The Girl From Rio - Jess Franco

Seen for the first time in January 2013.

I didn't know that I was going to be watching a Jess Franco film until I saw his name in the opening credits. This changed my expectations considerably, though perhaps it ought not to have, as "The Girl From Rio" is at the conventional end of the Franco spectrum without also being at the positive end of the qualitative spectrum. Though Franco's imprint is subtle, it is still definitely there.

Evidently this is an adaption of a Sax Rohmer story, about a sex-crazed villainess who wants to enslave all men. Like "Barbarella," it's more of a b-movie than any kind of exploitation movie - if we can draw a distinction between the two as a matter of genre than as a matter of production and marketing. Also, like "Barbarella," it's kind of boring.

The qualities that make a Franco film distinctive are somewhat lacking here. It's sensual without being smutty.   There's no surrealism, nor any obvious incompetence. A reasonable amount of effort seems to have gone into making it. It is, to put it plainly, a very conventional bad movie that one could easily imagine leaving an audience of tasteful middle class adults bored yet not ashamed. This is not the sort of film that Franco is known for. At his best, he would leave that same audience either scandalized and corrupted or astonished that a movie that bad had ever been made.

Nonetheless, little touches bear the Franco imprint, e.g. awkward dubbed dialogue, an incoherent twist, etc. Franco is a frustrating film-maker. What makes him distinctive is hard to pin down, and his oeuvre is so vast and he's worked in so many different genres and styles with varieties of budgets and seeming effort on his part. A person is probably a lot better off if they dismiss him casually before they find themselves corrupted by one of his gems and find themselves wading in and sifting through more and more of his work in an effort to duplicate that initial experience. Though sometimes one is rewarded by finding another gem. Just not in this case. Grade C.