The Hall of Infamy

With the caveat that I haven't seen the movie in question, I can maybe offer some context around his overall career. Around the early 70s, he greatly ramped up the number of movies he made in a given year. He would start making movies not just back to back, but sometimes multiple movies at the same time. From what I've seen of goods 60s work, there's a level of craftsmanship you'd expect from a standard studio product. But during the 70s his work started feeling looser, both on a technical level but also in terms of storytelling. You'll hear his work often described as dreamlike, and that approach to narrative definitely plays into this. He also tended to return to the same set of themes a lot, and it can help to view his movies in that context rather than just as individual movies. (Of course, he still made plenty of bad movies even with this lens applied, but you might get more out of them.)


He also switched producers a bunch of times, and you can see the overall atmosphere of his movies change as a result. I also get the sense that over time he was working with less and less money, and from everything I've heard by the 90s the cheapness fell below even normal standards of low budget horror. So I suspect that affected the craft of this particular movie.


Now, I only really became a fan last year when I watched a bunch of his movies somewhat closely together in the fall, but these are the ones I like best and think make a good case for the pleasures his movies offer.


Vampyros Lesbos
She Killed in Ecstasy
A Virgin Among the Living Dead
Doriana Gray
What a Honeymoon!

I watched a little of The Awful Dr. Orloff (1962) yesterday because, with Franco coming up so much I felt compelled to have something to provide some kind of comparison, and despite it not being a film that did well with critics I was still surprised at how good it was. It seemed like a film I could genuinely admire. I can't speak for all of it, but the first act is really composed in an interesting way, using all facets of filmmaking to provide atmosphere and thematic meaning. As far as falling low though, I can't conceive of any greater fall than that which befell everyone involved with Lust for Frankenstein.

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Orloff and Dr Z are definitely the best traditional films Franco made. And by that I mean they are legit good (at least better than decent), no qualifiers.


After that they get super sketchy and inconsistent. I don't think I've ventured much further than the early 80s, but I've only liked a small handful. Vampyros Lesbos, definitely. Maybe Succubus? It's hard to tell, since after awhile they all start to bleed into one giant lump of mood lighting and embarrassing eroticism.


Rollins is definitely better at this kind of thing. But I don't completely write Franco off.

I think shooting on film and the accompanying bigger budgets and crews force a kind of discipline that translates to sturdier filmmaking. You see it in vintage pornography, where the shift from film to the cheaper productions in the video era led to the overall craft in the genre completely falling apart, and sometimes in the case of individual directors over the period of a few years. (If I can use one especially illuminating example, Henri Pachard, a veteran director in the golden age, made a porno western called Showdown in 1985. This was shot on film. Not a great movie by any means, but shot nicely enough and made well enough. The next year he made Blame it on Ginger. Shot on video. Much cheaper and uglier looking. Total indifference to the mise en scene. Even the sense of how to frame a shot and when to cut had devolved. I'm sure it did the trick for interested parties, but the sense of actual filmmaking seemed to have disappeared.)


So I suspect something similar happened to Franco, exacerbated by the rate at which he making movies.

I'll add The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein to the list of Franco's that at least someone here enjoyed. It's presumably a very different movie than the one for this HoF. I can't remember a damn thing about it (like all of Franco's films), but I did turn on the beginning of it one night right before going to bed in the past month, and I was like, "I don't remember this at all - and it looks like it still rocks."


Either that or Virgin Among the Living Dead are probably my favorites of his that I've seen. Haven't seen Orloff or Dr Z though. I suspect they aren't what I'm looking for.


I think Virgin is the one that Strickland cited as being a cultural influence upon his making of The Duke of Burgundy.


I'll try to check.

ETA:
I think the BFI article visually looks familiar to me and is probably the one I read at the time.
I remember there's a prismatic refraction thing that happens at the beginning of Duke of Burgundy, that looked familiar from Franco's Jack the Ripper with Klaus Kinski (but very well might be in his other movies as well). I don't recall being super-big on that one. Reading the articles, I forgot Venus in Furs is often cited as one of his "big" ones. I still haven't seen it. I did pick it up at some point from KinoNow, so... "one day."

https://www.bfi.org.uk/lists/peter-s...ndy-influences

https://www.indiewire.com/2015/01/pe...dy-268006/amp/

My phone's browser really doesn't like something in the middle of that indiewire article.

I've seen 13 Francos so far and I liked a handful of them. A Virgin Among the Living Dead (1973), Eugenie De Sade (1973) and Nightmares Come at Night (1970) are my favourites of his work and I would recommend those three to anyone who wants to check him out.

That's the problem with making too many movies. If you don't need a big budget, it'll be flop after flop overtime. He even hated his own Devil Hunter movie.

i'm still yet to see any of Franco's work but i've had Justine on dvd forever lol. maybe i'll get around to that soon.

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Ah geez, I'd forgotten all about that. As I wrote my review, it just came spilling out, and I didn't refer to my notes - if I had, I'd have mentioned that scene where they all fire their automatic weapons and they make no noise at all. Completely silent. Not even a "pfft-pfft" so you can't even argue they have some kind of inbuilt silencers. An astonishing oversight.

Might as well start on these things....my God.

So let's get the Pros out of the way first. The poster isn't bad. The runtime is around 1hr13mins. This is including the brilliant iMovie effects of the opening credits and NOT including whatever the end credits ensue. I stopped the film rather quickly and even at 1.5x the speed....it was a slog to get through.

If someone had told me that this was a high school film project, I would believe them. I'd probably fail the kids involved in making the film, but I would still believe that this was of that quality. The lighting is literally, let's shine bright lights on people's faces. Everything comes off as flat. Second, the acting is atrocious. Even single person is waiting to say their lines in stiff fashion, nothing about anyone feels natural.

I laughed AT the film, maybe once or twice, then I became annoyed. I've seen these type of films before, but they were shot on film. The film gave the picture a sense of belonging. This does not. If this is a sign of things to come...I am in serious trouble.

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"A laugh can be a very powerful thing. Why, sometimes in life, it's the only weapon we have."

Suspect's Reviews

Think of the least funny film you've ever seen. Now multiply the pain and suffering you went through watching that by a million. That will give you a small sense of what I had to suffer while watching this Adam Sandler poop-fest.

Going Overboard was a film I would always see in the $5 Wal-Mart bin...rip-off. I remember a guy picking it up and his friend asking why the hell would he want that? His response was that he HAD to finish the collection. I'm assuming he is referring to his Adam Sandler collection, not movies that take place on a boat collection. I imagine what his thought process was watching the film. Does it rank among the best of Sandler's films? Is he the type of person that would put it over Sandler's more serious efforts? I wonder if that man is still alive today, or if he slit his wrists in an attempt to get away from this film. I'll never know.

I first watched this when a friend of mine made it the very first choice in our covid movie-watching parties. We would watch over the internet and have a discord chat going. We almost quit the group that very night.

Tedious. Boring. Insulting. Unfunny. Sluggish. Inane. Bad. No Good. Terrible. Pick any one of these words and it fits the description of the film, PERFECTLY.

Going Overboard is bad. I'm reading some reviews here and see some people chuckled here and there....I wanna be the lady who rings a bell in your face yelling SHAME...SHAME...SHAME...

If I had to suffer through this, then so do you.

*insert evil maniacal laugh here*

Please tell me this isn't another Themroc-esque scandal.

My heart wouldn't be able to take it if Going Overboard gets disqualified lol

I actually finished God's Not Dead in the same afternoon I started watching it, which I wasn't expecting to be able to do. I really thought this would be one of those "multiple viewings over multiple days" type situations.

I'll likely write something about it tomorrow, but I'm tempted to just post the page of notes I wrote while watching it, which is basically just my own riff commentary haha.

Themroc is better than every film I've seen in this Hall so far.

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I don't think anything here will get disqualified on the basis of it being too bad. After all, that's kind of the point to this Hall.

OK, someone's gonna have to explain this Themroc situation to me.

Themroc is better than a lot of the films that get nominated for the legitimate Hall of Fame

Someone said that they watched the film at a higher than normal playback speed, and given some of the complaints this person had about the quality of specific nominations, a few of us weren't 100% certain if they were joking or not.

I said that if they had in fact watched it in fast forward, that I personally thought it was a little disingenuous to the film and to the HoFs in general. We didn't have any rules about it one way or the other though, since I don't think it ever came up before. I mainly called attention to it so we could, as a group, decide what is and isn't permissible for future reference. It wasn't exactly a "scandal", but there was some drama involved and I didn't know what else to call it.

This here is kind of a weird situation though, because someone not being able to sit through a nomination at regular speed is technically a "good" thing for films in this particular Hall.

In case it's not clear, my comment on Suspect's review was just a joke about how horrible it would be if I had watched Going Overboard for nothing haha.

But it did remind me that maybe we make a rule regarding playback speeds for the regular HoFs in case it becomes an ongoing thing.