Jess Franco 70s Sexploitation

[ChicGandil Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close ChicGandil]

So if you didn't count his horror-based movies or WIP films, what are Franco's best or most significant sexploitation efforts? Some of the ones I figure I need to watch are:

Eugenie: The Story Of Her Journey Into Perversion
Nightmares Come At Night
Sinner: The Secret Diary Of A Nymphomaniac
Hot Nights Of Linda
Marquise De Sade aka Doriana Grey
Slaves

It looks like The Devil Came From Akasawa is more spy or espionage-based with less emphasis on the sexploitation elements, but I'm uncertain...

Anyway, are the titles listed prime starting points? How do they rank? Am I missing anything major? (Seeing how sprawling his filmography is, I obviously am - but just trying to orient myself with some of his more established work in this vein).

[Marshall Crist Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Marshall Crist]

Sinner may be my favorite Franco.

[ChicGandil Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close ChicGandil]

Cool. I haven't heard or read anything less than positive about Sinner.

Looks like I need to add Downtown to that list as well. Not sure I can get by the jazz numbers in The Other Side Of The Mirror though.

[Randy G Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Randy G]

A lot of his best work was in sexploitation, Eugenie: Her Story..., Sinner, Cries of Pleasure, Macumba Sexual and Night has a Thousand Pleasures

[Dom D Spoon! Find all posts View Profile Close Dom D]

So if you didn't count his horror-based movies or WIP films, what are Franco's best or most significant sexploitation efforts? Some of the ones I figure I need to watch are:

Eugenie: The Story Of Her Journey Into Perversion
Nightmares Come At Night
Sinner: The Secret Diary Of A Nymphomaniac
Hot Nights Of Linda
Marquise De Sade aka Doriana Grey
Slaves

It looks like The Devil Came From Akasawa is more spy or espionage-based with less emphasis on the sexploitation elements, but I'm uncertain...

Anyway, are the titles listed prime starting points? How do they rank? Am I missing anything major? (Seeing how sprawling his filmography is, I obviously am - but just trying to orient myself with some of his more established work in this vein).

Eugenie is Franco's own favourite and I would agree with him. Nightmares Come At Night is a mess. Looks like a film pieced together from other films. Sinner is fine. I didn't get through Doriana Grey. Didn't like it but I think it is highly thought of. Never seen Slaves.

[Johan Iversen Member Find all posts View Profile Close Johan Iversen]

Good films indeed on that list.
I even like Nightmares Come At Night, but that is maybe not a good starting point for getting into Franco.

You should also check out :
Eugenie De Sade
How to Seduce a Virgin
Countess Perverse

A Virgin Among The Living Dead, Exorcism and Lorna The Exorcist all have horror elements in them, but are really good movies from the same period.

If you enjoy his 70's sexploitation pictures you should also venture into his early 80's productions.
Less budget, but very Franco.

[Randy G Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Randy G]

How to Seduce a Virgin and Virgin Among the Living Dead are excellent. If we're including those with supernatural or sf elements I'm a big fan of Shining Sex.

I wonder what people make of Sinfonia Erotica? I want to pick up House of Women and I'm wondering what other Franco add to the order.

[BW Haggar Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close BW Haggar]

I wonder what people make of Sinfonia Erotica? I want to pick up House of Women and I'm wondering what other Franco add to the order.

I really enjoyed 'Sinfonia Erotica'.

Here's some blather about it I just dug up from my blog, written shortly after the blu-ray came out in 2018:

Given that period settings and gothic atmos often seem to have functioned as anathema to Jess Franco’s modernist / improvisational approach to filmmaking, it’s a surprise to find that this Victorian stately home-set caper – complete with formal attire, horse-drawn coaches and classical music cues - turns out to be one of the most inventive & rewarding pictures to emerge from his second golden era in the early 1980s.

Having recently severed his ties with Erwin C. Dietrich’s Ascot/Elite organisation, Franco here takes full advantage of his new creative freedom to instigate a disorientating nightmare of mirror shots, reflecting glasses, transparent draperies and blinding, unfiltered sunlight, transforming almost every shot into a rulebook-shredding celebration of effervescent photographic mayhem.

Though the plot-line here is a familiar mash-up of quasi-Sadean hi-jinks, the sexual content is relatively restrained (despite featuring one of the only male/male sex scenes in the entire Franco canon), allowing Lina Romay to convey a sense of mental collapse and spiritual dissolution in a manner not entirely expressed through displays of naked writhing.

Conveying a touch of the same bleak, dehumanised dread common to much of Franco’s best work, ‘Sinfonio Erotica’ seems to some degree like a shot at a more elegant / mainstream-acceptable project for Jess and Lina after a few years spent wallowing in the scummier depths of exploitation – and for my money it succeeds pretty well in this regard, momentarily trespassing into territory more commonly trod by the likes of Polanski or Borowczyk, whilst still revelling in a brand of psychedelic Victoriana that is all Franco's own.