You never know what you're going to get with a Jess Franco film; whether it's going to be a well-done horror picture ("The Awful Dr. Orloff"), a trippy head scratcher ("Venus In Furs"), an ineptly put-together adventure movie ("The Devil Came From Akasava"), vile and sleazy garbage ("Ilsa The Wicked Warden") or stylish, good-looking junk ("The Girl From Rio"). Having over 140 (!) films to his credit, this slapdash director is certainly a dicey proposition at best. "She Killed In Ecstasy" (1970), I feel, falls into that last category. A German-language film that was shot in Spain, it is yet another filmization of Cornell Woolrich's "The Bride Wore Black," which had been excellently brought to the screen by Francois Truffaut just two years earlier. But Franco is no Truffaut, to put it mildly, and he seems to have only a single trick in his director's kit--zoom in, zoom out; zoom in, zoom out...and that gets tiresome very quickly. Soledad Miranda (here credited as Susann Korda, for some reason) plays the widow seeking murderous vengeance on the quartet of doctors who denounced her husband's embryo experiments (an even touchier subject today!) and led to his suicide, and gorgeous as she is, she's no Jeanne Moreau. (She may do lesbian, but she sure ain't a thespian!) The seductions of the four doctors (one played by Dr. Orloff himself, Howard Vernon; another by Franco; and still another by a beautiful blond woman) are well done, but the homicides themselves are fairly lame and unconvincing, and a funky, sitar-laced, completely non sequitur soundtrack does not help matters one bit. The film doesn't wrap up after 80 brief minutes so much as suddenly stop and fade; very strange. On the up side, "She Killed In Ecstasy" features some striking sets and gorgeous scenery, and the DVD that I just watched from Image is one of the crispest-looking I've ever seen; an absolutely lustrous, first-rate transfer. By the way, I can almost imagine a 21st century updating of this film's classic story line; call it "She Killed ON Ecstasy"!
Review of She Killed in Ecstasy
