366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

The third installment in the “Pete’s Perverted Pix” series.

DIRECTED BY: Jess Franco

FEATURING: James Darren, Maria Rohm, Barbara McNair, Klaus Kinski

PLOT: A trumpet player becomes obsessed with a woman after witnessing her murder and finding her body washed up on the beach, then watches as she comes back to avenge her death.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Venus in Furs is at least twice as surreal as Hitchcock’s Vertigo, while telling a similar story of a man obsessing over a woman who might be anything from a dead ringer for the deceased to a ghost to a tulpa. On top of that, it gets way freakier between the sheets than most giallos, and tops itself off with psychedelic audio and visuals like the Summer of Love never died. All that, and it also has piss-all to do with the novel.

COMMENTS: Hang onto your lids, folks, because you’re in for a surprise. More than likely you came to Venus in Furs, as did I, expecting a hedonistic wallow in the giallo end of the Eurosmut pool. After all, this is Jess Franco making an erotic thriller with the same name as the 1870 novel whose author, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, gave masochism its name. With those credentials, you would expect a kinky, sex-crazed fetish festival that would make The Story of O look like a high school prom episode of the “Brady Bunch.” At least that’s what I’d expect, having first discovered Franco via the gory Bloody Moon (1981) and working through his horror pieces from there. What, nobody gets their brain buzzsawed this time? Awwww…

Color me surprised to find what has to be one of the tamest movies in Franco’s catalog—and also a class act that deserves to be better known. There’s little full nudity until act three, and even the topless shots are sparse, while gore is barely whispered. There is no particularly graphic cuffs-and-whips action going on. In fact, it’s hard to tell what the hell is going on at all, since the entire movie is told in random scenes shuffling through flashbacks, dreams, and memories. Franco (who also wrote the screenplay) throws away everything of Leo’s novel but the name of one of the characters and the title. Like many of our favorite surreal movies here, the plot’s open to interpretation, including the possibility of a circular narrative.

Bear with me while I piece this thing together. Jimmy (Darren), a jazz trumpet player, plays a gig where he witnesses Wanda (Rohm) murdered by what seems to be a group of aristocrats led by Kinski in what appears to be a snuff party. Jimmy flashes back to these events when he finds Wanda’s knife-scarred body washed ashore on the beach. He then wanders off in a fugue state to Rio during Mardi Gras (note to directors: please set more movies here), where the same woman returns, alive and well. The (ghost? zombie? vampire?) Wanda seduces Jimmy and stalks each of her murderers one by one,

but it’s hard to tell whether she kills them outright or just haunts them to death. The plot is half Vertigo and half Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948)—and mostly a jazz music video, since all the action takes place in nightclubs, parties, bars, or seedy bedrooms in flophouses. Nightclub singer Rita (McNair) is the voice of reason as Jimmy’s side chick, pining for the trumpeter and trying in vain to talk him out of his obsession with Wanda. Much of the story is told through Darren’s own narration, and at points Jimmy doubts his own sanity and even wonders aloud whether he’s alive or dead, so you just have to follow your gut with this one.

Hand to heaven, that’s the best description I can figure out over two-and-a-half viewings. You can go ahead and construct whatever theory you want, because it’s going to be blown to hell by the last thirty minutes of this movie anyway. I gather that Franco originally intended this to be a standalone work titled “Black Angel,” focused on an interracial relationship, but later (due to concerns over censorship?) he switched storylines, tossed in the book title, and changed the female lead’s character name to “Venus.” That’s the Franco work ethic! Never throw out a script when you can just throw out half a script. Lord knows, the movie does not suffer for it, so the decision to rewrite must have come early in production.

Now then, you can forget the plot, because the real point of this movie is to soak in the music and psychedelic scenes flashing by. Manfred Mann did the soundtrack and he and his band blow the roof right off the studio with wailing saxophone stabs, soulful trumpet solos, spine-tingling piano-tinkling, and catchy beats that set the tone of a hungover fever dream. Chasing mirages, Jimmy staggers into and out of bars and private estate parties, in a universe where everybody has either a musical instrument or a drink in hand. The visuals are a wild assortment of artsy mirror shots, zooms and close-ups, shadows and spotlights, blurring a scene here and applying glowing psychedelic color filters there, and anything else Franco can do to make the camera dance to the jungle beat of erotic passion. There’s so much eye and ear candy that you’ll barely care what the plot is up to. The cast is sure-footed, with Kinski suitably depraved, McNair as the movie’s warm cuddly heart, and Darren (very far away from his earlier Gidget movies) narrating a hazy and foggy noir with a pack of Lucky Strikes in his throat, making you wish he did his own detective series.

Venus in Furs is a fine, fun watch overall, as long as your tastes run to J&B scotch with a side of boobs. Even at that, it’s sexuality steams the room more through atmosphere and mood than skin. The only thing missing here is… uh, well, this series is supposed to be talking about BDSM depictions in cinema. The novel is about a submissive man’s infatuation with a woman to the point of wanting her to enslave him, but this story is several genre categories over from that. We do have a whipping here, a hot lesbian seduction there, and exactly one mild bondage scene, but you’d hardly know this was supposed to be based on a famous kinky novel. We’re left in the dark as to how this happened. Is this a ghost story? Is Jimmy actually murdering these people and just hallucinating this woman? Is she a vampire, or perhaps a supernatural siren luring men and women to their doom? Is Jimmy on her hit list and she’s just saving him for last? We the audience wonder along with Jimmy, left beside him playing our sad little trumpet on the beaches of the Black Sea, all mystery and no answers.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Made at a time when exploitation films could occasionally cross over to the art film market or dabble in visual or narrative experimentation that would be unthinkable now, Venus in Furs (1969, aka Paroxismus) is that rarity, a hypnotic, dreamlike tale that merges elements of a softcore grindhouse feature with avant-garde techniques and a touch of the surreal.”–Jeff Stafford, Turner Classic Movies

Venus in Furs

• Factory sealed DVD

List Price : 14.95 $

Offer: 10.19 $

Go to Amazon

Where to watch Venus in Furs