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Dir. Jesus Franco
Voodoo Passion is straight-up softcore. There is a story of such,
but the main and consistent part of the film is the nudity of its female
actresses and sex. It feels like a Franco
film, a slow and deliberate pace, dream-like, but its streamlined back to the obsession
with the female form more so than Female
Vampire (1973). Your ability to like this film depends on your liking of
mood in Franco's work. A newly wedded
wife of a government official moves to Haiti, only to feel that her sense of
reality is dissipating as she believes she's murdered people. As this happens,
the sensuality of the local music, and the draw of both her husband's platinum
blonde haired, and horny, sister and their maid servant, is becoming too much
to handle.
What could come off as a
"voodoo is bad" film, under the belief that she's being manipulated
and with voodoo dolls laying around the house, actually turns out to be
immensely different. Baring in mind it feels less like French softcore than the
older film, but more Euro softcore, with said sister whose continually nude and
lusting over her brother's wife, it's very much a reimagining of Franco's own Nightmares Come at Night (1970). There's shades of Female Vampire too in at least one
moment. Far from feeling like Franco
tritely repeating himself, it's actually cool that he was riffing on his own
work repeatedly in different tones and styles. It helped that he never made the
same type repeatedly each time - which may have made this sort of thing too
much when he had the expansive filmography he had - and the interconnectivity
of it all, that characters are doomed to be repeating the follies of previous Franco characters, is engaging as an
idea in taking his whole filmography as one giant film. It comes off as
befitting a musician whose main obsession, jazz, could be as much about
repeating sequences from previous work and taking it into new improvisions. The
thin plot for Voodoo Passion is
enough for Franco to push his female
protagonist through a series of scenarios where erotic and bloody incidents
take place out of her hands. It also becomes apparent, even if depicting its
setting as exotic, that Franco is on
the side of the Haitians just because he leaps on the opportunity to use the
environment's musical rhythms in his film's score instantly, mixing it with
jazz as the film progresses. A lot of the film is people being taken away by
the beats of the music, equal opportunity nudity by the bucket load, the entire
film more of a musical piece than a narrative. Long stretches, when it's not
the softcore sex, is lengthy moments of dance, of characters wandering rooms
and outside, the entire eighty minutes or so a vast lengthy atmospheric piece.
Its definitely a weaker Franco piece. It does feel long trying
to exist only on its nudity and music, not even a basic plot. Nightmares Come at Night (1970), which
it takes its inspiration from, was drawing on an abstract air and slightly more
complicated narrative. Admittedly the films which repeat tropes from his
previous work, that I've seen so far, have felt weaker, though I don't dismiss
those films at all, just that in this case, Voodoo Passion is definitely the weakest of the two. It mainly
rests on its erotic material and it has to be viewed through that mainly. Is it
sexy? Titillating? I confess to being attracted to every woman onscreen, and to
Franco's credit the women (and men)
are of many shapes and sizes, and that his actresses, even if lusted over, at
least had a distinctness and charisma to them that made them more human than vacant.
For a man who could get very scuzzy, the film is actually a lot more held back
too despite the wall-to-wall nudity. Its solid visual appearance probably explains this - this is not The Devil Hunter (1980) which does feel
scuzzy - and for simple titillation this film is far and above most softcore of
now, which is legitimately worse than something like this in quality in so many
ways. Whether you can appreciate this film for that or not is entirely of a
subjective opinion in this case rather than with other Jess Franco films.
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