Let me paint you a picture. You’re at an art gallery run by a guy in a turtleneck who smells like cloves and rejection. He ushers you into a room, tells you this next piece “changed cinema forever,” and then forces you to watch a topless woman stab a mannequin while German free jazz blares in the background. You try to find the point. You squint. You search the shadows. Nothing. Welcome to Succubus, Jess Franco’s most ambitious disaster and the cinematic equivalent of someone whispering erotica into a broken saxophone.
Released in 1968, Succubus (or Necronomicon, depending on which bootleg you stumbled across at 2 a.m. on Tubi) was Franco’s first attempt at respectability. And by “respectability,” I mean he was clearly trying to impress the arthouse crowd while still keeping one foot (and most of the camera) firmly planted in the crotch of exploitation cinema. The result is a surrealist nudie nightmare dressed up in faux-philosophy and drowned in enough jazz flute to induce a stroke.
The plot — and I use that word with the generosity of a drunk uncle at Christmas — follows Lorna Green (Janine Reynaud), a nightclub performer whose act involves S&M roleplay, dominatrix cosplay, and lots of slow movement through red-lit rooms. She’s managed by her boyfriend William, a man with the charisma of a damp bookshelf and the haircut of a disgraced magician. Soon, Lorna begins having strange dreams… or maybe they’re flashbacks… or hallucinations… or one long fever dream brought on by expired LSD and bad wine.
She’s either possessed, hypnotized, psychotic, or just really into weird sex. And Franco, like a child who just discovered Salvador Dalí and lingerie catalogs at the same time, has absolutely no interest in telling you which.
From the opening shot — a mannequin being stabbed in a sterile white void while Lorna moans and writhes like she’s trying to seduce gravity — you know you’re in for something “different.” And by different, I mean maddeningly self-indulgent. Franco clearly thinks he’s channeling Buñuel or Bergman here, but it plays more like a perfume commercial directed by a sleep-deprived pervert.
The dialogue is pseudo-intellectual drivel, a stew of philosophy-school dropout quotes and softcore pillow talk. One character says, “Man is an abyss; you grow dizzy looking into it,” and you realize he just plagiarized Nietzsche — badly. Another muses, “She is the embodiment of desire… and death,” as if that explains why the next scene involves a topless woman wandering a graveyard while stroking a plastic skull. It’s the kind of writing that would get laughed out of a freshman screenwriting workshop — and possibly flagged by campus security.
The acting? Glacial. Janine Reynaud gives a performance that vacillates between catatonic and confused, which I suppose fits a character who spends most of the movie half-naked and whispering to herself in mirrors. Jack Taylor, playing the blandly evil Wilhelm, delivers his lines like he’s being paid per syllable. Everyone else looks like they wandered in from a rehearsal for a German cabaret production of The Seventh Seal.
And then there’s the music. My God, the music. If you’ve ever wondered what it would sound like if a saxophone had an aneurysm in a brothel, Succubus has your answer. The jazz score is relentless — not sensual, not moody, but intrusive. It crashes into scenes like a drunken ex, slurring its way through musical scales nobody asked for. At times, it feels like the movie is being held hostage by a rogue jazz quartet with a vendetta against rhythm.
Visually, Franco does pull off a few interesting tricks. There are dream sequences with mirrored walls, neon lighting, and soft-focus surrealism that almost work. But every time he builds a mood, he ruins it by lingering too long, adding a pointless zoom, or throwing in a slow-motion dance number that looks like it was choreographed by someone on ketamine. Franco is the king of the almost-effective image. He sets the table, lights the candles… and then spills wine all over the guests and stabs the roast with a fork.
The sex? Tepid. Despite its reputation as one of Franco’s early erotic films, Succubus is about as arousing as a tax audit. There are naked bodies, sure — but they’re filmed with all the passion of a coroner’s report. Every sex scene feels like it was shot in a meat locker. The camera leers but never engages. It’s not sensual; it’s clinical. Like watching mannequins fumble through a mating ritual they read about once in a dusty magazine.
And let’s not forget the ending — if you can call it that. After 85 minutes of disjointed imagery, cryptic voiceovers, and the most underwhelming orgy ever committed to film, Succubus just kind of… stops. No answers. No resolution. Just one last slow pan over Janine Reynaud’s expressionless face, as if she too is wondering where the hell the plot went.
Now, there are those who defend Succubus. They call it dreamlike. Hypnotic. Avant-garde. These are the same people who eat soup out of mason jars and describe everything as “liminal.” But let’s be real: this isn’t a lost classic. This is Jess Franco trying to be deep and just ending up deeply annoying.
There’s no shame in making trash. Franco made a career out of it. But Succubus is the worst kind of trash — the kind that thinks it’s art. It’s like a dirty postcard dressed up in black turtlenecks and quoting Sartre. And unlike Franco’s later films, which embraced their sleaze with joyful abandon, this one clings to its faux-intellectualism like a drunk philosophy student who refuses to leave the party.
Final Verdict: 1 out of 5 moaning mannequins.
A pretentious fog of erotic nonsense. Less succubus, more succu-bust. Watch only if you’re conducting a thesis on how not to blend surrealism and sleaze. Or if you’re trying to punish someone slowly.
