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She Killed in Ecstasy The first thing we see in Jesús Franco’s She Killed in Ecstasy are images of stillborn children in jars with bizarre pop music on the soundtrack and German credits plastered over the scene. This is the opening to Franco’s fascinating, poverty-stricken 1970 remake of his own classic Spanish horror movie, The Diabolical Dr. Z (a.k.a. Miss Muerte, 1966). In She Killed, Franco shoots with nothing, using real locations that are picturesque by their sheer fabulousness: 1960s modern architecture, hotels on Portugal beachfronts, a parade of weird porno-look houses. There is a surplus of extreme wide-angle imagery and zooms straight into the gorgeous body of star Soledad Miranda. At least half the movie looks like it was filmed in hotel rooms. The unforgettable music is more of the same dance madness from the Vampyros Lesbos team of Manfred Hubler and Sigfried Schwab. |
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Dr. Z’s simple revenge story is present and accounted for, with only slight adjustments: after a misunderstood doctor is ridiculed by the Medical Board for his unconventional experiments, he kills himself. Then, one by one, the members of the board are killed by his wife, who has been driven mad with rage. Though both films share the same basic story (DR. Z is a little more elaborate and swaps the doctor’s wife for a vengeful daughter), their differences couldn’t be more striking. The original is filled with striking and often beautiful black and white photography, cool production design, and a script by Bunuel’s screenwriter, the great Jean-Claude Carriere. But watch a Franco film post-Dr. Z, and you feel like you’re on vacation with a trash film version of the Marquis De Sade. She Killed fixates on Soledad wandering around in a Boris Vallejo-esque metal bikini, posing in a cape on a speeding motorboat, wearing wigs, and having phony sex with Franco himself along with his actor friends, all before stabbing them in the crotch. Her supposedly brilliant scientist husband looks like he’s about 25 and wears colorfully patterned, unbuttoned shirts. In a typically emotionless Franco performance, his character’s struggle with professional rejection resembles a ’70s male model on a ’lude binge, staring blankly into a bathroom mirror. The medical conference here is simply a dark room, with four actors facing the camera, miming undoubtedly improvised non-sync dialogue. Franco performs an awesome rip-off of his own material that holds a hallucinatory, primitive power that money couldn’t buy. She Killed peaks with a flood of psycho-sexual set pieces, like a lesbian seduction scene viewed through a wine glass—intercut with a heterosexual kiss of Soledad and her dead lover. Our heroine absurdly strangles her totally nude companion with a see-through vinyl pillow and pins a note to her chest that says,“You are the second pig to die” in a bone thrown to Manson. Franco’s relationship with his star is fascinating. Her incredible body is revealed again and again with a full-frontal casualness that only sex workers might find comfortable. Given Franco’s rapidly disappearing material, Soledad is almost awesomely devoted. Watching this and her other films for him, you realize she could’ve been a star, and sadly now is one because she died so young. In She Killed, nothing is spared. Even Franco himself is a victim, tied to a chair while Soledad stabs him in his cock. The story shows how the uptight people killed Soledad’s man and she offs them for it, using sex to kill. In the end, love makes you insane, but the police inspector tailing her concludes in the final shot that she is not guilty after she commits suicide by driving herself and the corpse of her lover off a cliff. It’s as if the point of this Mobius strip of a movie is: without sex, we may as well die. That the late Soledad Miranda is in fact undead, preserved on film for eternity, is a creepy irony. She Killed in Ecstasy’s stark contrast to a film as polished as Franco’s earlier Dr. Z. is another reason why he will never be embraced by anybody but intellectuals, freak-movie spotters or the most jaded film enthusiasts—he seems to defy all logic and work via conscious regression. – Nicholas McCarthy |
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