Review: Eugenie: The Story of Her Journey into Perversion

Innocent young Eugenie (Marie Liljedahl) has been eager to spend time with Marianne Saint-Ange (Maria Rohm) after they met at a party. Marianne is just as eager to spend time with Eugenie, it seems. Marianne is lover to Eugenie’s father (Franco regular Paul Muller), and asks for him to arrange for Eugenie to stay on her private island abode for the weekend. Dad reluctantly agrees but only after Marianne promises not to be too harsh on the girl. Whatever that means. Actually, since Marianne probably had her fingers crossed behind her back, what it means is that she and her creepy stepbrother  Mirvel (Jack Taylor) are going to spend the weekend corrupting the young girl through alcohol, drugs, and sexual shenanigans inspired by the Marquis de Sade. Christopher Lee plays the film’s narrator, who enters the story proper by the climax, along with a cameo by Jesus Franco himself in roles you’ll have to see the film to understand (And even then you might struggle with the specifics. It’s that kind of film, folks).

Maybe not as memorably avant-garde and balls-out weird as his more infamous “Vampyros Lesbos”, this 1970 flick from prolific Spanish filmmaker Jesus Franco (who also made the interesting “She Killed in Ecstasy” and the rather forgettable “A Virgin Among the Living Dead”) is in some ways a more well-made film. In fact, plot-wise at times it comes off like a less arty “Vampyros Lesbos” (I also think it contains the same yellow curtains seen in that film. Watch the film and tell me I’m imagining it). Whether a more ‘normal’ Jess Franco film is what one is really looking for or not, I guess is up to the individual. I for one managed to appreciate this for what it is, just as I did “Vampyros Lesbos”, and (to a lesser extent) “She Killed in Ecstasy”. And make no mistake, a ‘normal’ Franco film can still be pretty frigging weird. This one gets completely fucked up the longer it goes along in the best Franco way possible. It ends up being quite the devious mind fuck.

Franco may not be a particularly good filmmaker, but one thing you can definitely say about him is that you can spot a Franco film a mile away. He may not go to town with the zoom on this one, nor are there random shots of scorpions, but this is still very much a typically Franco-esque film. Hot chicks, bold use of colour (stunning use of red in particular), gorgeous beach locales, kinky sex with a touch of sadism/sadomasochism, and a classic lounge music score by Bruno Nicolai (The Franco films “A Virgin Among the Living Dead”, “Count Dracula”, and “99 Women”). It’s a more handsomely mounted film than “Vampyros Lesbos”, in my opinion, and like that film, this is pretty hot stuff. Both Maria Rohm and Marie Liljedahl have fantastic bodies, and frequently display them. It’s a bit more explicit than “Vampyros Lesbos”, though it’s more ménage-a-trois oriented, compared to the obviously Sapphic “Vampyros Lesbos”.

Rohm is a much better actress than “Vampyros Lesbos” and “Ecstasy” star, the late Soledad Miranda, but Miranda had a certain unique melancholic, otherworldly sultriness to her that was beguiling and entirely her own vibe. The central trio here are all pretty good for what this is, co-star Jack Taylor (a William Fichtner lookalike) has a face born for spaghetti westerns. He’s creepy as hell and, although Rohm is excellent too, I think he runs off with the whole thing. I was less impressed with the biggest star in the film (and one of my personal favourite actors) Christopher Lee. According to his autobiography Lord of Misrule, Lee was the unwitting victim of the “Caligula” tactic of a distinguished British actor being unawares of the sexual content going on in the film around him. I’m tempted to call bullshit on principle (I certainly call bullshit on the cast of “Caligula” being supposedly unawares), but looking at the film, it’s somewhat plausible. Wearing a red smoking jacket, he’s mostly kept as a bookend to the film, and isn’t really present in the sexual scenes. Whatever happened and whoever did or did not know, it’s clear that he’s slumming it with his performance (a rarity for the classy Lee), and delivers rather corny and dull dialogue about the Marquis de Sade. In fact, the name-dropping of the Marquis (which doesn’t add much) and Lee’s jaded slumming are probably the film’s only flaws as far as I’m concerned. It’s otherwise an excellent piece of softcore Eurotrash.

This doesn’t have the same bizarro, melancholic vibe or visual craziness of “Vampyros Lesbos”, but it manages to be almost as entertaining in its own right. Supposedly an adaptation of the Marquis’ “Philosophy in the Boudoir”, the screenplay is by the pseudonymous Peter Welbeck, AKA writer-producer Harry Alan Towers (“Ten Little Indians”, “Five Golden Dragons”, “The Mangler”).

Rating: B