With the French productions The Lustful Amazons (1973) and Les
gloutonnes, Jess Franco wrote and
directed two brazenly erotic takes on Italy’s own Hercules counterpart Maciste,
a recurring cinematic hero from the peplum genre with respectable origins
dating back to the silent film era, starting with Cabiria (1914). A different character altogether, Franco’s Maciste, played by Wal Davis, is more of a medieval
playboy, adventuring to new lands full of sex hungry Amazons, randy mythical
queens, and horny Atlanteans, saving the day, satisfying entire tribes, and
living to tell about it.
The Lustful
Amazons contains some of the most entertaining comedic sex scenes, with top
tier Franco babes Alice Arno, Kali Hansa, and Lina Romay,
that are quite arousing to watch, and they manage to keep an otherwise
underwhelming film lively enough to sit through with a minimal level of
enjoyment. On the other hand, the longer sex interludes in Les gloutonnes manage to drag down what is actually an intriguing
erotic fantasy/adventure film. The settings for some of the more detached porn
scenes, seemingly edited into the film, are dark and surreal (done with Franco’s tendency for up-close body
worship) but couldn’t be more unnecessarily drawn out, even in a Jess Franco film, where I’m usually
conditioned for such lengthy interludes.
If you haven’t noticed, female vampires in movies have
been a long-running theme I’ve enjoyed exploring with this blog. It’s an
appealing aspect of fiction to me, and I just can’t get away from the
archetypical idea of the vampiress: her gothic image, seductive power, hidden
feral side, and deadly sexuality. Some time ago, around the time I reviewed The Blood Spattered Bride, I finally
gave Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla a read and wasn’t too surprised
at realizing how much Carmilla’s influence is felt in a large number of cult
female vampire films. Although, there seems to have been a bit of a debate as
to whether or not the perceived erotic subtext in Le Fanu’s novella has been misinterpreted by non-Victorian readers,
yet many filmmakers have nonetheless taken the subtext at face value, taking
whatever supposed eroticism is there in the writing of the book out of
the implicit and into the explicit; and, for its time, Jess Franco’s Female Vampire
(a.k.a. La comtesse noire, Bare Breasted Countess, Erotikill, and
many more) has to be the most erotic lady vampire piece, even more
so for the XXX version Lüsterne Vampire Im
Spermarausch. (On the opposite end of the spectrum is perhaps, and also
recommended, Let’s Scare Jessica to
Death — a Carmilla influenced
movie that hardly features any eroticism).
Jess
Franco could film movies faster than I can write reviews for
them. His films can sometimes have an overwhelming low quality feel to them,
making them difficult to digest for the majority. The natural location shots,
haunting tone, memorable and well-chosen female actors (Franco definitely had an eye for female leads that just seemed to
resonate with the camera lens), and Franco’s
brand of bizarre surrealism and eroticism don’t seem to be enough to save the
films for many, but they are nonetheless a huge hit for others. Al otro lado del espejo contains all of
the aforementioned elements and yet has a higher-than-usual quality feel to it,
most likely due to the terrific acting and screen presence from its leading lady (Emma Cohen of Horror Rises from the Tomb and Night
of the Walking Dead) and a believable tragic story.
Jazz pianist/singer Ana (Cohen) is profoundly affected by her
father’s (Howard Vernon) suicide
shortly after her engagement. After calling off the wedding, Ana leaves her
homeland on Madeira Island only to undergo several failed relations when she
intermittently becomes hypnotically driven to kill any man that becomes close
to her.
It isn’t just enough to say that Ana is haunted by images of her dead
father in the mirror. She doesn’t just see him, but she finds herself at times in
the mirror, in Franco’s looking glass
world. It can also be viewed as Ana’s mental reflection on her emotional trauma.
The memory of her father’s suicide driven by his stubborn disapproval of her marrying and
leaving him is intertwined with Ana’s psyche, manifesting itself when she
murders any man that shows any sexual interest in her. Ana’s traumatization,
spurned the moment of her outcry into the mirror, yields a malediction that
could either be viewed as some sort of curse or spell from her father’s ghost
or played off as the result of a kind of posttraumatic stress disorder. If
taken at face value, the goose bumps inducing ending, made more dramatic with
church bells signifying the wedding that never was, reveals which one happens
to be the case.
Kali
Hansa, born Marisol
Hernández, sort of put a spell on me with her role as Tunika in Amando de Ossorio’s THE NIGHT OF THE
SORCERERS. I would have dreams that were kind of like my own imagined sequel to
the film, where, in a sickly state, I would travel to the African forest where
this film took place. Knowing my time was running short, due to some sort of
terminal illness, I would travel up a mountain and to a place where I knew I
would find Tunika, in her vampire form. Longing to end my suffering, I would
find her in a shallow moonlit river where she would welcome me, and through an
act of vampiric intercourse, she would make me like her, curing me, making me
immortal, and also inflicting her curse upon me.
Thus is the effect her
presence in THE NIGHT OF THE SORCERERS had on me. With her constantly lingering
in my mind, I eventually viewed several more films that she was in, sometimes
credited as Gaby Herman or Kali Hansen. I was slightly saddened to find out
that she was usually just a supporting/minor character and had an acting career
that didn’t really take off, and it seemed to have ended circa 1976 after
shooting a hardcore porno for Jess Franco, WHITE SKIN BLACK THIGHS and an erotic comedy, GIRLS IN THE NIGHT TRAFFIC. Despite usually having small roles and frequently
being killed off, she visually stood out the most amongst other characters and gave off an ‘Oh-wow, who’s-that?’
impression. She apparently vanished after filming her last movie. She is from Cuba and was the girlfriend of Alberto Dalbes.
(Rumor bin: According to Jess Franco she moved back to Cuba to use her exceptional strength to fight against Fidel Castro!!!)
For this tribute to Kali Hansa, and possibly a new series for AT
THE MANSION OF MADNESS (Venomous Vixens), I’ve organized a few thoughts and
images from a selection of some of her films.
