Linda

Apparently I did, but I shouldn't have expected a movie similar to Vampyros Lesbos. I bought this movie on DVD from a Dutch company called Japan Shock who never failed to deliver good solid trash from Asia and Italy and I was yet to be disappointed. This one comes close.

It's very hard to distinguish this as a Franco movie. I know that he made a lot of movies (182 according to the IMDb listing) and of course not all can be masterpieces, but this one is not very different from most German late '70s/early '80s softporno flicks, the ones they show late saturday night on cable television.

There were some moments that reminded me of older Franco movies. There were a couple of scenes where naked women were involved in sado-erotic performances with audiences watching - which, believe it or not, is a Franco trademark - and there is a climax (!) involving scorpions, an animal Franco seems to feel very related to.

I missed the completely useless zooms he is famous for though, and for once they'd have been completely in place.

Overall, if you like beautiful naked German girls making love, getting whipped and being tortured; if you like bad English overdubbing that goes as far as people not opening their mouth while they are talking; if you like poor editing, bad camerawork, lousy acting and the weakest plot ever, then this is the movie for you.

Well, it's 1980 and prolific Spanish film director and probable king of sleazy cinema Jess Franco fills 80 minutes of screen time with nudity, frolics, torture and riotous sexual activity - all accompanied by an occasionally inappropriate score from Gerhard Heinz. Inappropriate because the music is jazzy, light, disco-froth throughout, which is fine, but hardly conducive to the occasionally dark moments.

For a film that was seemingly designed to be viewed once by gentlemen in raincoats in darkened cinemas, it is probably redundant to suggest that the tone is all over the place. I mean, who cares? If the film were made today, we would be invited to feel the horror and indignity of the various females whose bodies are used purely for show or as a marketing device. Here, however, no other consideration is given other than the spectacle of flesh and (occasionally uninvited) sex. And yet with lines like "I'll give you so much at once, you won't be able to take it," "I'm almost a virgin" and "You're the wildest, most desirable witch in the world," there's a through-line of camp fun on display that reminds us that Franco knows exactly the kind of film he is delivering.

The various actors and bodies on display invariably melt into one, and it is difficult to distinguish between then. The styles and fashions from the late 1970s bleeds into everything here, and it is just as well we have recognisable faces like Katja Bienart (who only features briefly) and Antonio Mayans (who is far and away the best actor here) who stand out from the crowd. Ursula Buchfellner as Betsy and Raquel Evans as Sheila are also of note. Enthusiastic though the other performers are, it makes me realise how much I miss the idiosyncratic charms of a Lina Romay or Anne Libert.

'A journey into a tropical sex paradise', as the trailer tags this, might be over-estimating things, but ultimately 'Linda' is a fairly light and frothy porn-laced drama that has no pretensions whatsoever. My score is 6 out of 10.

Jess Franco made a lot of films - ninety percent of them terrible, but there's a few gems littered around his filmography too. I would hardly call Story of Linda a 'gem' - but by Franco standards, it's certainly above average and while it's strange, messy and pointless; it's not actually all that bad for what it is. The Story of Linda is a sleazy porno outing that mostly takes place inside a high class brothel. The brothel is owned by Sheila, who also owns a hotel where Betsy works. The film kicks off properly when Betsy's sister Linda is kidnapped and forced to work at the brothel. The plot is not great by any means and the way that Franco tries to string together multiple plot elements only serves in making things more confusing. Personally I didn't tune into this film for a great plot; and on the sex and sleaze side of things at least; Story of Linda doesn't disappoint. There are plenty of beautiful babes and none of them seem to mind taking their clothes. There isn't a great deal of sex in the movie however, and personally I'd say that's a good thing as it gives the film more time to concentrate on the sleazy brothel itself, which is the best thing about the film. It's obvious that this film was put together without much love or attention, but it only runs for eighty minutes and the film delivers what most people will be wanting/expecting in those minutes. I can't really recommend this film; but Franco has certainly done a lot worse.

I saw this movie over the internet so the streaming video quality left a lot to be desired; still I think I got a pretty good idea of it. It was one of the last movies Franco made before he and Lina Romay dove headfirst into the Spanish hardcore porno industry, not emerging until the late 90's to do a bunch of crappy shot-on-video "comeback" projects with American scream queens and fanboys that they'd obviously met at international horror conventions. Personally, I always felt Franco's career had been in a long, slow decline since the early 70's when Soledad Miranda died. This movie, only marginally better than the aforementioned hardcore and SOV flicks, is yet more evidence of that.

Even for a Franco film, it's pretty plot less taking place at some seaside brothel where beautiful women are held as sex slaves and forced to do various erotic performances for the jaded European clientèle. "Linda" is actually the younger sister of one of the performers and more of a secondary character. She flees her boarding school ostensibly to rescue her sister, but stops at a friend's house for some reason where she falls in love with a friend's brother and takes time to frolic in the surf with him while her sister's life is in imminent danger. It really seems like two different movies (both of which are pretty boring) until the end when everything comes together in a pretty unsatisfying denouement.

Linda is played by Katja Bienert, one of strangest actresses Franco ever worked with. As slimy as it is when directors like Larry Clark cast twenty-year-old actresses that look fourteen, it at least makes more sense than casting someone like Bienert who easily looks twenty, but was only fourteen at the time! (I originally thought the IMDb info. that she was born in 1966 was a mistake, but the real actress recently wrote a letter to "Video Watchdog" magazine confirming that she really was that young). For what it's worth Franco keeps her out of the graphic sex scenes here, but her character is so superfluous to the whole story I don't why she was in the movie at all (let alone the title character). All the other characters, including the older sister, are pretty attractive but are obviously German sex performers rather than actors. I definitely wouldn't recommend buying this no doubt hard-to-find title even if you're a Franco fan, but it's worth watching over the internet I guess.