Eugenie... the Story of Her Journey Into Perversion (1970)
After a second viewing Eugenie has clambered it's way into my top 3 Jess Franco films. Made in collaboration with Harry Allan Towers,(Don't expect the typical tame, globe trotting affair of which many Towers films are famed for), Eugenie is something else indeed. Although it doesn't indulge itself in the usual Franco excesses of zooms into genitalia it is rather more risque than any other Towers produced film.
Based on the works of the Marquis de Sade, Eugenie is a sado sexual piece of erotica starring Marie Liljedahl as the young Eugenie, left at the island home of Madame Saint Ange (Maria Rohm) and her deranged stepbrother (as played in typically creepy style by the flat haired Jack Taylor), by her father, Franco regular Paul Muller.
Once there Eugenie is seduced by St Ange - The gorgeous Maria Rohm has never been more undressed or kinkier than she is here - and then by Taylor before engaging in a threesome as things really take a turn for the weird when Christopher Lee and a bunch of oddballs enter and watch as the threesome turns into S&M as Eugenie is whipped with a leather strap and what appears to be a mace. The film operates from then on in a semi dream like state with mesmerizing music from Bruno Nicolai and Franco toying with red light filters swirling round the viewers head like a hallucinogenic sexual experiment with Liljedahl and Rohm at the centre of it. Happy days!
|