PHENOMENALITY: (1) *uncanny,* (2) *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*
Defenders of the Spanish director Jesus Franco have sometimes championed the “oneiric” quality of certain films. I wouldn’t deny that a few of his horror-films capture this quality, however erratically. But as far as I can tell, Franco had no similar feel for the adventure-genres. Not unlike Joseph Losey on MODESTY BLAISE, Franco shows a basic contempt for the genres by simply filming a lot of exotic locations while his actors walk around spouting inane dialogue.
SADIST EROTICA and KISS ME MONSTER were shot back-to-back with two starlets, Rosanna Yanni and Janine Reynaud, playing a couple of sprightly lady detectives, sometimes called “the Red Lips.” Following a very loose approximation of the hardboiled genre, there’s no real detection here. Either the girls bop around to clubs, where their suspects eagerly seek them out, or people get murdered on their doorstep and furnish some vague clue to follow.
There’s not much to choose from either flick, though SADIST EROTICA is a little more organized in terms of Franco recycling his influences—a henchman named Morpho (after the one in Franco’s breakout film AWFUL DOCTOR ORLOFF), or having Reynaud dress up in a Diabolik-like outfit for nearly no reason. The opponent in this one is a mad sculptor who kills women and encases them in plaster. KISS ME MONSTER pits the lady dicks against a cult of sexy girls who (I think) are trying to steal a formula that makes zombies from another cult of masked men. I watched these things twice, and I think they made even less sense the second time through.
It’s almost hard to term these flicks “combative,” since the girls never get in a real rough-and-tumble fight. But they both know how to shoot down evildoers, and their favorite schtick is to have one of them kiss up to some malcontent while the other missy karate-chops him from behind, so I guess they qualify. If a viewer ever wanted to see what the Matt Helm films would look like if they were made for no money, here’s the answer to that question.
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