Franco's most unsettling film


This is Franco's most disturbing film due mostly, in my opinion, to Pamela Stanford's look and performance, a blend of mental illness and icy-cool, supernatural maliciousness as well as Lina's waifish sexual delirium. Lorna's repulsive-looking. There's an atmosphere of creeping revulsion and disgust that permeates the film. The "city of the future" French location work adds a very different dimension since most of Franco's locations are either Gothic or tropical. That location work has the same futuristically-sterile textural feel as The Tenth Victim which used atypical areas in Rome to create a sense of disorientation. Franco predates Cronenberg in his use of venereal horror with Lorna as the supernatural agent of sexually-rooted infection and disease that destroys the family. This must have gone over well in urban grindhouse movie theaters.

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