Review: Succubus (1967)

A few years ago, not long before a local UHF station became an affiliate of an international Spanish language network, I stumbled bleary-eyed across an intensely obscure horror film under the title of Among the Living Dead. It had obviously been edited to bits-it ran about an hour-and was almost completely incomprehensible. It did, however, have an interesting basic premise: the heroine of the story turns out to have been a mental patient, and therefore we can't be sure how much of the movie actually takes place in the "real" world and how much takes place in her head. And the ending makes it clear that the young woman is in a nightmare and will never know whether she's still asleep or, far worse, wide awake.

The director of that movie was one Jesus "Jesse" Franco, who apparently specialized in such pseudo-artsy horror films, which had scenes of sex and gore with philosophical, elliptical conversations draped between.

Succubus is along the same lines. Maybe they gave it that title hoping moviegoers worldwide would assume that it was a porno flick. No such luck, puppies. This is the story of a beautiful young woman (Janine Reynaud) who stars in a bizarre nightclub act in Lisbon in which she teases and tortures a young couple before taking all her clothes off and killing them. You know, the usual night out on the town.

The problem is that the young woman in question is slowly but surely losing her marbles, and the suture-thin line between reality and fantasy becomes increasingly hard to find. She's seeing a psychiatrist and plays word games with him; during one of these, the doctors asks her about how she feels about specific classic monsters, and Franco pans his camera across the faces of some very badly painted Aurora monster models.

If that sounds laughable to you, then you've come upon the problem with Succubus: Franco wants so badly for us to take his artful, erotic nightmare so seriously that he throws in stuff that either makes viewers shake their heads or bust a gut. Unfortunately, there's a lot more of the former than the latter. Example: our loony leading lady brings another beautiful young woman back to her place-which just happens to be a castle--and they've just begun to kiss on the bed when we see that the blonde she's brought home is really a mannequin even though it really isn't and she tries to bash her/its head in and the blonde runs away only to be cornered by other mannequins moving toward her and then the actress picks up a knife and....

See what I mean? It's not really funny and not really deep--it's just weird.

At least there's a respectable amount of eye candy: Janine Reynaud is a truly beautiful redhead, and some of the men are pretty as well--most particularly a bartender who serves his rounds while entirely naked (his naughty bits are hidden by a strategically placed top hat, though).

Succubus is worth a look only if you're in a tolerant mood or just up for something decidedly goofy--or both.

(By the way: a succubus, according to Webster's New World Dictionary, is "a female evil spirit or demon thought in medieval times to descend upon and have sexual intercourse with sleeping men." Who says horror films aren't educational?)