Movie star Annette Lamark (Glenda Allen) and her entourage go for a weekend trip to a rather pretty island she must have bought quite some time ago. Annette’s sister Valerie (Montserrat Prous) is living there all year round with some rather weird domestics, taking care of Annette’s little son and nurturing quite the hatred for Annette in long, dramatic internal monologues.
Among Annette’s usual group of lickspittles is the detective Juan (Alberto Dalbés), apparently a total hottie, though you might not notice when looking at him.
Soon enough, the kid is napped by someone who demands quite a sum of money. Tempers run even higher and more hysterical now, of course, and things don’t get any calmer once someone sabotages the boat connecting the island to the mainland and starts killing some of these arseholes and fools.
I generally prefer the weirder side of great director Jess Franco, and often tend to find his more conventional movies a bit boring. This very Agatha Christie (though based on a novel by Spanish writer Enrique Jarnes) mystery is actually one of the better among the more mainstream Franco movies, building quite a bit of tension out of the melodramatic clichés, certainly helped by a fantastic bit of overacting by Prous (bizarrely cast as the ugly duckling of the sisters) who really works all of those close-ups of her eyes Franco goes for to maximum melodramatic effect. This is also one of Franco’s genuinely pretty efforts, with many picture postcard shot of the island that makes an effective contrast to the nastiness going on between the characters.
The island setting – and the film’s general lack of porniness – do hamper some of Franco’s stylistic fixations. There’s little room for nightclub sequences (though Jess manages to squeeze a bar and some soft, melancholic guitar playing in), and certainly none for zooming through any woman’s nether regions. If that’s a disappointment or a feature, a viewer probably needs to decide for themselves.
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