Hot Picks
|
|
|
Los Blues de la Calle Pop (Aventuras de Felipe Malboro, volumen 8)
Spain 1983
produced by Manacoa Films
directed by Jess Franco
starring Antonio Mayans (as Robert Foster), Lina Romay (as Candy Coster), Trino Trives, María del Mar Sánchez (as Mary Sad), José Llamas, Agustín García, Jess Franco, Juana de la Morena, Analía Ivars, Ricardo Palacios (voice)
written by Jess Franco (as David Khune), music by Jess Franco, Fernando García Morcillo
review by Mike Haberfelner
|
|
Mary Lucky (María del Mar Sánchez) hires world famous private eye
Felipe Malboro (Antonio Mayans) to find her boyfriend Macho Jim (José
Llamas) who has gone missing a few weeks back. She can't pay the rate he
demands, but is all to quick to suggest to pay the difference in sex. Now
Mary paints Macho Jim like a innocent saint, but when Felipe asks his
friend and informer bar pianist Sam Chesterfield (Jess Franco) about him,
he gets a whole other picture, that Macho Jim was a punk and drug pusher
who's in a relationship with stripper Butterfly (Lina Romay). And asking
too many questions, Felipe runs into a gang of punks lead by
flamenco-dancing and knife wielding Impassive Carter (Agustín García)
who give him a sound beating. But that's not to slow a world famous
detective like Felipe Malboro down any, and the next day he already
attends Butterfly's show, and even though he's ultimately chased away by
her rich admirer Saúl Winston (Trino Trives), he starts to put the case
together, and eventually finds out that Butterfly's actually Winston's
wife and Winston is the chief supplier of drugs to the region. Felipe
sneaks into Winston's home to have sex with Butterfly, and gets the whole
story: Macho Jim is both her lover and Winston's lover and wants to this
way take over the drug business. Of course this ends in disaster,
Butterfly eventually stabs Macho Jim to death, then is shot, and Felipe
thinks it was Winston, who later dies in a plane crash. Coming home,
Felipe finds Mary in his bed who insists on paying up, and confesses it
was actually her who shot Butterfly, and the whole case was actually just
a ruse to get her close to Butterfly, a rival from their teenage days. Of
course, after sex Mary's handed her just desserts ... Los
Blues de la Calle Pop is pretty much a comicbook come to life: The
movie tells a simplistic story made up from genre mainstays, full of
exaggerated characters, and blunt plottwists, and even many of the shot
compositions look more like comicbook panels than what you'd expect from a
movie. And all of this is what makes Los Blues de la Calle Pop
work, it's an hommage to cheap comicbooks rather than a genre film, and
this way director Jess Franco gets away with a lot, especially considering
the low budget he had. But what the film lacks in certain departments, the
director makes up in unusual, comicbooky camerawork, a healthy shot of
(self-)irony, and a very cool jazz score. Now it's far from the best the
man has ever done, but it shows his inventiveness and low budget ingenuity
and deserves at least more recognition than it presently gets. And by
the way, there are no Aventuras de Felipe Malboro 1 - 7, it's just
another of Franco's allusions to comicbooks.
|
|
|