Les nuits brûlantes de Linda (1975) [filmed in 1973]

... aka: Brutal Nights of Linda
... aka: Burning Nights of Linda, The
... aka: But Who Raped Linda?
... aka: Come Close, Blond Emmanuelle
... aka: Erotic Dreams
... aka: Habitación Prohibida (Forbidden Room)
... aka: Hot Nights of Linda, The
... aka: La felicità nel peccato (Happiness in Sin)
... aka: Savage Girls

Directed by:
"J.P. Johnson" (Jesus Franco)

In Paris, Marie-France Bertrand (Alice Arno) is looking for work and goes to an employment agency where she learns of an opening which will put to use her nursing, teaching and secretarial skills. Taking a train ride to the country, she goes to the seaside villa of wealthy Paul Radeck (Paul Muller), a secretive man who wants her to help care for his two adult daughters; Linda (Verónica Llimera) and Olivia (Lina Romay). Linda is a depressed, paralyzed woman-child who clutches her baby doll and likes to sunbathe naked on the terrace. Olivia, who's actually an orphaned cousin Paul adopted and not his blood daughter. is lonely, virginal, sex-obsessed and lies in bed drinking champagne and throwing out sensuous glances to at anyone who walks through the door. Also living in the home is Abdul (Pierre Taylou), a servant who doesn't speak and only grunts like a caveman. Her first night there, Marie-France has immediate reason for concern as everyone acts either extremely suspicious or extremely screwed up. Olivia keeps her awake moaning loudly and likes to watch her new "teacher" shower. She also catches the voyeuristic Abdul peeping in her room and makes note that the short-tempered Paul refuses to discuss Linda's condition and refers to her only as "the fruit of sin."

Meanwhile, a female photojournalist (Catherine Lafferière) and a goofy private dick (Richard "Deconninck " / Bigotini) are spying on the villa from a nearby house with binoculars that somehow enable them to see right into all the bedrooms. Since the girls like to run around naked most of the time, she's hoping to get good photos for Playboy while he hopes to get evidence that Paul murdered his wife, which is the rumor around those parts. Olivia is troubled by nightmares / flashbacks of her uncle slashing his unfaithful wife Lorna's (Monica Swinn) lover's throat with a sword while the two were in bed. Paul is also haunted by visions of the tryst and takes it out on his daughters by beating and screaming at them all the time and caressing them while they sleep in the nude. When he catches one of his girls in bed with Abdul, he drags him off to a room, chains him to a wall and whips him while calling him a dog. There are numerous sexual tanglings all around that keep Abdul awfully busy and Olivia makes mention of wanting a key to a locked room her father always keeps guarded to see what's inside.

The pacing is extremely, almost insufferably slow most of the time and this has next to no narrative drive to propel the thin story forward. Sex, jealousy, madness, murder, child abuse, lesbianism, incest, suicide, ESP and voyeurism all rear their heads from time to time, but the story itself is rather aimless and uninvolving. As per the director's usual, the bulk of the time is spent on nude / sex scenes, but the film finally settles more in the horror-thriller territory in the last few minutes with one of the cast members going crazy and murdering numerous characters with a sword and battle axe. There's some minor comic relief in side scenes, constant zoom shots into eyeballs, a few nice visual touches, a good Daniel White score and a cheeky twist at the very end that's kind of humorous. Of course, the primary reason this was made was to undress all of the female cast members, and this at least does that much, though it takes Franco a whopping 18 minutes to get one of the ladies naked, which may be a record for him. Looks-wise, Romay is in her prime here, so that's good.

Like most other Franco films, this was released in different forms in different markets with differing footage, though the running times all hovered around 80 minutes. The first release, as originally shot by Franco and titled Les nuits brûlantes de Linda, contained just one graphic scene of banana play featuring Romay, though later French versions contained added hardcore insert shots spliced in that were filmed by Franco himself. This was the same version released on the bootleg circuit here in America under the titles Brutal Nights of Linda and The Burning Nights of Linda. Franco later trimmed out some of the more explicit material and filmed new comic scenes featuring the private detective and reporter characters specifically to pad out a softer release version, which played on European TV (dubbed into English) under the title Erotic Dreams. Another version released in Italy titled La felicità nel peccato ("Happiness in Sin") supposedly contains a soft sex scene featuring Swinn not seen in any other version.

The one I ended up watching was an 80 minute cut packaged as The Hot Nights of Linda but with a title screen that calls it But Who Raped Linda? which was also the version theatrically released by hack company Eurociné. The sex is soft, the nudity isn't all that explicit by Franco standards, it's in widescreen, is English-dubbed and opens by saying it's "a film by J.P. Johnson" and then goes on to list the director as Madeleine Quinquandon, who was actually one of the production managers. (The credited director on the Italian version is "Rick Deconinck," it's "Roy Darton" in Spain and so on). Under any name, this is a middling and rather forgettable effort for Franco that represents neither the best nor the worst of his work. Getting into even more details about the various versions (there are many) is something I'm not going to do here because, quite frankly, I didn't like this enough to want to sift through other versions looking for little differences. For a full and thorough run-down of the variations, consult the excellent write-up by Eric Contenas at DVD Drive-In RIGHT HERE.

In 2013, Severin released the ultimate collector's edition for this title. It includes multiple versions of the film, including a DVD and Blu-ray of the soft version as well as a poor-quality VHS transfer of the French-language, English-subtitled hardcore version, referred to as the “French Hard Banana Version.” Other extras include roughly 30 minutes of interview footage with Franco and Romay, another ten or so minutes spent with author and “Franco expert” Stephen Thrower, who discusses the director, the film in question and plugs an upcoming Franco book he's working on, a brief outtake reel, trailers and a few other goodies. It's really not worth the 30 dollars they're asking unless you're a Franco completist.

★★

Frauengefängnis (1976)

... aka: Barbed Wire Dolls
... aka: Caged Women
... aka: Gardiennes du Pénitencier, Les
... aka: Femmes en cage
... aka: Jailhouse Wardress
... aka: Woman Caged
... aka: Women's Penitentiary IV

Directed by:
Jesus Franco

There's wall-to-wall female nudity and sadism galore in this very sleazy Swiss / West German women-in-prison torture flick. Along with ILSA, THE WICKED WARDEN (1977) and WOMEN IN CELLBLOCK 9 (1977), it made up a troika of w-i-p flicks that Franco made for Swiss producer Erwin C. Dietrich over the course of three years. If one wanted to be a little more lenient then WOMEN WITHOUT INNOCENCE (1977), another Franco / Dietrich collaboration, could be thrown in there, as well. Even though it's set in a mental asylum for female patients instead of a prison, it was basically the same thing. These kind of films of course came back into vogue in the early 70s thanks to the success of the Roger Corman-produced, Jack Hill-directed films like The Big Bird Cage (1971) and The Big Doll House (1972), which became such big hits that hundreds of similar efforts were made around the world well into the '90s. Prior to the Corman films, Franco had already made at least one women's prison feature, 99 Women (1969), which is very mild in comparison to what he'd later do. His later ventures into this genre were also, tonally, a bit different than what others were doing with the same format. The female empowerment angle present in nearly all other w-i-p films, used perhaps as a crutch to justify all of the torture and nudity, is thrown right out of the window in favor of degradation and graphic nudity. Cellblock 9, for instance, found every single one of its female captives getting killed off at the end. Some reward for enduring such torture, huh? One of ladies fares a little better in this one, but most do not.

Things open with a long sequence of a starving, chained woman being treated like a dog while she desperately pleads for food and a guard barks out things like "Bitch!" and "Filthy whore!" while whipping her. It'll be a sign of things to come for poor Maria (Lina Romay), the newest prisoner in this women's island rehabilitation camp. Maria has been tried by some tribunal and given a life sentence for the murder of her father. Naturally she's actually innocent of the crime as a ludicrous later plot twist will reveal. Instead of having to work 14 hour days in the salt mines at another prison, the evil directress (Monica Swinn) has convinced authorities Maria is insane, so now she'll be subjected to these wacko's idea of therapy. Dr. Carlos Costa (Paul Muller), who is actually Dr. Moore but killed the real Costa and is now impersonating him, has her sign papers allowing them to do shock treatment on her. Next thing she knows she's tied down naked to electrified bedsprings getting jolted into submission.

The corrupt prison staff are breaking each girl's will and then pimping them out to high ranking government officials on the side. One girl goes to an impotent Governor (Roger Darton) who has Nestor (Eric Falk), chief torturer at the prison, rape her while he watches. One of the prisoners gets a letter out they're being tortured but it's intercepted. For punishment, they have their food rations cut in half and more girls get tortured and violated. Most of the prisoners being held there have gone crazy from all of the psychological and physical abuse they've had to endure. Ingrid (Peggy Markoff), who murdered her own brother because she had incestuous designs on him, is a delusional nymphomaniac who constantly plays with herself and keeps talking about Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella. Rosa (Beni Cardoso) has been reduced to a giggly, child-like state. And the virginal Berta (Martine Stedil) has somehow managed to keep it all together since she's been there, but the staff's still working on that. After getting simultaneously electro shocked and anally raped with a cane, Maria gets thrown into a cell with those three and eventually several of them plot to escape.

If this film belongs to anyone, it's probably Swinn as the cruel lesbian wardress. She has dialogue like "This isn't some country club!" and refers to the prisoners as "the lowest kind of scum" while prancing around in an outfit consisting of an ill-fitting monocle, an unbuttoned shirt, a belt, panties, knee-high black boots and a riding crop. During one scene, she bends the virgin over a table to test her virginity with her finger, has sex with her then instructs the girl to slap her around. Afterward she has the girl thrown into solitary confinement. And solitary confinement here means being denied food or water, getting chained up on the floor naked and having Nestor whip and degrade you. Swinn's character also makes the occasional aside about how much she detests "bleeding heart liberals" and journalists who want to expose the abuse going on at her prison. I suppose in Franco's mind this is all probably a parable about the need for prison reform.

By far the strangest scene in here is when Maria flashes back to her father (played by Franco himself) sneaking into her bedroom at night and trying to "show his affection." The scene is oddly shot in slow-motion. And I don't mean that the film itself is put in slow-motion, but Franco and Romay move in slow-motion! Aside from that one scene of unintentional hilarity, this film falls into a really gray area. It's too ridiculous to be taken seriously and too nasty and one-note to be "fun." Even the torture and humiliation scenes are boring and tiresome because they're drawn out for so long. The breakout "action" at the end is just plain pitiful. Naked ladies will be the film's chief drawing card and the nudity here is about as graphic as you can get outside of a straight-up porn film, with close-up spread eagle shots, zooms into crotches and fingers (and a lit cigarette!) being inserted into vaginas.

Frauengefängnis was originally released in the U.S. in a heavily cut version as Barbed Wire Dolls (the DVD with the same title is uncut) and would later be issued on VHS (again, drastically cut) under the titles Caged Women and Women's Penitentiary IV. In 1979, hack distributors Eurocine blended scenes from it with Hell Train (1977) and Elsa Fraulein SS (1977) and released it as a new film called Jailhouse Wardress.

★1/2