Year: 2010 Company: CineBinario Films Runtime: 66′
Director: Jess Franco Writer: Jess Franco Cinematography: Jess Franco Music: Friedrich Gulda (posthumous)
Cast: Carmen Montes, Paula Davis, Lina Romay and some guy in a sweater who goes unnamed
Disc company: Intervision Picture Corp Video: NTSC 16:9 1.85:1 Audio: Dolby Digitlal 2.0 Spanish
Subtitles: English Disc: DVD5 (Region 0) Release Date: 02/08/2011 Product link: Amazon.com
Reviewed from a screener provided by Intervision Picture Corp and CAV Distribution
Jess Franco is back, for better or for worse, and his budget is smaller than ever. This shot-on-video effort, not even a year old as of this writing, sees the director working on what may be the smallest scale of his career, with all of the… ehem… action taking place in a handful of confined apartment rooms. What’s it all about? I’ll let the back of the DVD case do the talking:
An exotic dancer named Paula has been murdered. Her lover Paula is the prime suspect. But in a nightmare world of passion and perversion, could abstract desire be the greatest crime of all?
Helpful, eh? Though the opening credits make a point to list Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde as an inspiration for the story, there really isn’t much of one to inspire. The film opens with a detective (cult film personality Lina Romay in a very brief appearance) interrogating a disturbed young Paula (Carmen Montes, Killer Barbys vs. Dracula) after the death of her exotic dancer lover, also named Paula (Paula Davis). The scene accomplishes little beyond letting us know that Paula the first has tried killing Paula the second a few times, and its end spells the same for the film’s negligible narrative aspirations.
