Midnight Party

Midnight Party (1976)

** (out of 4)

Strange tale of a dancer (Lina Romay) who leaves her husband and rock star boyfriend at home when two playboys invite her to a midnight party. Once at the party she has a threesome with a couple and then wakes up the next morning to find both of them dead in bed with a knife in their back. Soon Romay finds herself kidnapped and on a strange voyage where she keeps showing up at various locations. This is a rather strange film because a lot of the time it has Romay looking at the camera and talking to the viewer as well as telling them jokes. There's no doubt this was meant as a comedy or even a spoof of sex films because there are a lot of jokes running throughout. Some of these jokes work but the majority of them don't. The film starts off pretty fast and loose but quickly wears out its welcome and in the end it really starts to drag going on for 90-minutes. Romay is charming as ever and the fact that she runs around naked for the entire movie is only a good thing. Monica Swinn is good in her role and Franco himself appears with a wooden leg. The best joke in the movie deals with Romay being a working woman while her husband sits out home and does housework. This leads to some pretty funny scenes where the husband plays what would normally be played by a woman. In the end this film certainly isn't among Franco's best but it's not nearly one of his worst.

There are several different edits of this movie and if the version you happen to view does not last for 90 minutes, then it is not the definite version. The original version does not start with the night club act but with a lengthy prologue where Lina Romay, writhing on a bed, talks at length to the camera/spectators, saying that she hopes we'll like her and if the movie becomes successful, she'll be signed for three more movies, etc., etc. Several times during the course of the movie, she also turns towards the camera during the action and addresses the spectators, commenting on the action. At one point, Franco himself, who also acts in the movie, does the same. The plot of the movie is thread-bare and has got to with a stripper and escort girl at a night club, Romay's character, involuntarily getting involved with a bunch of spies. There are loads of fairly explicit sex scenes. The humor may appeal to some and not to some, but the movie is interesting, if not for anything, for the deliberately Brechtian interludes.

It all begins with Lina Romay dancing in chromed pants on a stage in some cheap bar. She hooks two playboys and ends up with an invitation to their midnight orgy. Her communist rock star bearded lover shows up in her dressing room and starts shouting slogans. Her husband pays her a visit. And then she talks directly to the camera, explaining to the viewer she has to get dressed for the party.

Definitly one of Franco's numbest and most chaotic feature,s where he plays a sadistic wooden-legged private eye with his trademark black sunglasses. You can see all you want from Romay, who spends most of the movie running around naked. The plot doesn't seem to be very important and the jokes fly low. If you like Franco you'll laugh to death watching this one but if you're a newcomer, you may wonder where the hell can we get some drugs as effective as the ones they used to write this.

All histories have their internal logic, and all the films of Jess are reasonably illogical. In order to begin in this film of 1976 Jess he uses pseudonymous of Tawer Nero, in clear reference to Julio Perez Tabernero with whom he signs the script, that as it is custom it is not most important, or perhaps the direction, which is not clear. Anyway the presentation of the titles of credit with the images of a sensual performance of night club, and the appearance of the name of the director between the naked chests of the protagonist, yes is typically 'Francyne'. Lady Porno counts the eventful journeys of Sylvia, Lina Romay, the artist of night club that naked of principle to aim throughout the film, being its sex from all the possible angles, and trying positions that later the Ojete DE Lulú' will show in '. In this sense the title could have been sure because the real protagonist of the film is the sex of the protagonist: ' Is like a bunny that single hopes a caress to open itself to the tenderness.... and that will tender. Sylvia is invited to a celebration by a pair to participate in one orgies. After Demetra sexual of the loving triangle, once again with Mónica Swing in one of the vertex, one awakes and it finds to the assassinated pair. When he tries to escape is kidnapped by another even stranger who becomes crazy to undress it, to violate it and to lick sex to him, until his head arrives Janos Radeck, a cripple, ugly, and no hands that a allemande one speaks peculiar Spanish. This personage incarnated by Jess is a clear tribute to the Dr Strangelov, of the famous film of Stanley Kubrik ' Red Telephone... we flew towards Moscow ' , carried out by Peter Sellers. From this film of Stanley Jess also he takes his sense ironic and amused to narrate his history of spies and detectives between delirious kidnappings, violations and murders. In principle Lady Porno shows the typical erotics scenes of the films of Jess and it is not possible to be classified of pornographic, although it is for greater of 18 years. The films porno of Jess were rolled in the decade of the 80, and in the 70 they were of moaned teats, asses and of pleasing, although as Jess says, the border of the pornography is only question of the type of plane that you use, and ' franking' is 'Private' aside from all the well-known and aided to know. This one is a film in which Lina watches the camera and directly explains to the spectators its feelings and thoughts, with its sharp and worldly worse language . Of this Jess form it plays with the film within the film, like Vermeer paints a picture within the picture, both with the sincerity of the creative genius that knows that its work finalizes with the action of the spectator. In this sense the words of Radeck are revealing, in a scene where it is telephoning (red telephone) it says: ' I am 008, I call to him to explain the true death of Joe....... hatred to everybody... (leaving the accent German, watching the camera and taking off the glasses) you you think that I am an audacious international agent, are not idiot, see me kindly and they will realize that my true profession is the one of actor ' The film is solved like one ' road movié, with all in movement between persecutions, firings and deaths. The spectator can be died of laughter or remain exited by the explicit samples of meat and sex, until arriving at the éxtasis with the final scene, a disturbing scene in which Sylvia very shamelessly masturbate, and the camera looks for eager the fingers whipping clitoris for a shaved sex. Then if we discovered to Lady Porno, because in that naked scene nothing is simulated and everything gets dressed that obscenity that portrays our reality of repressed desires, to end a wink of complicity and a kiss to the spectator. PD :'Impure vulva lost in your deserts between the ruins': Sara Ross