THE LAST CIRCUS -- DVD Review by Porfle

Originally posted on 10/12/11

 

You don't watch Spanish director Álex de la Iglesia's THE LAST CIRCUS (2010) as much as you're propelled through it.  Frenetic, intensely melodramatic, and way off-the-wall, it's like a Jackson Pollock painting with broad splashes of humor, tragedy, beauty, and violence. 

After a cool main titles montage, we find ourselves in a circus in Spain circa 1937.  The clowns' performance is interrupted by militia pressing men into service to fight in the Spanish Civil War.  Next thing we know, there's a clown in drag wading into a platoon of National soldiers with a machete, in the midst of a spectacular battle in the streets.  Already we know that this isn't going to be your average movie.

His son, Javier, grows up to be a sad clown in a circus dominated by Sergio (Antonio de la Torre), a "happy" clown who is the children's favorite despite his savagely violent nature.  Javier (Carlos Areces) falls in love with Sergio's gorgeous acrobat girlfriend Natalia (Carolina Bang), who is fond of Javier but perversely excited by Sergio's abuse.  When the clowns finally clash, all hell breaks loose.

A visual feast, THE LAST CIRCUS takes us on a dizzying tour of baroque circuses, blazing battles, and off-kilter urban tableaux where mad clowns with machine guns terrorize the citizenry.  Javier's attack on Sergio leaves him with a face that would make the Joker wince--thus ending his career performing for children--while the increasingly psychotic Javier's gleeful self-mutilation gives him a grotesque, permanent clown face meant to strike fear as he goes on a ramapage of revenge against the world. 

Areces, a portly, plain-looking actor, deftly takes his character to this drastic stage after first appearing as a normal and deceptively meek-looking man gradually driven to violence to protect his Natalia.  After his attack on Sergio, he becomes a wild man in the forest and ends up actually biting an elderly General Franco in one of the film's most weirdly comical moments, after which he transforms himself into the homicidal clown monster. 

As Sergio, de la Torre gives a raw performance that takes on added richness once his facial disfigurement makes his character even more volatile and unpredictable.  Most exhilarating for me, however, is the statuesque Carolina Bang as Natalia.  Whether performing her circus acrobatic act, dancing in a Kojak-themed nightclub in front of a giant portrait of Telly Savalas, or making love with passionate abandon to her beastly boyfriend Sergio, she's utterly captivating.  You can't blame Javier for being obsessed with her to the point of having heated delusions in which she appears as a shimmering religious icon.

The film is technically dazzling from the direction and photography all the way to a heart-pounding score by Roque Baños.  The great SPFX include lots of well-done CGI and green screen culminating in a thrilling cliffhanger climax atop a towering monument with Javier and Sergio doing battle over their mutual love Natalia.  The sequence owes quite a bit to films such as THE CROW, BATMAN, and a few others that may come to mind while watching it, with one sweeping camera move after another producing vertigo-inducing thrills as the story builds to its peak. 

The DVD from Magnolia's Magnet label is in 2.35:1 widescreen with English and Spanish 5.1 soundtracks.  Subtitles are in English.  Extras consist of international and U.S. trailers and the featurettes "Making of The Last Circus", "Behind the Scenes Segments", and "Visual Effects."  The latter reveals an extent of green-screen usage throughout the film that I was unaware of while watching it. 

One of the most welcome surprises of my recent viewing experience, THE LAST CIRCUS is a mad rush through a thoroughly skewed adventure bursting with goodies for the eyes and the mind.  You may not like it as much as I did, but I can't imagine anyone being bored by it.

THE LAST CIRCUS -- DVD Review by Porfle

THE 7TH DAY -- DVD Review by Porfle

A slow, thoughtful suspenser from Spain, Olive Films' THE 7TH DAY (aka "El 7º Día", 2004) lights the fuse early and lets it burn gradually toward what we fear will be an explosive conclusion.

The atmosphere is deceptively calm and pastoral at first as we join the inhabitants of a small village in Spain going about their everyday lives, the earthy traditions of the old barely giving way to the impatience and impetuous yearnings of the young.

Our main focus is young Isabel (Yohana Cobo), who is telling the story after the fact.  She recounts how a boy and a girl from the Fuentes and Jiminez families have a whirlwind affair that results in the girl falling madly in love but the boy ultimately brushing her off.

The girl is crushed to the point of madness, and her highly unstable brother Jerónimo (Ramón Fontseré) takes drastic action by stabbing the boy to death. As he heads to prison for an extended term, the two families enter into a blood feud that results in violence and death on both sides.

The juxtaposition of such heated passions with such a relatively peaceful setting emphasizes the feeling that we're seeing a healthy organism suffering from a horrible, spreading virus.

The Jiminez family, a struggling young couple with three lively, lovely daughters, is accused of the most heinous crime for which the volatile Fuentes clan plots a catastrophic revenge, aided by the early release of the increasingly insane Jerónimo.

And yet for most of its running time THE 7TH DAY holds back on the action, letting its story unfold so gradually that we remain transfixed throughout, waiting for things to come to a head.

We see Isabel, the oldest Jiminez daughter, falling in love with a bad boy herself and going through the usual teenage angst.  Other stories of small town life are told, familiar dramas that have unfolded since time began.

Meanwhile, the Fuentes family is anything but benign and normal in their simmering hatred, which is stoked mostly by a bitterly vengeful woman and her sociopathic brother.  Wielding shotguns and spouting hate, the Fuentes family gives in to their blinding madness at last during a village festival in which no bystander is spared their wrath.

Performances are good and director Carlos Saura has fashioned a beautiful-looking film with an elegant visual style.  The acoustic musical score is superb.

Subtle and matter-of-factly told, the story of THE 7TH DAY is tragic in that the innocence and promise of its younger characters must suffer the consequences of a long-simmering cauldron of hatred set to boil by events beyond their control.  The final sequence is utterly shocking, and we're left wondering how, or even if, life will go on for the survivors.


YEAR: 2004
GENRE: DRAMA
LANGUAGE: SPANISH (with optional English subtitles)
LABEL: OLIVE FILMS
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 100 min
RATING: N/A
VIDEO: 1.85:1 Aspect Ratio; COLOR
AUDIO: STEREO
EXTRAS: NONE

THE 7TH DAY -- DVD Review by Porfle

CRIES OF PLEASURE -- Blu-ray Review by Porfle

 Originally posted on 2/19/20

 

I guess I've seen about a dozen or so of the many films directed by Jesus "Jess" Franco (VAMPYROS LESBOS, SHE KILLED IN ECSTASY, COUNT DRACULA)  during his prolific career. And while nowhere near the expert many of his fans are, I can say that one never knows quite what to expect from him.

It all depends on Franco's budget, collaborators, various other factors, and, most of all, whatever mood he happened to be in when undertaking a particular project.

With CRIES OF PLEASURE (1983), Franco must have felt like skirting the boundary between two familiar themes: the twisty intrigue tale with elements of murder and betrayal, and the softcore sex romp in which he could indulge his penchant for long, meandering passages with naked people exploring each other's...well, long meandering passages.

It begins a bit like SUNSET BOULEVARD, with one of the main characters already floating dead in a swimming pool. The narrator, ironically, is a simple-minded mute named Fenul (Juan Cózar) whose only job is to wander around the mountaintop Spanish villa strumming on the guitar to provide background music for his master, Antonio (Robert Foster).

Antonio, a wealthy, arrogant young playboy, has a live-in lover and maid named Marta (Jasmina Bell) who later claims to have been raped by him at age 12 but remains desperately in love with him and serves as a sex slave.

Meanwhile, his beautiful houseguest Julia (Franco's longtime muse Lina Romay, THE HOT NIGHTS OF LINDA, SINFONIA EROTICA, TWO FEMALE SPIES WITH FLOWERED PANTIES) is about to meet his equally lovely wife Martina (Rocío Freixas, THE SINISTER EYES OF DR. ORLOFF), who that very day is being released from an insane asylum.

That's just about all the set-up the director needs to get cracking on yet another torrid tale of lurid lust and maniacal madness, all of which will commence right after the characters are all properly introduced and thrown into a succession of those long, meandering passages.

These are all shot in very extended takes as the camera lingers artlessly but intently over various combinations of nude, writhing bodies while occasionally wandering out the window to take in some of the Spanish oceanfront scenery.

The sex itself is technically softcore but sometimes threatens to cross the boundary into hardcore. As with many sequences of this kind, things tend to get monotonous (I've personally gotten to the point where I find just about all sex scenes boring), although Lina Romay's many fans will certainly have a visual field day here.

What makes CRIES OF PLEASURE more than just another sexploitation flick, however, is the queasy undercurrent of sadism, perversion, and ultimately murder that pervades it all. 

At least one participant in all this carnal decadence will be tortured to death, and somebody plans to murder someone else before it's all over.

While the extended sex scenes are furiously performed and at least marginally erotic, the most worthwhile thing about it all (for me, anyway) is how Franco's barebones plot, based on the writings of the Marquis de Sade, is revealed to us in broad, deliberate strokes that keep us attentively waiting for its resolution.

When CRIES OF PLEASURE does hit that final chord, it's just kinky and off-kilter enough to elicit a sigh of satisfaction that we've made it through yet another unpredictable Jess Franco fever dream with the feeling that, somehow, it has been time rather well spent.


Special Features:

    In The Land Of Franco Part 1: Stephen Thrower Tours Multiple Franco Locations in Portugal
    When Donald Met Jess and Lina Part 1: Filmmaker Donald Farmer Interviews the Power Couple in 1993
    Jess Franco’s Golden Years: Interview with Stephen Thrower, Author of ‘Murderous Passions & Flowers of Perversion – The Delirious Cinema of Jesús Franco’

CRIES OF PLEASURE -- Blu-ray Review by Porfle

NIGHT OF OPEN SEX -- Blu-ray Review by Porfle

Originally posted on 2/21/20

 

From the title and cover art, I thought NIGHT OF OPEN SEX (Severin Films, 1983) was going to be one of Jess Franco's more experimental and largely plotless indulgences.

But sure enough, there is a plot, and a pretty passable one at that, although it has its work cut out for it competing against Franco's endless cinematic explorations of his beloved Lina Romay's bouncy naked body.

We first meet Lina (HOT NIGHTS OF LINDA, SINFONIA EROTICA, TWO FEMALE SPIES WITH FLOWERED PANTIES) as Moira, a popular local harlot who draws big, enthusiastic nightclub crowds just by writhing around onstage in various states of undress while wantonly pleasuring herself.

Naturally, she's the perfect choice for sleazo conman Vic (Miguel Aristu) to recruit in his plan to trick a dying Nazi general (Albino Graziani, MANSION OF THE LIVING DEAD) out of a hidden cache of gold by having her pose as his niece.

But first Vic and Moira must kidnap the real niece, Tina Klaus (Carla Simons), and get her to divulge the general's whereabouts in one of those scenes where Franco flirts with torture porn.

It's also a flirtation with real porn in that it contains some vaginal penetration, albeit with a hot curling iron as Moira proves she's as cruel as she is beautiful.

This early scene is brutal and rather shocking, especially since Moira is a character we're meant to like as we follow her sexual and materialistic exploits, some of which are in a humorous vein, for the remainder of the story.

The rest of the film is a series of near-hardcore sex scenes focusing on Moira flailing ecstatically with various partners including her blonde girlfriend Eva (Lorna Green, MACUMBA SEXUAL) and a moustachioed stud named Al Crosby (J.A. Mayans, CANNIBAL TERROR), who first abducts Moira and then teams up with her to search for the gold while finding time to engage in endless frantic couplings.

The aforementioned plot keeps chugging away during lulls in the sexual action and actually becomes somewhat intriguing as Moira and Al work to decipher the Nazi general's cryptic clues and make their way through lush seaside scenery where a hidden mansion awaits.

Adding to the suspense is another male-female duo on the gold hunt, and their sudden appearance during Moira and Al's climactic sexual frenzy, which is stoked to new heights by the sight of a big stack of shiny gold bars, augments the film's twisty and rather amusing finale.

Franco (COUNT DRACULA, VAMPYROS LESBOS, SHE KILLED IN ECSTASY), who makes a brief cameo appearance while tied up and gagged, is in relatively good technical form here with some steady camerawork and ideal locations. 

My favorite part is the opening, a gorgeous extended shot through the windshield of a car cruising down an oceanfront boulevard lined with lightposts beneath a dark, cloudy sunset. The entire film looks good considering the low budget and Franco's tendency to work fast and loose.

NIGHT OF OPEN SEX is neither the director's worst (so far I would nominate PAULA-PAULA) nor the best of the comparatively small number of his scores of films that I've seen. Non-Franco fans will likely find it lightweight and slow, even boring. Lina Romay fans will get a severe case of eyestrain. I found it interesting (Franco is always interesting) and fun.


Buy it at Severin Films

Scanned in 4k from the original negative

Special Features:

    In The Land Of Franco Part 2: Stephen Thrower Tours Multiple Franco Locations in Portugal
    When Donald Met Jess and Lina Part 2: Filmmaker Donald Farmer Interviews the Power Couple in 1993
    The Night of Open Jess: Interview with Stephen Thrower, Author of ‘Murderous Passions & Flowers of Perversion – The Delirious Cinema of Jesús Franco’

NIGHT OF OPEN SEX -- Blu-ray Review by Porfle

Dracula & Renfield's Duplicate Death Groans (Spanish "Dracula", 1931) (video)

In the Spanish-language version of "Dracula" (1931)...

...the same death groan was used for both Dracula and his minion, Renfield.

Listen when Renfield's body hits bottom.

Now listen to Dracula when he gets staked.

But who groaned first?

It was Bela Lugosi in the English version.


I neither own nor claim any rights to this material.  Just having some fun with it. Thanks for watching!

Dracula & Renfield's Duplicate Death Groans (Spanish "Dracula", 1931) (video)