Exorcism Blu-ray offers decent video and audio, but overall it's a mediocre Blu-ray release
Exorcism stars Jess Franco's wife and muse, the incomparable Lina Romay, as a performance artist who stages faux satanic rituals for the gratification of the Parisian elite. When a defrocked priest with a penchant for S&M (Franco) witness one of these erotic spectacles—and mistakes it for an actual black mass—the moral crusader launches a one-man inquisition upon the sexually liberated women of Paris.
Ah, Jesús "Jess" Franco, the trashiest of the Euro-trash directors, the seamy eye behind nearly 200 limp and sordid films, most of them some
combination of lazy horror and flesh-baring softcore sleaze. He might have a cult following, but he's gained it only by being prolific—prolifically bad. His
breakthrough, if you can call it that, was 1961's The Awful Dr. Orloff, a gothic chiller in the Hammer Film Productions mold and Spain's first
bonafide horror movie. Increasingly, though, he moved away from this relative reputability—coinciding with his move to the more sexually liberal
France in 1970—and started churning out slow-paced, low-to-no-budget grindhouse snoozers effluent with writhing naked ladies, S&M imagery,
psuedo-poetical dialogue, and a withering aptitude for good filmmaking technique. Don't get me wrong, I understand all of the reasons why some
people "like" Franco's films—the ironic, so-bad-it's-passably-entertaining enjoyment, the kitsch factor, the copious nudity, maybe even the fact that
Quentin Tarantino is a noted admirer—but I don't think any fan can claim with a straight face that Jess Franco is a competent director, let alone a
good one. Then again, I suppose "good" here is entirely beside the point.
You can't Torquemada anything!
This week, Kino Lorber and Redemption Films are putting out two of Franco's 1970s T&A-meets-horror sleazefests, Female Vampire—about a
vamp who lives off of semen, not blood, naturally—and Exorcism, which is thankfully not a low-budget boob-addled rip-off of The
Exorcist. (Although, let's be honest, I'd probably pay to see that.) Released in 1975 in various cuts and numerous alternate titles—The Sadist
of Notre Dame, Demoniac, Chains and Black Leather, etc.—the latter shouldn't be confused with Lorna the Exorcist,
which Franco completed the previous year. Then again, if you did mix up the two, it probably wouldn't matter much; either way, you're getting the
same old Franco formula: 1 part story to 2 parts shoddy camerawork to 12 parts undiluted quasi-erotic voyeurism.
The film opens with Franco's muse and longtime companion Lina Romay—a self-described exhibitionist—tied to a wooden crossbeam, being tortured by
a platinum blonde (Catherine Lafferière) who chops off a dove's head, collects the blood in a crystal chalice, and smears it all over Romay's naked body.
This bit of medieval black magic-style frippery is all an act, a piece of lurid underground theater for the sexually uninhibited set in swinging 1970s Paris.
Romay is Anne, an administrative assistant for "The Garter and Dagger" magazine, the blond is Martine—her sometime lesbian lover—and they work
with the rag's editor, Raymond (Pierre Taylou), to put on these fake-gory S&M shows, which usually devolve into all-out audience-participation orgies.
Exorcism stars Jess Franco himself as Mathis Vogel, a writer for the magazine and an erstwhile priest who was expelled from the church for
being "too severe." If his actions here are any indication, that's a massive understatement. Vogel has recently been discharged from an asylum, and
when he catches wind that Raymond and the girls will be holding a "black mass," he mistakenly believes they'll be dabbling in real occult acts—not just
putting on a show—and devotes his life to exorcising the demons of everyone involved. Through murder. Yes, Vogel becomes a latter-day inquisitor of
sorts, renting a room across from the girls' flat—so he can play peeping tom while they nakedly embrace—and tracking down a series of swingers and
whores so he can save their souls with a flashy knife. There's also a subplot about a pair of detectives trying to find the killer, but it's so nominal that it
could be chopped out and you'd probably never notice.
Franco's performance is almost completely inert; he spends most of the film leering out of windows or from behind doorways. There's one moment of
shockingly realistic-looking gore—I'm assuming Franco substituted a pig carcass for a closeup of a woman's torso being cut open and her heart removed
—but otherwise, the film is short on horror and long on drawn-out softcore titillation. Campy bondage. Nudie tussling. A dominatrix teasing an old dude
who looks conspicuously like Joe Biden. It'd be one thing if the film were actually erotic, but it's more tedious than anything, hampered by Franco's lack
of concessions to story or character, not to mention his generally artless style and amateurish camerawork. Note that this particular cut of the film is
an intermediary between the heavily sanitized version for the U.S. market, Demoniac, and a hardcore version with reshot pornographic
inserts. When I say "inserts," I mean inserts, and yes, Franco even did his own "stunts." Always classy, that one.
I'll say this up front: this is by far the best Exorcism has ever looked on home video. And now for the caveat: that isn't saying much. This was
probably a grubby-looking film from the moment it came out of the camera, and the print that Kino Lorber and Redemption have used for this new
1080p/AVC-encoded transfer is rife with age and projection-related damage. There are white specks and scratches galore, along with long greenish
vertical gouges during some scenes and brightness fluctuations in others. None of the this has been digitally cleaned up, so you can basically say the film
is presented "as is." On the plus side, this means no digital manipulations—no edge enhancement or grain-erasing noise reduction. The 35mm grain
structure is intact, and if nothing else, the image does have a naturally filmic quality. Of course, the picture is inherently constrained by Franco's blatant
disregard for accurate focusing, so you can expect far more softness than sharpness, and not much fine detail. Color is pleasing, though, with good
density and balanced saturation. If shadow detail is occasionally crushed in darker interior scenes, it probably has to do with the original exposure and
not the work of the Blu-ray's colorist. I didn't spot any overt compression issues or encode glitches.
The only audio track included here is an uncompressed Linear PCM 2.0 mix of the film's English dub, and yes, the dubbing is pretty bad. But this is
presumably all Kino and Redemption had to work with—their Female Vampire release has English and French tracks, so I don't know why they
wouldn't do the same here if they had access to a French mix—and besides, it's listenable enough. Voices do peak harshly at times, but everything is at
least understandable. Anyway, you don't watch a Jess Franco film for the sparkling dialogue. The track shows its age with some light hissing and mild
pops and crackles, but nothing too distracting. Audio-wise, the best part of the film is its eerie score, which blends guitar and string and some kind of
droning organ. Do note that there are no subtitle options included here, which is a bummer for those who might need or want them.
To each his own. Jess Franco definitely has his fans—who will probably want to snap up this Blu-ray release of Exorcism immediately—and even
if I don't agree with them, I can at least see why the prolific underground director's films have a camp/cult allure. Some folks just get off—literally or
figuratively—on low-budget 1970s sleaze. Fair enough. Franco isn't for everyone though, obviously, so if you're new to the director's body of naked-body-
centric work, I'd advise checking out a few clips or trailers on YouTube first instead of rushing into a blind buy. For cheapo nudie-horror buffs only.
Independent film distributor Kino Lorber has issued its Blu-ray slate for October 2012. Releases are arranged through Kino's different distribution branches - Kino Classics, Kino Lorber, and Redemption Films. The October titles include The Lina Wertmüller Collection, ...
