This review contains mild spoilers.
After having such a positive reaction to
A Virgin Among the Living Dead recently, I decided to revisit
Vampyros Lesbos and
She Killed in Ecstasy. These are two West German-Spanish co-productions that Jess Franco did practically back-to-back, featuring some common cast members, including Soledad Miranda in the lead, as well as Ewa Stromberg, Paul Muller and Franco himself. They also both feature music by Manfred Hubler and Siegfried Schwab. As a result they very much play as companion pieces and are very easy to talk about together. When I'd watched both a few years ago, I'd enjoyed them enough, more so the former, but on a rewatch, I had a much stronger reaction. Gun to my head I still think
Vampyros Lesbos is the better movie, but the better qualities of
She Killed in Ecstasy felt a lot more immediate this time around, so I will perhaps dedicate just a little more space to discussing that one. (This will be a hybrid review, in case you're wondering.)
As I've stumbled across Franco's films over the years, I've found that the ones I've reacted to most strongly are the ones with strong central female presences, which is certainly the case with Miranda here. Both movies play to her seductive qualities, but the latter is grounded more firmly in her perspective and allows her an emotional range not present in the former film. In
Vampyros Lesbos, a loose riff on the Dracula story, she plays a predatory vampiric figure who casts a spell over the heroine played by Stromberg, while in the latter she preys on the members of a medical council who condemned the unorthodox research of her disgraced scientist husband. It's probably redundant to say this, but Miranda is more than credibly seductive in both movies, yet when filtered through Stromberg's perspective, she's a bit of a blank slate, the sense of mystery around her inner thoughts proving part of the allure. In the latter, the calculation in her seduction of her targets is more transparent as we share her perspective. She does a lot of the work with her eyes, which she deploys to the ends of steely obfuscation, desire and seduction, or hatred and intensity, as the situation requires. I understand up to that point she'd done mostly lighthearted films (and her donning of multiple wigs in
She Killed in Ecstasy feels like a reflection on her past as a performer), but her presence here has a penetrating, almost bracing effect. (Apparently Franco felt the same way, and planned on doing many more films with her, until her life was tragically cut short in a car accident.)
In my viewing of
A Virgin Among the Living Dead, I was struck by Franco's use of different performers, particularly for their appearance, and I think these films provide some interesting examples as well. I compare Vernon in
Virgin to his work in
Ecstasy, and while he's bug-eyed and weird looking in the former, he's maybe even a little handsome here, yet any implied virility is immediately undercut (quite literally) once Miranda goes to work on him. Certainly Stromberg benefits from the comparisons, playing victims of Miranda's seduction in
Vampyros Lesbos and
She Killed in Ecstasy, but as the heroine in one and a villain in the other. I'm even starting to grow on Franco as a performer, as his awareness of his limitations leads to some pretty interesting casting across the films.
Vampyros Lesbos has him seeking revenge against Miranda's character for driving his wife to insanity and providing another outlet for Franco's Sadean interests in his characters' torture of Miranda's victims.
She Killed in Ecstasy has him as a more central villain, and has its funniest moment, when he, as a notable uggo, makes disparaging comments about Miranda's appearance. Sir, have you looked in a mirror recently? (Franco seems aware of his lack of conventional handsomeness, as evidenced by an interview where he offers amusing anecdote about being compared to Yoda. I suppose there are worse
Star Wars characters to be likened to.)
Vampyros Lesbos is the more formally daring work, with its endless roving zooms dissolving the film's different scenes into one extended dreamscape, a recurring motif of water underlining the fluidity of the aesthetic approach. It's an appropriate one as the heroine is first haunted by the villain in her dreams, and the sensuous slide into the real world makes that attraction feel more urgent. If anything, the movie plods a bit in those brief moments when it pays lip service to plot and exposition (not surprisingly, these are the scenes when only dudes are present).
She Killed in Ecstasy is not quite as fluid overall, but perhaps a bit more seamless in progressing the plot, as it's structured around the cycle of revenge enacted by the heroine. Both films are erotically charged and Sadean-flavoured, but while the former has a dynamic of sexual dependency between the vampire and her victims, the latter makes the audience perhaps a bit more complicit in those elements, asking us to identify with the heroine as she commits a series of sadomasochistic murders. (Franco himself puts himself in the victim's chair for one of them, which I suppose is one of the advantages of being the director. If one must be murdered in a horror movie, there are worse ways to go out than at the hands of Soledad Miranda.)
The intensity of these scenes is contrasted with the use of the landscape and surrounding architecture, which like
Vampyros Lesbos gives the movie a thick veneer of exoticism, but perhaps is a little more belittling than the other film. What else to make of the heroine's house, which resembles a Tetris-like parody of the real thing? Or the way a cliff looms in the background while the villains futilely discuss their options for survival? The decor very much plays into these qualities as well. You'll notice that the least gripping sections of
Vampyros Lesbos take place in the banal interiors of the asylum, right when the focus shifts to the dudes. The movie stacks the deck in favour of scenes in Miranda's lair, trusting that we'd prefer to spend time with good looking ladies in a sexy, sleek manor rather than a bunch of lame-o dudes in boring wood-heavy rooms.
She Killed in Ecstasy frames Miranda against certain elements of the set design to enhance the spell she's casting on her victims, and gets one of its strangest images and biggest jolts when a character is smothered with a see-through plastic cushion.
And despite being a musical luddite, I feel compelled to dedicate a few words to the score. I've seen reviews deride the music as cliched and cheesy, and while it's true they're very much of their time, I don't think that's entirely a bad thing. We could all benefit from the occasional sitar twang or vaguely Krautrockish synthesizer drone, and whether or not it fits traditional ideas of "good" scoring (which frankly a lot of our most beloved horror soundtracks don't), the fact is that I've spent a non-zero time listening to some of these tracks outside of the films, which I think speaks to their enjoyability. Revisiting "Droge CX9" and "The Lion and the Cucumber" in their original context in
Vampyros Lesbos (and recycled in
She Killed in Ecstasy, which reuses a lot of the same music but has a few extra tracks of its own), I do think they provide the movies with an appropriate aural groove, and when they popped up on the soundtracks, I was immediately put in a good mood. These are movies I very much enjoyed spending time in again.
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