A fine bit of trippy erotica

Red-Barracuda

Venus in Furs is arguably the best film prolific Spanish cult director Jess Franco ever made. It was one he released in his late 1960's period when he had noticeably more budget at his disposal and he was able to hire actors of the calibre of Klaus Kinski. The reason this film is so high up quality-wise in Franco's filmography though is that it combines this higher budget with many of the personal facets that would go on to make some of his later work so interesting. Essentially he became something of an auteur of erotica and in this flick he shows he knew how to do it well. Sexploitation was a genre that Franco would contribute dozens of films to but this is one of the ones where he took a lot more care.

The story-line is about a jazz musician who finds the body of a beautiful dead woman washed up on the shore of a beach; she subsequently appears to him from beyond the grave and carries out a series of deadly revenges on the three individuals who killed her. To be honest though, the story-line isn't terribly important; it's more a means of taking us from A to B. What it serves to do is allow for Franco to indulge in arty cinematic devices such as colour filters, slow-motion, strange camera angles and of course copious zooms; while at the same time delivering the requisite erotic content. The latter is of a pretty classy calibre though, helped massively by the presence of the rather gorgeous Maria Rohm as the title character. Franco really photographs all scenes with her very well and her revenge scenes in particular are strikingly effective.

Despite the title, this film only has a passing relevance to the famous 1870 Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch novel. The only connections seem to be that the title character is called Wanda and she is fond of wearing furs. The Italian director Massimo Dallamano made a direct adaption of the book – also called Venus in Furs and also released in 1969 - and it too is well worth seeking out. Franco's film was basically re-titled to surf the popularity that novel had at the time. Amusingly, the film blares out the vocal line 'Venus in Furs will be smiling' every time Wanda deals with another of her tormentors. The music in general is a jazz score composed by Manfred Mann which adds a significant amount of atmosphere and mood and compliments things ideally. I have read in more than one review here that the sound in general is completely unsynchronised and that it's basically all voice-over – strangely, even though I have seen this film twice, I didn't even notice this. I can only account for that by the film being so successfully trippy that it didn't even register with me. At the end of the day, like all Franco, this is not a film for all tastes although it's definitely one of his more plot-oriented and user-friendly. Whatever the case, for Euro-cult enthusiasts it ticks a lot of boxes.

score 9/10

Red-Barracuda 25 November 2014

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw3130540/