50 percent of the film is of a guy playing a trumpet and 33 percent is flashbacks or lame camera effects. There are a few good shots of Maria Rohm, but what are we supposed to do for the other 80min? Sing along to the ridiculous theme song? Enjoy the pathetic plot? Or the acting, which exists almost exclusively in Darren's voice-over? The montage interview with Rohm in the extras--thankfully with no recent images-- is interesting, though.
shareYes, in a way the movie reminds me of that saying "there's no "there" there," meaning it was all kind of empty and didn't deliver a dang thing. That being said, I really got into the jazz combo performing somewhere in the middle of the movie (I played trumpet in high school jazz band, so maybe there was an unconscious personal bias). Acting was minimal, plot was confused and hard to decipher, but for me anyway the movie partially redeemed itself with a hard-to-define atmospheric weirdness, plus some nice location shots of distant lands (Istanbul, Rio). Kinski was his typical bizarre self, Rohm was easy on the eyes, and her interview in the DVD extras was interesting and kinda' zany. I can see how this film would not exactly be a crowd favorite, but I was able to extract at least a few positives from the movie. I watched it twice (mainly to try to figure out the 'WTF' plot), and played the jazz combo number (not the theme song, but the number in the middle) numerous times. I was hoping somebody would put that song on YouTube someday.
"It's going to get worse before it gets better." - The White House
Here's a good review that explains the film fairly well:
http://www.ferdyonfilms.com/?p=556
here's an excerpt:
Venus in Furs was one of Franco’s close-to-mainstream works, sporting a fairly high-profile cast that included James Darren, Klaus Kinski, Franco regular Dennis Price, and singer-actress Barbara McNair. But it can’t be mistaken for anything other than a work by the era’s most wayward trash auteur. With an inherently fetishist narrative, Venus conjures some of the circular madness popular in horror cinema like Dead of Night (1945), but it’s more a work of soft-core surrealism, avoiding gore and even tiptoeing with surprising dexterity around the full-bore sexuality that infests Franco’s later Vampyros Lesbos.
It's sad that you weren't able to get into this. i was totally swept up into this crazy fantasy world that they created for this film. It isn't about linear story, or a theme song. It's just the atmosphere and feeling that something like this can evoke. I loved it, and many people do, i believe...
"IMdB; where 14 year olds can act like jaded 40 year old critics...'
I don't think this movie is meant to be erotic. It's not, particularly. What we see is the imaginary life of one man who descends into madness. We see his muse.
share