Jesús Franco: creator of erotic horrors who had a unique cinematic vision
▻http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/apr/04/jesus-franco-dies-82-unique-vision
Franco’s output beckons the curious with its sheer cumulative density; it’s not unusual for fans to say things like: “I’ve only seen 30 so far,” or, “I’ve seen a hundred but it’s not enough.” American critic Tim Lucas aced the trend with the mind-boggling statement: “You can’t see one Franco film until you’ve seen them all,” at which point most of you will probably back off and call the sanatorium. But he had a point. Franco’s work is best seen as a giant mosaic, a rippling borderless continuum, with individual films less important than the wider trends and currents passing through. Watching a single Franco film is like sipping a glass of water from a brimming lake; to really enjoy what he has to offer you have to throw yourself in. A cautious place to start would be a sober and elegant early work like The Awful Dr. Orlof (1962), a Gothic tale of illicit surgery starring the debonair Howard Vernon. More adventurous souls might prefer another medical-themed offering, The Diabolical Dr. Z (1965), an exuberant pulp horror flick co-written with Buñuel’s regular scriptwriter Jean-Claude Carrière. If you’re in the mood for something further out, there’s Necronomicon (1967), a hallucinatory infusion of art cinema head-games and reality-warping sadomasochism: at an early screening, the esteemed director Fritz Lang declared that it was, “the first erotic film I’ve seen all the way through because it’s a beautiful piece of cinema”.