Jesús "Jess" Franco (born Jesús Franco Manera; 12 May 1930 – 2 April 2013) was a Spanish film director, writer, composer, cinematographer and actor.
He was only six years old when he started composing music under the protection of his brother Enrique. After the Spanish Civil War he was able to continue his studies at the Real Conservatorio de Madrid, where he finished piano and harmony. Being a Bachelor of Law and an easy-read novel writer (under the pseudonym David Khume), he signed on to enter the Instituto de Investigaciones y Experiencias Cinematográicas (IIEC), where he stayed for only two years, while he worked simultaneously as a director and theater actor. Later he went to Paris to study directing techniques at the I.D.H.E.C. (University of Sorbonne), where he used to go into seclusion for hours to watch films at the film archive. Back in Spain he began rted his huge cinematographic work as a composer, with Cómicos (1954) and El hombre que viajaba despacito (1957), and later worked as an assistant director to Juan Antonio Bardem, León Klimovsky, Luis Saslavsky, Julio Bracho, Fernando Soler and Joaquín Luis Romero Marchent, among others. He also worked at Ágata Films S.A. as production manager and writer. His first works as a director were industrial and cultural short films. However, he soon applied all his knowledge and experience to his feature directorial debut, We Are 18 Years Old (1959). From that moment on all his work was supported by co-production. His Succubus (1968) was nominated for the Festival of Berlin, and this event gave him an international reputation. His career got more and more consolidated in the following years, and his endless creativity enabled him to tackle films in all genres, from "B" horror films to pure hardcore sex films. His productions have always been low-budget, but he nevertheless managed to work extraordinarily quickly, often releasing several titles at the same time, using the same shots in more than one film. Some of his actors relate how they they were hired for one film and later saw their name in two or more different ones. As the Spanish cinema evolved, Jesús managed to adapt to the new circumstances and always maintained a constant activity, activity that gave a place in his films to a whole filming crew. Apart from his own production company, Manacoa Films, he also worked for companies like Auster Films S.L. (Paul Auster), Cinematográfica Fénix Films (Arturo Marcos), the French Comptoir Français du Film (Robert de Nesle), Eurociné (Daniel Lesoeur and Marius Lesoeur), Elite Films Productions (Erwin C. Dietrich), Spain's Fervi Films (Fernando Vidal Campos) or Golden Films Internacional S.A. He acted in almost all of his films, playing musicians, lawyers, porters and others, all of them sinister, manic and comic characters. Among the aliases he used--apart from Jesús Franco, Jess Franco or Franco Manera--were Jess Frank, Robert Zimmerman, Frank Hollman, Clifford Brown, David Khune, Frarik Hollman, Toni Falt, James P. Johnson, Charlie Christian, David Tough, Cady Coster, Lennie Hayden, Lulú Laverne and Betty Carter. Lina Romay has been almost a constant in his films, and it's very probable that in some of them she has been credited as the director instead of him. In many of the more than 180 films he's directed he has also worked as composer, writer, cinematographer and editor. His influence has been notable all over Europe (he even contacted producer Roger Corman in the US). From his huge body of work we can deduce that Jesús Franco is one of the most restless directors of Spanish cinema. Many of his films have had problems in getting released, and others have been made directly for video. His work is often a do-it-yourself effort. More than once his staunchest supporters have found his "new" films to contain much footage from one or more of his older ones. Jesús Franco is a survivor in a time when most of his colleagues tried to please the government censors. He broke with all that and got the independence he was seeking. He always went upstream in an ephemeral industry that fed opportunists and curbed the activity of many professionals. Jess Franco died in Malaga, Spain, on April 2, 2013, of a stroke.
Candy, a strip-tease artist, tells the story of her life, which will lead us to discover how she ended up as a stripper; the bad example of her sister... her dissatisfaction with the men who loved her... her dissapointment by the only man she loved, Peter... and lastly, her meeting with Katy, a girl from the same milieu, who understood her. At the end all the twists in the story dissolve into a smile. Everything was make-believe... just a nightclub act, to please the crowd.
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Secret agents against spies who hide microfilm up their behinds. MichaelElliott1 from IMDB writes:
"Yet another hardcore film co-directed by Jess Franco and Lina Romay. As usual with a Franco hardcore picture, this film doesn't go for anything sexual but instead it throws countless sex scenes into a bizarre story.
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A group of nun's become possessed by demons and are then tortured in a dungeon of horrors during the inquisition
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The great Jess Franco is obviously going to continue to intrigue his fans and irritate the rest of the world with the films he makes until the day he dies, which hopefully is another twenty-five years away or so. In the meantime, he delivers "Jess Franco's Perversion", the DVD release title of his 2005 film, which is again based on a story by the Marquis de Sade, who has inspired many, many Franco films in the last thirty years. In "Perversion", the great Lina Romay heads a cult of sadistic lesbian prostitutes who live for the destruction of men and any woman who dares fall "victim" to a man.
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A woman (Romay) notices a man spying on her from a hotel room across from her own, so she gives him something to look at. This is basically three short films, ala three sex acts, put together with a short running time of 54-minutes. You can tell this is one of Franco's quickies that he filmed in a day or two, but it features a nice score from Pablo Villa.
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Jess Franco goes the de Sade route again with this film, which is a remake of similar films from 1969 and 1970 (among others). In this version, a perverted couple (Robert Foster, Mabel Escano) stalk a young teenage girl named Eugenie (Katja Bienert) and eventually take her to their island where they try to deflower her. Franco has countless credits to his name and many times he remakes his own films. In some cases, as here, he remakes them several times. I was really looking forward to this film because both earlier versions are among the directors best work but the story here doesn't quite flow as well. The first forty-minutes of the film we see the couple stalking the young girl who is usually walking around totally naked. Franco makes a lot of this very erotic but after a while it grows tiresome and by the time they hit the island, you know where the story is going and the psychedelic sexual scenes come off rather lame whereas in the earlier films they were quite disturbing and freakish. I've never been a fan of Foster so his presence here doesn't do much for me and Escano doesn't work either. Lina Romay plays a sex slave who thinks she's a dog but she doesn't add anything. Katja Bienert is the one who comes off the best but I'm sure many will have a problem with her nudity and sexual situations since, according to the birthdate she gave, she's only fifteen here. Check out Eugenie de Sade and Eugenie...The Story of Her Journey Into Perversion instead as they show Franco, this story and the eroticism at their peak.
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Blind Target is the story of a young woman who emigrated from the poor tiny Latin American country of San Hermoso only to strike it rich and famous as an author in the United States. When she returns to her homeland to promote her novel "Desperate Letters" - a thinly veiled expose of her native land's political corruption - she is in for a welcome that she could not have imagined in her worst nightmares.
It is a welcome pleasure to watch Franco do with video that so many talentless hacks are incapable of. We get exotic locales, a fine story line, albeit a little confusing, but that is the Jess Franco way. In addition to all of this the lead actress is gorgeous and has a smouldering fire underneath her performance. Add to that the lovely Lina Romay who is always a joy to see before the camera and if that wasn't enough... LInnea Quigley! My favorite scream queen actually being used for her thespian skills in a magnificent role! On the DVD there are deleted scenes with commentary that at first you're like, so what? Then we get this great shot that I assumed was a crane shot. The producer explains that they stole three picnic tables from a nearby park, stacked them one on top of the other and set the camera on top of them. Of course Jess wanted to be sure that the shot was in frame and in focus so this little, old man scuttled up the top of the stack to make sure that they got the shot! This is professionalism in a medium that has never been real kind to Jess. The man deserves better and the viewing public needs to recognize his genius for what it truly is.
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Romina Power (18 year old daughter of Tyrone Power) stars as Justine, a nubile young virgin cast out of a French orphanage and thrust into a depraved world of prostitution, predatory lesbians, a fugitive murderess (Mercedes McCambridge), bondage, branding and one supremely sadistic monk (an outrageous performance by Jack Palance). It's a twisted tale of strange desires, perverse pleasures and the ultimate corruption of innocence as told by the Marquis de Sade.
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Ilsa, now a vicious warden, runs a mental-hospital for young women. A girl deliberately "checks" in to the hospital to find out what has happened to her sister who stayed there. Meanwhile Ilsa and one of the guards are forcing the inmates to have sex with male prisoners, filming them and selling it as pornoflicks.
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A young doctor kills himself after a medical committee terminates his research into human embryos, considering it too inhumane. His wife then seeks revenge on those who drove her husband to his death by luring each member of the committee into compromising situations and then killing them one by one.
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Lina Romay plays a bored housewife who goes out and gets sexual pleasure from anyone she comes into contact with.
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Italian spoken, hardcore import version of aka 'Al Otro Lado del Espejo/Lo Specchio del Piacere' the obscure 1973 film from Jess Franco. When Ana (Emma Cohen) decides to get married, her lesbian sister Marie (Lina Romay) commits suicide by plunging a dagger into her chest. From that moment onward Ana feels the impulse of killing all the men who intend to have a love affair with her while under the spell of her sister's ghost. This is the rarely seen Italian spoken hardcore version of the film and contains an abundance of hard lesbian action. This uncut/hardcore version has never been available in English language. This version of the film is a definite must for any true Jess Franco fan. With Emma Cohen, Lina Romay, Howard Vernon, Alice Arno, Francoise Brion and Philippe Lemaire.
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When a couple of over-the-hill and down-on-their-luck female private eyes stumble from an art smuggling caper into a kidnap and murder plot, they try to turn a profit instead of solving the crime.
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Jess Franco's EUGENIE is his more personal follow-up to the long-unavailable (until Blue Underground's 2002 release) of his scope PHILOSOPHY IN THE BOUDOIR adaptation EUGENIE... THE STORY OF HER JOURNEY INTO PERVERSION. Soledad Miranda (billed as Susan Korday - a variation on her Susan Korda pseudonym used in roles requiring nudity) plays Eugenie who begins an incestuous and sadistic affair with her stepfather Paul Radeck, a writer whose work has not met with the success it deserved. They embark on a series of thrill-killings (one of the victims is future Franco starlet Alice Arno in her first role for him). Their next intended victim is a sensitive jazz musician (Andre Montchall) but Eugenie falls in love with the artist and incurs the wrath of her stepfather.
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Lady Luck comes in many disguises. For ill-fated artist Johan Harker she took the form of Lorna, a beautiful woman with unearthly desires. Lorna grants Johan his wish for riches and success beyond his wildest dreams. But happiness lasts only until Johan's beautiful daughter Lucy reaches the age of her ripening. Now Lorna will come calling for what Johan owes...Lucy's soul. She's no longer Daddy's little girl. She's the spawn of Satan.
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A model named Barbara Hallen (Caroline Munro) has disappeared and her father (Telly Savalas) gets private detective Sam Morgan (Chris Mitchum) to go to Paris to find his daughter. Barbara's trail leads Morgan to a plastic surgery clinic owned by Dr. Flamand (Helmut Berger). Morgan's investigation reveals the horrifying secret behind the Doctor's miracle cures which is blood and organs taken from kidnapped young women. As Morgan's investigation closes witnesses are eliminated one by one, each in a more horrible way.
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Lina Romay plays Tarantula, a nightclub performer whose act essentially involves writhing around naked on a web. She seduces female audience members and takes them back to her place in order to string them up on more webs and, sometimes, turns into a spider with a human head.
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Using new footage and out-takes ripped from his other One Shot Productions films, director Jess Franco attempts to make a Marquis De Sade anthology but somehow manages to cobble together incoherent bits of sexiness, crassness, ugliness and tedium. Quite obviously the least effort amongst his One Shot Productions films, it's widely understood that this is the one film Franco made for his American company that had no real involvement from his new producers - and it shows. Without the steadying hand of producers Peter Evanko or Kevin Collins, Franco is left to his old devices of zoom lenses on flabby butts and repetitive loops of images and sounds. There's no story, just images set to music that apparently was supposed to suggest a mood. Instead it merely suggests that now is a good time to take a nap.
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Dr. Mados is sent to Fallas, New Mexico to interview a surgeon, but, when she arrives, she finds that the man is unwilling to speak to her as it appears that something in this backward western town has him under it's control. As Mados gets closer to the truth, she's sucked into a world of bloodsucking cowboys, insatiable nymphs, and the irresistible charms of Countess Irina, who wants Mados to be her vampire heir!
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Translated as “Lulu's Talking Ass”, this Jess Franco flick features his hot wife Lina Romay and her delicious behind. See, this is what we call theme and variation--instead of another talking vagina movie, Franco switches it up and gives her behind a mind!! Granted, this movie's is entirely in Spanish with no subtitles--but the way it's set up, you won't need to know what's being said. Most of it is sex anyway!
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Director Jess Franco returns to hardcore in this someone erotic but overly long film. A woman, recently dumped by her lesbian lover, spies on her two neighbors, lesbians of course, as they carry out various sexual acts. There's really no story to speak of here but instead we're treated to countless sexual acts. Some of these are erotic but for the most part the film goes on way too long and, as usual, things get pretty boring. The cinematography wasn't too bad and the jazz score by Franco and Daniel White was very good.
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"Disturbing and extremely well-made Jess Franco film about a woman (Lina Romay) returning home from an insane asylum only to discover her husband is now living with a man. The two men eventually find a nun (Susan Hemmingway) who's been raped and the three come up with a plot to kill the wife for her money. This is one of Franco's "art" films that manages to be quite beautiful in a poetic sense and ranks among one of his better films. The performances are all very good, especially Romay who once again gets to show off her sexual fits. Not nearly as explicit as I was expecting but still very good." -- IMDb user comment
Based on a story by Marquis de Sade.
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