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It would be Jesús Franco, wouldn't it, who recomposes Rumpelstiltskin into a demonic orgasm with a Marlene Dietrich replica. She (Pamela Stanford) dons massive cyan eyeshadow and curly blonde wig, multiplies the chips at the casino for a struggling businessman (Guy Delorme), demands his first-born child in exchange. He dismisses the supernatural, "Faust was just the creation of an author's mind," yet there she is, "like some irresistible enchantress out of the pages of a fairytale." On the edge of womanhood, his daughter (Lina Romay) receives the Sapphic succubus while his wife (Jacqueline Laurent) is afflicted with a hellish literalization of Joyce Mansour's "fièvre ton sexe est un crabe." The labyrinth of the senses, two or three rooms studded with pubic tufts plus a hotel discotheque scored by André Bénichou's doleful guitar. (The outside world consists of a lemon grove behind the opening credits, and La Grande-Motte's futuristic slanted balconies viewed from a moving taxi.) The Vampyros Lesbos theme has the bedeviled assistant (Catherine Lafferière) scratching at asylum walls in stockings but sans culottes, the director plays the befuddled doctor. "Who controls you?" The barren and the moist, possession and transference, the suckled nipple and the bloodied dildo. Courbet and Modigliani are the modalities, and Howard Vernon is at hand to illustrate the surrealism at play by turning a sea conch into brass knuckles. "You deserve your punishment. Condemned to the void forever." The upshot is Romay in bed naked but for knee-high boots and dagger, eyes flashing and legs spread and mouth agape—Franco's blur of ecstasy and madness in its final form, virtually a lost segment from Dwoskin's Central Bazaar. With Richard Bigotini, Raymond Hardy, and Caroline Rivière.
--- Fernando F. Croce |