably one of Franco's most digestible films). No, we're talking about literal accessibility. See, we want to recommend something you can actually find, unfortunately a wide bevy of Franco's most interesting work is extremely unreachable, some of which not even released at all (DVD or VHS). Given such parameters, we've gone ahead and decided to (re-)introduce you to Franco's 1988 release of a picture called Faceless.
Faceless is atypical of Franco's work in many ways. First, it by and large strays from the thematic eroticism that crux the bulk of his films; even flirtatious subterfuge seems to be curbed in light of a more sinister, conventional horror approach. Is that to say it's a nude-free picture? Hardly, but the story here doesn't revolve around such or feature seductive soft-core vampiresses looking to chug more than blood. No, Faceless is about a demented yet renowned doctor in France willing to go to great lengths to restore the beautiful face of his daughter after a near fatal acid misfortune turned the poor girl into the Joker (one year prior, mind you). How great of lengths? The good doc spirals into a baleful bout of butchery -- collecting young nubiles off the street, storing them in a basement, excoriating their faces and replacing their skin over his daughter's own marred visage (Not unlike Mansion of the Doomed, but with faces instead of eyeballs).
With a much bigger budget than Franco was used to working with, and with a roster of b-movie stalwarts such as Helmut Berger (the doctor), Telly Savalas, Christopher Mitchum and Caroline Munro - Franco somehow retains the feel of the gritty, anti-swank mid-'70s Euro-trash that we saw from the best horror directors in the world around that time. Besides the grainy look an unabashedly cool grindhouse soundtrack, the violent grue sequences are first rate. We get a syringe needle to paraplegic's eyeball, a chainsaw decapitation, a drill to the cranium - none of them fail to quench even the most potent of bloodlust. And that's not to mention the actual surgical gore! A paper thin plot revolving around a father of one of the female victims seeking his own vigilante justice certainly takes a back-seat to the wildly imaginative fatality scenes that Franco obviously loves to relish in. Ah hell, just get a load of the trailer below.
