Kuhbeere Kinepiffle: Top Ten Jess Franco Films (with Contextualizing Introduction)

Aside from being the uncle of Javier Marias, probably the greatest European novelist of my lifetime and a heavy smoker who died at seventy of pneumonia shortly after surviving a COVID-19 infection by the skin of his teeth in 2022, the industrious and indefatigable low budget Euro gutter cinema iconoclast Jess/Jesús Franco is accorded by IMDb with having directed 204 films, most of which I suspect would fall into the gothic horror, sex comedy, and/or spacey freeform erotica genres. Google’s ever-accommodating AI tells me that there have been, according to “tracking data on Blu-ray.com,” 342 distinct Blu-ray releases of films by this widely beloved cult director. There can be no doubt that a hefty portion of those disks have special features showcasing the thoughts and eloquent meditations of gay English Franco aficionado and Nightmare USA author Stephen Thrower, who is definitely among the film specialists of our dodgy-ass era who I find most praiseworthy and personally likeable. Since he is indeed a confirmed gay man, I find it charming that Thrower enjoys watching ten minute scenes with no apparent presiding filmmaking logic in which nude women writhe like epileptics to the tune of modal piano jazz and comical overdubbed moans. Franco often did the music for his own films though usually under a pseudonym. When he started working in his native Spain again at the end of the 1970s, not long after the death of Francisco Franco the dictator (no relation), Jess found himself working with truly minuscule budgets, but that didn’t slow him down in the least. In fact, sometimes a producer would give him an absolutely piddling amount of money for a single picture and Jess would make two or even three movies without telling the producer. I believe that it always makes some sense to produce little lists of films because there are so many of them and so many things happening in this world all the time. It is helpful to put things down on paper so that you can organize your thoughts effectively. When a filmmaker has made something in the neighbourhood of 204 films, in such cases it might be truly helpful to have somebody who has seen a whole bunch of them lay out some faves in order to guide those just getting started toward getting themselves somewhat oriented.