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The slasher according to Jesús Franco—the horrors of early Eighties disco are surpassed only by the Mickey Mouse mask that conceals a disfigured profile. "What good is a sign if I can't understand it?" The setting is the "International Youth-Club Boarding School of Languages," which has to be a joke on the dubbing. The institution mixes vaguely Moroccan architecture with cut-rate bungalows, an ogress in a wheelchair (María Rubio) runs it, hordes of Teutonic babes attend it. The Contessa's hamburger-faced nephew (Alexander Waechter) comes home from the psycho ward and takes to spying on the heroine (Olivia Pascal), his sister (Nadja Gerganoff) refuses to resume their chummy bond until some coeds get skewered. "If we could only get rid of everybody around us..." The Spanish spoof of American gore is more pronounced than in Simón's Pieces, stock shocks (fogged-up mirror, jumping cat, falling styrofoam boulder) alternated with kinky juxtapositions (the tip of a nipple on the tip of a knife). The uproarious showstopper is a reworking of the old maiden-tied-to-railroad-tracks routine, only this time she cheerfully goes along with the black-gloved Snidely Whiplash as the gargantuan rotary saw buzzes toward her neck: "It's a little perverse, but I'll try anything!" The ensuing decapitated mannequin would be included in the blood flood that opens Matador, though it's the obsessive liebestod whipped by Franco in the middle of a chintzy shocker that Almodóvar most clearly remembers. With Peter Exacoustos, Jasmin Losensky, Corinna Drews, Ann-Beate Engelke, and Christoph Moosbrugger.
--- Fernando F. Croce |