As a Jess Franco fan, I consider She Killed in Ecstasy to perhaps be the film which best summarizes his triumphs as a director--to date, I am unsure which film best represents his failings. It has everything that fits the unique feel that Franco brought to the table as a director, being a distinct vision of trashy weirdness that touches on the tropes and film mechanics which Franco returned to nearly obsessively. Furthermore, it also stars not only Franco himself, but his muse Soledad Miranda and the Awful Dr. Orlof in person, Howard Vernon.
Soledad Miranda plays a young woman (never named) who ends up marrying Dr. Johnson, an ambitious medical researcher who wants to create people with greater disease immunity via in-utero hormone stimulations. For this unethical action, the Medical Council orders him stripped of his license to practice and his experiments destroyed. This drives Johnson insane and he eventually kills himself with a straight razor. Mrs. Johnson sets out for revenge against the four scientists (whose ranks include both Howard Vernon and Jess Franco) whom she holds responsible for her husband's death. She seduces and kidnaps all of them, subjecting them to gruesome deaths, until at last she joins her husband in whatever afterlife awaits him.
Pretty straightforward. There is little pretense in what is transpiring here, but that is where Franco soars. This movie has a fairly high amount of subtext, which actually gets a chance to remain as subtext. The villains of this film--the doctors who destroy Johnson's life--are depicted as what we would identify today as arch-conservatives. They are opposed to hippies, drugs, prostitution, and, as it happens, tampering with human embryos. Now their problems with Johnson's experiments are not that they, y'know, could be perceived as being what the Nazis wanted, but that they kill fetuses. What's more, they say this is not only a medical crime, but also a blasphemy as well. Indeed there's definitely a religious framing to the doctors' motivations, as, while they're not specified to be Christian, they definitely have some sort of religious beliefs which motivate their medical practices. It's easy to read this movie through a feminist, pro-choice lens, a rejection of a social order which values the lives or "lives" of fetuses over those of suffering adults and children. Some of Howard Vernon's talks about the lives of hippies, and "social orders to which [one] must conform," seem to be a genuine meditation on Franco's behalf on the idea of changing social mores and the revealed hypocrisy of the so-called moral guardians in the tide of transformation that took place in the late '60s. In a somewhat predictable twist, Howard Vernon, the most outspoken of the group on matters of ethics, is revealed to be a masochist who hates kissing and other traditional expressions of sexuality--what would have passed as a shortcut "pervert" in the '70s. What's more, the overzealousness of Johnson's opponents mirrors the violence committed by abortion opponents in real life; after all, it doesn't seem very professional scientifically to wreck a rival's lab and assault said rival's wife. That comes from a place of emotion, not cold ethics.
I still don't know how I feel about the idea of in-utero hormone manipulation, however, which is what's at stake here even if it seems to stand in for abortion. Perhaps that's where my generation will be seen as dinosaurs--as science marches on it may indeed be possible to eradicate genetic diseases and birth defects in the womb, and that may be embraced by whoever comes next as a progressive ideal. I'm wary again because to me it recalls eugenics, and indeed I can easily see those with the means to do creating children who are a step beyond, who have unfair physical advantages that will allow them to be born doped athletes, as it were. I also worry about the drugs used being unsafe and causing more harm to the children than good in the long-term, because there's a habit in the United States of refusing to do or ignoring extant research when it comes to the drug industry. I think most significantly, however, I am concerned about our primitive notions of what constitutes a "defect" in regards to how this practice could be applied--that is to say if we can detect autism in the womb, or even homosexuality, there would certainly be parents who would want those traits eradicated, and there would be plenty of doctors willing to do so. In a broader sense this would also affect the rights to bodily independence for intersex individuals as well, who already face nonconsensual "normalizing" surgeries in infancy almost universally. Technology should not serve to narrow diversity and I believe that autistic, queer, and intersex identities and bodies are vital to our society.
But anyway. Now that I've guaranteed some angry messages sent my way, let's talk about how this is a Jess Franco movie. The Franco identity is irrevocably linked to the trash aesthetic. Soledad Miranda shows up with metal pasties that have a third pasty dangling as a pendant between them. Everyone sounds like they recorded their lines in a bathtub or swimming pool, even when the characters are in small rooms or outside. The zoom lens, as ever, is abused, with nary a single shot in the whole not featuring some sort of zoom. (I wonder what the script for this looked like.) Our leads live in a creepy artsy house that makes no sense. There are pretentious poetic divergences that mean absolutely nothing. And of course, there are plenty of characters twitching and sweating in beds as disembodied voices mock them. In this case, Dr. Johnson spends a rather sizable chunk of the movie hearing the Medical Council call him "Ein Tier" (an animal) over and over and over and over again. It's one of the most hilarious things I've ever seen, or rather heard. It's gotten to the point now where whenever I see a movie where someone accuses someone of being a murderer or some such, I always have to join in their shouting with, "Ein Tier! Ein Tier! Ein Tier! Ein Tier!"
Let's talk about Howard Vernon.
First of all, his voice. I am now sure that Vernon did his own dialogue for this one, because it sounds like him from interviews and other movies where he speaks naturally, like Zombie Lake and Ogroff. This indicates to me that Vernon spoke German just as well as he did English, French, and Spanish. I really wish there was a biography of Howard Vernon available because little details like this fascinate me.
Speaking of details...
Howard
Vernon's
dick.
There's no getting around this one. I don't know who to look to in this case: Howard Vernon, for being willing to show his 57-year-old dick and balls on camera, or Jess Franco, for being able to convince a 57-year-old actor with at least some dignity to his name (he was in a Godard film, after all) to do a sex/murder scene that ends with him showing off his goods. Then he was able to do it again two years later for Countess Perverse. In this movie it becomes doubly incredible--in that I literally could not find it credible that I was seeing this--because this also features Vernon's character being castrated. To have both a favorite actor's junk in a film unexpectedly in addition to a castration scene not only rocketed this movie up onto the A-List for me but also made me severely question myself and whether or not I'll have an audience after including these details.
In all seriousness, it may sound like I'm body-shaming Vernon, poking mean-spirited fun at the body of a man just because said man happens to be aged. In truth, this scene did legitimately deepen my respect for Vernon, and sent me a vivid picture of the connection between Vernon and Jess Franco. Franco wanted to send his cast into the flames and Howard Vernon would follow him to the end. He was an actor true, dedicated to his craft, never turning in a performance he didn't put his heart into it. In truth a lot of my amusement over this comes from the fact that I may have horrified some of you who are familiar with Vernon and who never wanted to imagine that he had a nude scene, much less a full-frontal one. But here is the honest truth: if someone was in a Jess Franco movie, you can guarantee there is another Jess Franco movie where we see their junk. I'm legitimately surprised we didn't see Franco's own balls in this too.
Anyway. Like I said, She Killed in Ecstasy provides what is probably the Jess Franco experience. As we've seen, that's both for the better and for the worse. But of all of Franco's movies I've seen, this one is one of the most lively, and thus, one of the most traditionally entertaining. If you are willing to brave a whole lot of genitalia, this one will not leave you disappointed. I watched in ecstasy.
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