The Demons
I’m not sure when I last saw this Jess Franco film, but it must have been many years ago because when watching this BD from Nucleus Films, I was struggling to remember any of the plot details or what was going to happen later in the film.
As with most period ‘nunsploitation’ films, this moves between scenes of torture and those with a more erotic (I use the word advisedly because, and it might just be me, there’s not much here I found titillating). It’s difficult to watch this and judge it on its own merits because of its similarities to Ken Russell’s The Devils, a superior film in every respect, but there is something fascinating about the historical aspects of how and why sexually repressed nuns were thought to be possessed by Demons and horrendously tortured.
I think the reason why Russell’s film is so brilliant is because he avoided the temptation to have a third of the running time comprised of naked women writhing on beds while masturbating. It’s far more interesting to look at the corruption and hypocrisy in the Church which, in the same way as they dealt with the medical knowledge, permitted overt sexuality from men but used it as a way to subjugate and punish women. It is interesting to note that though this story is mostly concerned with the Spanish Inquisition, one of the main characters is Lord Justice Jeffries, the infamous ‘Hanging Judge’, whose bloody jurisdiction never extended beyond England!
The picture quality on this disc is superb, as is the French PCM track. I sampled the lossless DTS-HD Master Audio one, but found it was not as focused or clean as the uncompressed option. If you like the film, this is a really good release.
Adult Fairy Tales
Because I enjoyed the 88 Films DVD release of this film, an oddity from Full Moon, I upgraded to the Blu-ray release some time ago but it was only this week when I decided to watch it.
Taking all the characters from the classic fairy tales (it was released in the US without the word Adult and the opening has the title Fairy Tales), this follows a prince who, now 21 years old, most find a woman and produce an heir or forfeit his kingdom. What follows is, for the want of a better word, a quest as the Prince encounters Little Bo Peep, Jill (and a clearly homosexual Jack), Snow White and a host of others as the action moves between what the Prince is doing and the old woman’s shoe, a house where almost anything goes!
This is, as I said earlier, an oddity with some scenes which wouldn’t be out of place in the Russ Meyer film and others which have work somehow because of their offbeat humour. It’s a film from the brain of Charlie Band and the credits are notable because the director of photography was none other than Daniel Pearl, the cinematographer best known for his work on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre! It’s not the greatest film I’ve ever seen, but the humour somehow works and it could be because I’m a fan of Russ Meyer’s films and others from Charlie Band but I find this really enjoyable and will probably return to it in the not too distant future.
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