In short: Lorna the Exorcist (1974)

Original title: Les possédées du diable

Because a mysterious woman named Lorna (Pamela Stanford, making up for her lack of eyebrows with the most extreme eye make-up the 70s have to offer) says so, rich guy Patrick Mariel (Guy Delorme) takes his wife Marianne (Jacqueline Laurent) and his nearly eighteen year old daughter Linda (Lina Romay) to some brutalist looking nightmare city in the Camargue instead of St. Tropez as he promised them. He doesn’t have much of a choice, for Lorna is a demon (or something), and eighteen years ago, Patrick made a pact to beget Lorna’s daughter and future replacement in the soul buying biz on his wife – don’t ask about the technical details, please – in exchange for the usual prosperity and power.

Now, Lorna wants Linda, her kinda-sorta daughter. Patrick isn’t willing to actually give away his beloved daughter to Evil, but he will have little choice in the matter.

In between this, we regularly pop in with a Madwoman (Catherine Lafferière) who likes to wear no panties and rave about Lorna. She’s under the care of a Doctor played by Uncle Jess Franco himself, so I’m sure everything will turn out well for her.

Why she is in the movie at all is anybody’s guess – she might be meant to be just another victim of Lorna jacking up the nudity and writhing quota, or the rest of the film may be her hallucinations. We don’t know, Jess doesn’t tell, as is par for the course with him.

As regular readers of this blog know, I have a high tolerance for Jess Franco’s style of bullshit – at least in his films made before 1990 or so – but this movie – decidedly not about an exorcist named Lorna – is a bit of a drag. Despite being on the pornier side of Franco’s output, until its final twenty minutes or so, this lacks the languorous perversity of many of the director’s better films, but keeps the usual tedium. What is laughingly called the plot takes ages to actually reach the point I’ve described above, and there’s not much else going on.

The moments of weird visual poetry that are a large part of the draw of Franco’s films for me are few and far between, and much of the expected copious full frontal nudity with dollops of the macabre feels curiously perfunctory and definitely un-erotic. Lorna really only comes into its own as something of interest in its final twenty minutes or so, when Franco doubles down on the perversity – nothing says class like Lina Romay sucking Stanford’s breast while Stanford repeatedly moans “my daughter! my daughter!”, not to speak of the dildo – and things become a bit more lively than they were before.

For the Franco initiate like me, that’s at least enough to make this supposed attempt to jump on the possession movie bandwagon worth watching once; sane people should probably avoid the experience.