Thursday, June 23, 2011

Venus in Furs (1969)


Directed by Jess Franco
My rating: 2 stars out of 4
IMDb
(DVD, Blue Underground)

Former teenage heartthrob James Darren is a jazz musician in Istanbul who finds a dead girl washed up on the beach. She starts showing up at his gigs alive, even when he runs to Rio. They start a love affair, much to the chagrin of his regular girl Barbara McNair. The lovely Maria Rohm has apparently risen from the dead to get revenge on the people who murdered her in a sexual tryst. So, one by one, she lures them into various deviant sexual situations and murders them. In the end, she leaves poor Jimmy alone to ponder both her and his own existence. At its best, a dreamy, hallucinatory bad trip set to cool jazz, at its worst soft porn set to Manfred Mann. Franco frequently goes to his usual stable of effects: zoom, extreme close-ups and slow motion, which are as tiresome as they are predictable.


No comments:

Post a Comment