She Killed in Ecstasy (1971)

1970-71 were busy years for Jesus Franco - even by his standards - shooting eleven films, often back-to-back, often sharing locations and casts.  She Killed in Ecstasy (1971), for instance, was shot less than a month after Vampyros Lesbos (1971) in the Summer of 1970 and features much of the same cast and crew.  Most notably, like its predecessor, it stars Soledad Miranda (under her regular alias of Susann Korda), in her penultimate role, before her death in car crash a few weeks later.  The film itself is a revenge drama, with Miranda as a vengeful widow targeting those she holds responsible for her husband's suicide.  But, Franco being Franco, the plot doesn't develop quite as straightforwardly as might be expected with such a scenario and is full of bizarre touches.  For one thing, the husband is hardly a sympathetic villain, being a doctor who had been conducting some pretty unethical-sounding experiments of human embryos.  His speeches justifying his work are worthy of Peter Cushing's rendition of Victor Frankenstein as an entirely amoral character, blinded by ambition and his unshakable self-belief, to the dangers and questionable ethics of his experiments.  It's all for the greater good, is the main theme of his self-justification, which falls on deaf ears at the medical council, who have him struck off.  But if the husband, Dr Johnson, is of questionable morals, the four members of the council who condemn him, are characterised as inflexible zealots, their language, effectively accusing him of being a heretic and a monster and calling for his work to be completely destroyed, seeming more suited to brimstone-and-Hellfire religious fundamentalists than men and women of science.

The council's condemnation goes beyond professional sanctions, however, with a mob destroying Johnson's lab and beating him up, followed by a campaign of public condemnation, which eventually hounds him to his death.  As might be expected in a Jesus Franco film, Miranda's revenge involves her seducing and murdering the four members of the council, all of whom are revealed to be hypocrites of questionable morality themselves.  Professor Walker (Howard Vernon), for instance, turns out to be a quasi-religious hypocrite who has sex with prostitutes, but preys beforehand - he ends up stabbed and castrated by Miranda.  Dr Crawford (Ewa Stromberg) ends up suffocated with an inflatable pillow, after being revealed as a closeted lesbian who practically throws herself at a disguised Miranda: a far cry from her prim and proper demeanour as a moralising council member.  The other two council members, Dr Houston (Paul Muller) and Dr Donen (Franco himself), suffer similar fates, with the latter, as chairman of the council, receiving particularly grisly treatment- stumbling over his wife's murdered body at his home, before himself being tied up and hacked up by Miranda.  Meanwhile, a laid back police inspector has been conducting a hugely laconic investigation into the deaths, always several steps behind Miranda and seemingly unconcerned by the bodies piling up.  

What lifts She Killed in Ecstasy above many similar revenge thrillers is its languid, dream like feel.  Location-wise, it seems to occupy some kind of geographic and temporal limbo.  While the setting is clearly Southern Europe (it was shot in Spain), with its sun drenched coastal locations, many of the principal characters have English-sounding surnames: Johnson, Walker, Crawford, Houston and Donen.  We're never sure where any of these people are meant to come from - even the unnamed police inspector, played by Horst Tappert, seems to have wandered in from a German Krimi film.  The action also unfolds with the  logic of a dream, particularly with regard to the death of Dr Johnson.  He apparently dies at home, yet despite everyone apparently knowing that he is dead, Mrs Johnson is never seen reporting his death, there is no apparent investigation into his death and, most bizarrely, his dead body remains at home, in the marital bed, in a remarkable state of preservation.  Its location (and state) is pertinent to the plot, as we have scenes strongly implying necrophilia on Miranda's part.  Moreover, at he film's climax, she has his body on the passenger seat of her car as she kills Donen, dying alongside the corpse when the car goes off the road as she drives away, just as the police inspector finally catches up with her crimes.

All-in-all, She Killed in Ecstasy is a fascinating film, more erotic thriller than giallo, slasher or straightforward horror film.  Visually striking, the locations are used to great effect and, unusually, Franco's direction is quite restrained, with less of his trademark gratuitous zoom-shots than usual.  Despite the typically short shooting schedule, the film comes off as, by Franco standards, remarkably polished.  Most fascinating, though, is that central conceit of a woman so in love with a man of dubious morality himself, that she is moved to extraordinary acts of vengeance against his tormentors.  That they, themselves, are such reprehensible characters, is the saving grace that stops Miranda's character, from an audience perspective, becoming the villain rather than the heroine.