Phollastía

Let's face it, Jess Franco is valuable. He's an intuitive, an oaf, an illiterate, an anti-intellectual. He's not like John Waters, who displays trailer trash. He IS trailer trash. He apparently does no planning for his movies and sort of makes them up as he goes, coming to work each day, using whoever shows up.

But his intuitions are so mystifyingly perfect sometimes. He is the genius who invented the superpositions we celebrate in "Rocky Horror," the well sculpted sleaze. But that perfection of narrative cinema — the insertion of something from one movie tradition into another in a way that shows mastery of both — is important because it seems to underpin much of what we see in today's Spanish-speaking filmmakers. They don't do sleaze, that's irrelevant. They superimpose, fold.

But Franco is a tough one to like. He's still making movies, over a hundred and fifty so far. Most of them have none of his magic in them and most of those, I think, weren't even made by him. That's because he usually doesn't even come to work, and his long time companion runs the show, making movies that feature herself. Its the Yoko Ono deal run amok.

Needless to say, she is trailer trash in the uninteresting sense, someone who believes vulvas are expressive. The films that appear from her have neither Romay or Franco's names on them instead one of the dozens of pseudonyms they've invented, here "Betty Carter."

I do recommend you spend time with Franco. There are a half dozen you probably must see and as with many filmmakers ignore what you see and watch how it is put together. But not this. Its made by the walking dead.

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

Phollastía (1987)

* (out of 4)

Spanish director Jess Franco's hardcore spoof of "Dynasty" is the second of two spoofs of popular American shows. The previous one, Falo Crest, at least had some nice humor in it but this one here is pure trash from start to finish. Franco has made some terrific erotic movies in his career but here he's just trying to be disgusting and he certainly does that. This film is rather hard to watch due to all the nasty stuff going on and I'm not talking about the sex scenes. There are plenty of hardcore sex scenes going on but it's pretty rough to enjoy any of them due to all the other stuff going on. I would go into details but I'd be kicked off this site if I mentioned just one of them. If you have to watch every Franco movie then that's your only excuse for tracking this one down. The score by Daniel White is the only good thing here.

Here comes another cult TV series parody from a crazed little spanish entertainer called Jesus Franco. Number one was Falo Crest, making fun of, of course, Falcon Crest. Now comes the time for Dynasty.

Kickin' off on an amusing note, the movie pushes the parody to a level where even the technical aspects are a mimic of the original series. All is well in the lusty family. Everyone screws secretly, until Jean Collins (Lina Romay) gets home and "screws" everything up, throw your hands in the air, get naked and procreate. Problem is that apart from Lina (who's still getting old), all the other actresses are painfully ugly - one even wears what looks like monster make-up !

Silly and a big laugh for Franco admirers, it ends with words of wisdom coming from miss Romay's nice and round lips : "In my family, we make good milk". Hilarious.