Das Frauenhaus

Say what you like about old Jess, but he knew what he wanted from a film, and very often got it. Like with Blue Rita, barely enough budget to cover all the doors in tin foil or make the night club look very different from a waiting room, he got the girls, he got them to take off their clothes and he used lights and what props he had to make a ravishingly attractive piece of nonsense. Here is the most elegant of soft core movies that also includes the torture (albeit with green paint and promise/denial of sex) of gents in chains. Whole scenes are shot through fish tanks and although there is some sort of spy plot-line,it makes no sense so can be completely ignored.

Spain's premier perpetrator of permissively pulchritudinous peep-show perfidy unleashes yet another colourfully unexpurgated leer into the sublimely sinister, sinfully subversive sensual bacchanalia of the persuasively perky, delightfully depraved Blue Rita (Martine Fléty), and her scintillatingly perverse, serially sapphic, crank-yankingly lurid yen for malefic male bondage shenanigans, along with a terminally twisted, pant-wetting peccadillo for crudely administered, coitus-enhancing, limbic region-riling chemicals to insidiously inflame the increasingly demonic desires of the sensationally sadistic Rita's cruelly caged, lustfully-enraged male concubines!!! That most inventive Iberian instigator of psychedelically-inspired perversity is at his libido-igniting B-Movie breast with his Bourgeois sensibility baiting, bellicosely bonkers Blue movie boff-fest 'Das Frauenhaus' - why remain so boringly blue, when you can be 'Blue Rita'!

During the 70' Jess Franco made lots of exploitation films with different success. Blue Rita is one of Jess Frano's finest efforts, because of Franco's great cinematography with many colorful scenes and carefully created atmospheric sets. Many of the scenes have a psychedelic touch and the music score is great.

The storyline is kind of absurd, which should be expected by fans of Jesus Franco, involving soft erotic club performances combined with secret agency's and creative torture methods. Somehow the style feels like a combination of Succubus and Ilsa and the Wicked Warden, without the pseudo philosophy of Succubus, focusing on the atmosphere.

For me this feels like one of Franco's most inspired movies and belongs to his best efforts. The overall rating may be lowered because of the many soft erotic scenes and the hard-to-follow / incoherent storyline, but for those who seek great original atmosphere like only Jess Franco could, this is a must see. The German spoken version should be preferred.

"Blue Rita" is more or less what you'd expect from a Jess Franco film: very explicit - very kinky - very strange - very incoherent - very bad. The plot, as far as I could say, is about some Parisian strippers who double as secret agents: they kidnap enemy (whose enemy? Never mind) spies and use sexual torture methods to make them "talk". To give Franco credit, the production design is colorful and the cinematography is often striking. But the editing is incompetent and the pace is deadly. What puzzles me is how Franco convinced so many young women in his films to bare everything and be treated as pieces of meat by the camera, but I guess the men don't come off much better either. Still, if you just want to stare at naked women on the screen "Blue Rita" will do the job....but so will many other AND better films. (*1/2)

This film seems very much like a largely improvised affair to get from one soft-core nudity scene to the next. Some of the dialogue scenes, as one example, have the characters' mouths intentionally obscured, undoubtedly to maximize flexibility in dubbing in lines when that part of the script was actually written later on! The FX are also quite laughable, even for the time. Yet the whole experience has a strange allure to it partly due to the surreality of the semi comprehensible plot and partly due to some truly dazzling psychedelic visuals. The scenes in the jazzy strip club are just amazing, as is the costume design! The naked flesh on display is sumptuous.