succubus
THE FLICKS: If it weren’t for Ed Wood’s overhyped oeuvre, Jess Franco would certainly go down as history’s most inept film director...and I mean that in the most positive way possible. Hand-in-hand with the clumsy staging, bad cuts, and even worse acting is an underlying charm that excuses most of his film’s faults. But what makes him even more interesting is that from time to time he shows that he actually could direct his way out of a paper bag – Venus in Furs being one example, and the newly released edition of Succubus (aka Necrominicon) being another. Obviously inspired by the non-conformist, non-linear cineastes of the French New Wave (in particular Godard), Franco turns in a psycho-sexual LSD trip set against a crazy jazz score. It’s not a horror film, it’s not exploitation. It’s an art film that ignores plot structure in favor of random dialogue and images; a salamander crawling on a woman’s skin, sex as seen through a fishbowl, and flashbacks within flashbacks filmed with a he...