Fascination (Jean Rollin, 1979)

Just to let you know, the image of Brigitte Lahaie stabbing that Max Perlich lookalike in the side with a dagger is constantly bouncing around inside my head as I start this review. If that's the case, why don't you continue down that road? I don't know, it seems a little obvious, don't you think? I mean, I watch a film that stars Brigitte Lahaie, and the first thing I do is go on some long tangent about, oh, let's say, her dark, piercing eyes. You know what, let me try a different track. If it doesn't work out, I'll go back to perving out over Brigitte Lahaie; after all, it's what I do best. If I were to tell you in advance that you were going die if you remained inside a chateau filled with hot French chicks wearing diaphanous robes when the clock strikes midnight, would you stay? The catch being, there are people outside the chateau who want to straight-up murder your French ass. The bullet they fired in anger that grazed your neck is all the proof you need to realize they're serious about setting in motion a series of events that will lead to your immediate demise. Well, that's the dilemma put in front of the nattily dressed thief at the centre of Fascination, a Jean Rollin film that begs the question: Should I stay or should I go? Stay, and you could be wallowing in the kind of vaginal riches the likes no man has ever experienced. Go, and you'll probably be shot in the face. The key word when describing the stay option is "could." Meaning, the vaginal riches are not set in stone. You could, as far as we know, be the main course on the menu that belongs to a deranged cabal of semi-shapely pseudo-vampires.

Much like the ruins in Lips of Blood, the oft-alluded to midnight gathering keeps the audience somewhat interested in the film's outcome. It's a clever technique that prevents those who are not used to Jean Rollin's lyrical brand of art-house erotic horror from bailing on the film all-together. I'll admit, when one of the characters mentions that some "friends" are coming over at midnight, I was rather intrigued. Since I'm being honest, the real reason I started watching this flick was see what Brigitte Lahaie was going to do with that giant scythe you see her carrying on the film's poster. Giving the poster the benefit of the doubt, I was comforted in the knowledge that, no matter happens, Brigitte Lahaie will be wielding a giant scythe at some point over the course of this film.

It's true, you do have to wade through your fair share of lesbian sex and ox blood taste testing to get some Brigitte Lahaie scythe action. But I'm sure almost everyone with a Brigitte Lahaie scythe fetish will agree that it's well worth the wait.

It's true, there's nothing duller than tasteful lesbian sex (no scissor position, me no likey). I am, however, intrigued by this so-called "ox blood taste testing."

I'll get to that in a second, the film actually opens with Brigitte Lahaie and Franca Maï dancing on a stone bridge. It's a great image, as they're dressed all in white and their phonograph record player acts as a sort of turn of the century boombox.

According to the doctor who is accompanying some proper ladies to the butchershop, the year is 1905, and everyone drinks blood. And not only that, it's great for the immune system. I don't know if I agree with that. But I will say this, we're only a minute into this thing and we've already had three striking images. The first, of course, being Brigitte Lahaie and Franca Maï dancing. The second is the sight of one of the proper ladies standing in a pool of ox blood. And the third is the close-up shot of one of the proper ladies rubbing ox blood over their lips. Sure, the latter two are kind of gross, but they're also strangely erotic, especially the lip rubbing one.

Meanwhile, in a nearby barn, a group of thieves are about to divvy up the loot (a satchel of gold coins) from a recent score. If one of the thieves, Marc (Jean-Marie Lemaire), the blonde dandy in the red and black blazer, looks a little out of place amidst this sea of unkempt crooks, that's because he's not with them. Don't get me wrong, they're on the same team. It's just that, I don't think they trust him. The feeling is mutual, and when Marc notices a slight shift in their attitude, Marc pulls out a gun, grabs the loot, and takes the lone female thief (Myriam Watteau) hostage.

My favourite part of Marc and the female thief's brief trip through the countryside was when the female thief tries to use her breasts as bargaining chip. What I liked about it was the way Marc laughed at her, as if to say: Put your tits away, honey. I'm an ass man. Only problem being, the exaggerated nature of his laughter allowed the female thief to get close enough to knee him in the groin and escape into the woods.

Quickly reuniting with her comrades, the gang of unruly thieves (who are basically three dudes and a lady) begin to chase Marc across the lush landscape that is rural France circa 1905. Realizing that he can't run forever, Marc heads toward this sort of creepy-looking chateau that's surrounded by a moat.  Using the stone bridge that leads to the front door–the very same bridge Brigitte Lahaie and Franca Maï were seen earlier dancing on–Marc cautiously enters the chateau.

What he finds inside are two women, a brunette named Elizabeth (Franca Maï) and  a blonde named Eva (Brigitte Lahaie), who tell him that they're "ladies-in-waiting." In-between the parts that feature mind games and ill-fitting old-timey underwear (no turn of the century corset can contain Brigitte Lahaie's delightful bosom), we get lesbian sex, heterosexual sex, a shoot out, and French chicks with daggers.

Don't get too excited, it's not as awesome as it sounds. No, things don't really start to pick until Brigitte Lahaie decides to head outside and take care of business, if you know what I mean. If you don't know what I mean, let me put it this way: Brigitte Lahaie has a giant scythe and she knows how to use it.

With midnight fast-approaching, Marc must choose whether to stay or go. Since there wouldn't be much of a movie if he just up and left, Marc decides to stay. And in doing so, comes face-to-face with Elizabeth and Eva's "special guests." Now, I don't want to reveal who these guests are exactly. But let's just say, they haven't come over to drink tea. Played by  Fanny Magier, Muriel Montossé (Cecilia), and three other actresses who shall, for some strange reason, remain nameless, the women seem intrigued by the handsome thief.

Are they vampires? Or are they merely a bunch of, to quote Marc, "bourgeois crackpots"? Who's to say? The swagger Brigitte Lahaie displays when she goes out to "greet" the thieves was very vampire-esque. But then again, it was the middle of the day. Yeah, but since when do Jean Rollin vampires play by those silly rules? Either way, the film, while not as entertaining as say, The Demoniacs and Lips of Blood, Fascination does have a certain ethereal quality about it that was on the cusp of being appealing at times, and Brigitte Lahaie's gorgeousness is undeniable.

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Faceless (Jess Franco, 1987)

The extreme lengths one will go through in order to attain the perfect complexion is examined in the ghastly Faceless (a.k.a. Les prédateurs de la nuit), a plastic surgery gone awry chiller from trash peddler extraordinaire Jess Franco (Bloody Moon, Eugénie de Sade, and hundreds of other works of sleazy goodness). Well, actually, I wouldn't go as so far to say that there is any sort of "examining" going on this film–after all, it's a Franco flick (tawdry thrills and lingering leg moments are the main order of business). But as far as watching backroom chainsaw dismemberment, unwanted face peeling, gigolos getting scissored in the neck, drill heads being changed prior to a head being drilled, and, my personal favourite, syringes wielded by sophisticated women of European extraction go, I'd say the film is resounding success. Oh, sure, Telly Savalas (NFL Players Association Awards Dinner) literally phones in his performance and the amount of flame coming off the guy playing the Dorothy-friendly fashion photographer will cause your inexpensive gaydar to explode into a million fabulous pieces. But what exactly is wrong with using a telephone and being aggressively flamboyant? I can't think of anything.

After a night of high end shopping, Dr. Flamand (Helmet Berger), his wife Ingrid (Christiane Jean) and his sister Nathalie (Brigitte Lahaie) are confronted in a Paris parking garage by a dissatisfied patient. Unhappy with the results of her plastic surgery, the scarred woman throws a glass of acid in Ingrid's face. Mildly disfigured ("mildly" because I thought she still looked hot), Ingrid retreats from the world. Determined to bring his wife back to a state of acceptable attractiveness, Dr. Flamand and Nathalie begin to work on finding her a new face.

This search sees them abducting a fashion model named Barbara (Caroline Munro), a prostitute (Amélie Chevalier), and an actress (Florence Guérin). The model's disappearance (she was lured with sweet cocaine) causes her New York-based father (Telly Savalas) to hire a private detective (Christopher Mitchum) to do what the French police can't seem to do, and that is, find out what happened to Barbara.

Luckily for her, Dr. Flamand and Nathalie's deranged man-servant (Gérard Zalcberg) causes Barbara some facial distress during an off-the-cuff sexual assault.

As punishment for this act, the man-servant is forced to rub his face over the fishnet stocking-covered legs of Ingrid. Um, I don't really see how this is a punishment exactly. I mean, I must have missed something, because this looked like, from my cockeyed point-of-view, to be the best punishment ever.

Anyway, unsure of his face transplanting skills, Dr. Flamand employs the services of a former SS doctor (Anton Diffring) who did experiments at Dachau. The nonchalant manner in which Dr. Flamand and Nathalie go about finding the Nazi physician was kind of jarring. Killing women for their faces is one thing, but hiring a Nazi?

A nosy, wheelchair-bound patient (Stéphane Audran), who is recovering in the non-antiseptic dungeon wing of Dr. Flamand's clinic, starts to get suspicious of all the sinister activity going on downstairs, but she is quickly taken care of.

A virtual lingerie bonanza–in that it worships everything below the neck–the human face is effectively rendered redundant in this film. Whether it was Jess Franco's intention or not, but what I took away from the film is that the face, while important in some social situations, isn't necessary. The body, particularly when draped in pleasing fabrics, supplants the face when it comes to winning over the fickle crotches of others.

Every scene that features a woman enticing her intended victim seems to centre around the act of lifting up a piece of fabric to reveal the fleshy, unadorned area that separates the structural inner workings of their intricate lingerie. This combination of nylon and skin is so harmonious, that the person generating the images of this frothy display with his or her cerebral cortex will discover that their genitals have since become inflamed with a feverish form of desire.

However, it should be said, that in the case of Caroline Munro, she doesn't even seem to need lingerie.* Merely utilizing the tantalizing shape of her full-flavoured thighs, Caroline manages to manipulate a degenerate without the aid of flouncy undergarments.

Alluring, chic, and moderately evil all at once, Brigitte Lahaie is elegance personified as Nathalie, Dr. Flamand's unscrupulous assistant/kleptomaniac sister. Whether plunging syringes into the eyes of paranoid patients or driving scissors into the throats of untactful male prostitutes, Brigitte oozes sophistication and a steely brand of grace. I liked how she called the tactless boy-toy an "asshole" right before ventilating his neck area; the way it clashed with her overall European elan made my ovaries sing.

With her dark, piercing eyes–which looked extra nefarious when paired with red leather–Miss Lahaie cast an eerie spell over the proceedings. No fooling, nary a scene goes by without a shot of Brigitte staring intently at something.

When I first saw Florence Guérin dominating the dancefloor at the local discotheque, my eyes couldn't help but notice that her white fingerless gloves had less finger material than your average pair of fingerless gloves. After I grew bored with admiring her swanky handwear, it was Florence's black high-waisted leather mini-skirt's turn to dazzle my senses.

In terms of leather skirts seen throughout the history of pop culture, I'd definitely put Florence's up there with the one Papillon Soo Soo wears as a Da Nang prostitute in Full Metal Jacket and the many that Italian singer Sabrina Salerno struggled to keep on during the late 1980s. What I liked about it was that it gave her vagina and the wind swept confines of her delicious anus the coverage they so desperately need to go about their daily business, or in this case, nightly business, with a modicum of confidence. At the same time, the skirt managed to accentuate the length of her spectacular gams.

While Papillon's leather skirt seemed like it was glued on, and Sabrina's appeared to have a mind of its own, Florence's was lifted up on purpose. You see, Florence Guérin (who plays herself in this film) wants to impress Dr. Flamand and Nathalie (especially the latter, who clearly has dibs on her labia), and she does so by lounging seductively on their sofa. Pulling up her black high-waisted leather mini-skirt with a determined hiking motion, she lays out the exquisite fullness of her Gallic frame for all to see. Exposing the softness of her womanly body like it were a freshly cooked meal, Florence awaits the return of her horny hosts with a breathy mix of trepidation and insincere coquettishness.

A kinda remake of the classic Eyes Without a Face, this knock off/undertaking is similar in that it takes place in France and is about a doctor who desperately wants to procure a new face for a female loved one. Yet, being a Jess Franco film, the deep and thoughtful aspects of the Georges Franju version have been jettisoned and have found themselves replaced with discotheques, fur coats, garter belts, make out sessions with severed heads, cocaine, pimps named Rashid, and, of course, black high-waisted leather mini-skirts. Not a bad trade, if you ask me.

* Do leg restraints count as lingerie? The UCLA, the undergarment council for lingerie affairs, stated in its 1894 charter that: "Any fabric that is used to emphasize the natural beauty of the human body, whether intentional or not, shall fall comfortably under the lingerie umbrella." And, hey, I'm not one to argue with the UCLA, so I guess the answer to my question is a resounding yes. They do count. Yay!

Special thanks to the swanky empresses over at the Love Train for the Tenebrous Empire for causing my frazzled mind to become acutely aware of this botched face lift, high-waisted leather skirt-laden piece of trashy cinema.

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