Franco's boring mess...

A while back I purchased Anchor Bay's Jess Franco collection boxset, consisting mainly of titles I had little or no knowledge off. I do find Franco fascinating and I know he has made some amazing films (99 Women and Eugenie to name two of my personal favorites). It is just so hard to find the good ones amongst all the crap...and the man has made alot of crap. Yesterday I looked up all the titles in the boxset om imdb to find the one with the highest user score. Not that a high imdb scores mean that much, but at least it provides some sort of indication (score was 5.8/10 from 420+ user by the way) on whether something is completely unwatchable. The highest rated film in the box was Love Letters Of A Portuguese Nun.

The 80 minute running time felt like forever. A young girl, Maria, is innocently messing around with her boyfriend in the woods. They're caught by a priest, who convinces the Maria's mother to give away all her savings and send her off to a convent so that her soul can be saved. Of course the priest is a dirty bastard and so is the head nun, but not only that. They're also satanists and want to use Maria in their ceremonies. Maria isn't being very cooperative and she is eventually sentenced to be burned at the stake (it's set back in those days). Awaiting her execution, she writes a letter to God and he hears her prayer. Well, a Prince that happens to ride by finds the letter and stops the execution.

Unfortunately, no amount of sexy nuns could change the fact that this film is boring, boring, boooooring.

If this is the highest rated film in the boxset, I'm not sure I want to watch any of the others.

Could someone please recommend some good Franco, before I give up on the man completely.

I watch movies so you don't have to #6 - School Of The Holy Beast (1974) Warning: SPOILERS!

It took me quite a while to get into Japanese movies. I realise this is a mindbogglingly stupid generalisation, but I really tried. Then I tried again and still just never found anything that I liked. Eventually I kinda got into Seijun Suzuki and movies like Branded To Kill (1967) and Tokyo Drifter (1966), but I'm not sure if I actually liked them back then or if it was because Jim Jarmusch told me I should.

Anyway...at some point, without the influence of Mr Jarmusch or anyone else, I discovered Kaneto Shindo and his incredible Onibaba (1964) and Kuroneko (1968). These two films completely blew my mind at the time, in a way that no other Japanese film had ever done. So, a whole new world of cinema opened up to me. Eventually I came across the 'Pinky Violence' genre...and I was sold. There were some incredible films made under this vague blanket description. And in general, Japanese indie cinema in the 70's was fucking incredible...a great mish-mash of horror, martial arts, sex and violence that crossed borders we hadn't even dreamt of yet in the West. And it wasn't even scrappily put together, like so many American 70's sex/exploitation movies. The Japanese ones often looked absolutely INCREDIBLE.

School Of The Holy Beast
Directed by: Noribumi Suzuki
Starring: Yumi Takigawa, Emiko Yamauchi, Ryouko Ima

OK...School Of The Holy Beast. An mind-boggling mix of sex, violence and religious imagery, as well as absolutely stunning to look at. The following review/run-through, contains some mild images of violence and nudity, so read on at your own risk...