Venus In Furs

Taking its title from Austrian author Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s infamous 1870 novella but sharing little else with it than a fur coat and a taste for the sexually perverse Spanish Z-grade director Jesús Franco's screen adaptation has all the makings of  a cult film - sensationalizing script, low-fi/ kitsch production values, amateur hour acting and so on - all infused with a playful engagement with the already self-parodising tropes of the horror genre. For some this will be appealing (and it is rated as one of his best by connoisseurs of such things) but for the rest of us will probably be a tediously haphazard, rambling example of trash cinema.

Jimmy Logan (James Darren) a jazz trumpeter finds the body of a dead girl, Wanda (Maria Rohm) washed up on a beach near Istanbul. He recognizes her as a regular at the hotel at which he had a steady gig in the house band. Jimmy wanted to get with her but knew that she out of his league, in part because she was involved with three of the hotel’s kinky guests: a millionaire playboy (Klaus Kinski); Percival Kapp, an art dealer (Dennis Price in the doldrums of a once-promising career derailed by alcoholism), and Olga, a fashion photographer (Margaret Lee). In the process of trying to work out what has happened he realizes that he had been a witness to the thrill-kill of Wanda by her demented  admirers.

Fearing the same fate, Jimmy departs for Istanbul, then Rio de Janeiro where his long-time friend and sometime lover, Rita (Barbara McNair), is singing at a club owned by another acquaintance of Jimmy’s by the name of Herman.  Jimmy gets a job in Herman’s house band, resumes his affair with Rita and everything seems to be coming up roses but then Wanda, or her doppelganger, shows up seeking revenge on her killers. 

This broadly summarizes the plot of Venus in Furs but Franco takes a much looser, elliptical approach to the narrative than it would suggest, some of which works on a formal level (the jazz score is a plus in this respect) but more often than not comes across as self-indulgently sleazy and pointlessly opaque. Still, fans of this kind of campily bent cinema should be well-pleased.

 

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