Paula-Paula: An Audiovisual Experience (2010)
** (out of 4)
A new decade is upon us and Spanish filmmaker Jess Franco is back with a new project. The film, according to the credits, is a version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and starts off with Paula (Carmen Montes) being questioned by a Detective (Lina Romay) for the murder of her friend Paula (Paula Davis). Franco has made nearly two-hundred films in his career (probably a lot more if you count the various alternate versions) but I think it might be fair to say that this one here contains one of his smallest budgets. There are a few lines of dialogue and everything else was probably shot in one or two rooms with only three cast members and Franco doing most of the technical stuff. Even Romay only appears for a total of three-minutes so we've pretty much got very little here. In the promotional stuff the film was being called something original and unlike anything we've seen from Franco. I'd say this isn't true as the film really reminded me of a lot of those One-Shot productions where we have very little story and just long stretches of various women doing strange dances or other things. Here, the film runs a brief 66-minutes and we have an opening, a closing and everything in the middle is pretty much the two ladies making out. As with the One-Shot films, the visuals here have distorted colors, morphed cinematography and other strange things going on so again, we've seen this stuff before. I think what does set this film apart is that the visuals are certainly not the most important thing as that there belongs to the music score and this here is what was most impressive. The score jumps all over the place from Jazz to Rock to some weird, funky Country-like stuff but it's extremely catchy and is clearly the best thing about the film. As far as the cast goes, the two females are fair but nothing overly special and Romay doesn't get enough to do.
