Madame Villeblanche (Lina Romay) runs a nightclub/whorehouse which
employs exclusively lesbians with shaved pussies, because otherwise her
girls could fall in love with the clients. At one point, one of her girls
falls in love with Antonio ... and she has him tortured by the other
girls, up to a point where even Anna is turned on and joins in, and then
she has him castrated. And when that procedure is over, she has Anna
tortured as well. By and large, she likes her girls torturing and
castrating men and even eating their penisses and ... the end.
I'm not sure about this film: On one hand, it's nice to see that
director Jess Franco, a man well into his seventies, is still making his
brand of films, weird and dirt-cheap blends of sleaze and art-cinema,
trash and avant garde, held together by his very own cinematic language
consisting of weird camera angles and a succession of extreme close-ups as
only he dares to do it. On the other hand though, the film is seriously
lacking on several accounts: There simply is no story to speak of, let
alone characters or character development, the sex scenes are way too
extended so they quickly become boring, and they seem too choreographed to
really be exciting, and by and large (apart from a scene at the beginning
when Lina and Rachel Sheppard try to have sex but are repeatedly
interrupted by peolpe phoning in), the film seriously lacks humour,
something Franco was never afraid of in earlier films.
In a nutshell, Perversion is by no means Jess Franco's worst film, but
it's also not one of his better ones. Let's just hope he will go filming
on and on and on and before long produce another masterpiece - which he
certainly seems to be capable of doing ...
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