FRANCO FEBRUARY: RIFIFI IN THE CITY (1963) ***

Jess Franco’s Rififi in the City isn’t really a sequel to Jules Dassin’s Rififi, but it does have a vague connection to that classic crime film.  Jean Servais, who was the star of that flick, plays the heavy here.  Also, there is a safecracking scene that plays out without sound or music, although it’s not nearly as long as the caper scene in Rififi.  While the title may have been trying to capitalize on Rififi’s success, Rififi in the City remains an entertaining crime thriller in its own right.  

A lowly stoolpigeon named Juan (Serafin Garcia Vazquez) learns a big-time politician named Leprince (Servais) is secretly the head of the crime syndicate in the city.  Naturally, Leprince has him killed.  Juan’s handler, Mora (Fernando Fernan Gomez), is an upstanding police inspector who flies off the handle when his informant is murdered.  Mora rattles Leprince’s chain and his goons retaliate by beating him up and tossing him in the river.  He recovers and quits the force so he can move freely to get back at Leprince without having to report to his hardened police captain (Antonio Prieto).  Complicating matters is a woman who dresses all in black and goes around the city bumping off Juan’s killers.  Of course, Leprince is number one on her hit list.  

Rififi in the City is a tough, mean, and entertaining little crime picture.  I know I'm biased towards Franco’s horror and sleaze extravaganzas, but even I have to admit, this was a surprisingly classy and respectable affair for Jess.  It serves as proof that Franco could deliver a beautiful looking film if given the proper time, money, and resources.  The camerawork is often interesting, the black and white cinematography is excellent, and some of the compositions of light and shadow are pure film noir.  The strong performances, solid action, and clever twists and turns help make this a crackling thriller.

At one-hundred-and-four minutes, it is a little on the long side.  There’s probably one plot complication and/or needless supporting character too many, but nothing that dramatically gums up the works.  There’s also a lot of padding in the form of calypso-jazz numbers and cabaret song and dance routines.  At least one of these numbers is pretty great though as it features Maria Vincent all dolled up in a sexy matador outfit.  

As far as Jess Franco cinematic trademarks go, there are a few slow, somewhat aimless camera pans.  Gratuitous cabaret numbers are also one of his signatures as well.  Plus, this was the first in-name only sequel he directed.  (See also Ilsa, the Wicked Warden.)

FRANCO FEBRUARY

The Video Vacuum salutes any filmmaker that embraces quantity over quality.  No director better fits that aesthetic than Jess Franco.  The man made hundreds (HUNDREDS) of movies.  Maybe a handful of them are stone-cold classics.  A few of them are amazing works of genre filmmaking.  Many of them are trashy fun.  But LOTS of them are just plain bad.  That’s why we’re devoting this month to Jess Franco.  What kind of Franco funkiness will we be getting this February?  There’s only one way to find out.  

TUBI CONTINUED… BEACH VOLLEYBALL DETECTIVES 2: BOMB AT THE BEACH (2007) ***

The first Beach Volleyball Detectives ended like all great movies do, with our heroes beaten, broken, and licking their wounds from a crushing defeat.  (Okay, so it ended like The Empire Strikes Back.)  This one starts with a ten-minute recap of the original, which is fine by me and/or any likeminded individual who didn’t get enough scenes of sexy bikini-clad Japanese babes playing beach volleyball the first time around.  

This time out, the Beach Volleyball Detectives turn in their badges and go rogue to catch the bad guys.  (Just like in Licence to Kill.)  They eventually learn there is a traitor in their midst who is secretly working for the evil China Volleyball Team.  In order to beat them, our heroines must first face off against the Indian team (who have stretchy limbs like Dhalsim from Street Fighter 2) and the Russians (which is just one girl who can self-replicate).  

Let me get this out of the way before we go any further:  Beach Volleyball Detectives 2:  Bomb at the Beach is not the instant classic the original was.  It's only an hour long, but about half of it is recycled footage from the first movie.  I guess if they wanted to, they could’ve just edited both of them down into one ninety-minute film.  Then again, if they did that, we would’ve been robbed of the original’s great cliffhanger ending.  

While it lacks the non-stop gut-busting humor of the first film, it’s still pretty funny and consistently enjoyable throughout.  It’s basically set in the Rocky 2 mode where everything that happened in the original happens again, except this time the hero wins the rematch.  While that kind of reduces the novelty of the overall enterprise, it still had plenty of scenes of sexy bikini-clad Japanese babes playing beach volleyball to satisfy this discriminating viewer.  I mean, the climactic match features the villainesses serving, setting, and spiking the volleyball with their boobs.  What more do you want from a motion picture?  (If you answered, “Scenes where sexy bikini-clad Japanese babes use magic powers to turn volleyballs into dragons, missiles, and acid rain clouds”, then don’t worry because it has that too.)

AKA:  Beach Volleyball Detectives 2.

TUBI CONTINUED… BEACH VOLLEYBALL DETECTIVES (2007) ****

Beach Volleyball Detectives may be in Japanese, but it was speaking my language all the way through.  There’s nothing I like to see in a motion picture more than sexy bikini-clad girls playing beach volleyball.  The fact the girls in this movie are detectives is just icing on the cake.  Allowing them to use their finely honed volleyball skills to catch bad guys (in one scene, they spike the ball to knock out a terrorist) makes this, in my humble estimation, a fucking classic.  Utilizing a Japanese cover of “Get Off the Road” from Herschell Gordon Lewis’s immortal She Devils on Wheels as the Beach Volleyball Detectives theme song?  Well, I mean, you’re just going after my heartstrings now, aren’t you?  

True art transcends borders, languages, and races.  It brings us all closer together in a spiritual sense and that while we are all unique individuals, there are some films that show us that deep down, we are all the same.  Beach Volleyball Detectives is such a picture.  

A nefarious terrorist is hiding out at the beach volleyball international training headquarters.  Naturally, the sexy bikini-clad Beach Volleyball Detectives enter the tournament to catch him.  Before long, they become unwilling participants in an underground beach volleyball tournament where the losers are sold into sex slavery and/or the organ harvesting black market.  

The opposing teams all have great gimmicks.  The Indian team use the power of yoga during their match, the Russian player is a human Matryoshka doll, and the Chinese supervillains are sexy anti-capitalists.  The matches themselves are a total blast as they play out like a live-action anime (or maybe a video game).  The scenes where the girls use their special moves are particularly a lot of fun.  

Despite what you may think, there’s no nudity here.  Lord knows there were plenty of opportunities during the various shower scenes, locker room scenes, cat fights, etc.  What’s amazing about Beach Volleyball Detectives is that it’s so damned good that it doesn’t need an abundance of T & A to hold your attention.  It’s a lot of fun on its own terms.  I mean, restraint isn’t something I would expect from a movie called Beach Volleyball Detectives, but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t work. 

Look, I’m not saying Beach Volleyball Detectives can cure cancer.  I’m just saying I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if it noticeably shrunk the size and appearance of some tumors in a limited test trial.  It’s that fucking good.

AKA:  Beach Volleyball Detective:  Catch a Peeping Stalker!

TUBI CONTINUED… THE HITLER TAPES (1994) **

Lonely loser Marcus (Andren Scott) miraculously survives being shot in the head by a prostitute at the end of Even Hitler Had a Girlfriend.  After seeing a shrink and trying his hand at being a stand-up comedian, Marcus slowly starts creeping back into his old habits of perving on people and hiring call girls.  Meanwhile, a prostitute (Karen Zaczkowski) listens to Marcus’s audio tapes and watches his video encounters with other hookers.  

The Hitler Tapes is a big step down in quality from the classic Even Hitler Had a Girlfriend.  Even though it’s only an hour long, it feels much longer than the original.  In fact, it might’ve been unfinished as Scott was tragically murdered the same year it was released.  (He was shot in a 7-11, which is eerie because there are scenes in the movie where he works at a convenience store.)

The film feels more like a footnote to the original instead of a true sequel as it often plays out a collection of outtakes than a cohesive narrative.  That wouldn’t be such a bad thing if it was out and out hilarious.  However, it lacks the sharp wit and constant belly laughs that made Even Hitler Had a Girlfriend a classic.  Scott (who wears a bandage on his head most of the time) is pretty good.  It’s just that his dialogue and observations about life in general pale in comparison to the brilliantly written original.

Even though it’s a good half hour shorter than the first movie, there’s still a lot of padding here.  The most egregious padding comes in the form of two music videos that serve no purpose whatsoever besides eating up screen time.  It also doesn’t help that the film sorely lacks the non-stop gratuitous nudity of Even Hitler Had a Girlfriendl.  I mean if you’re going to pad things out, you might as well do it with T & A.  Do yourself a favor and stick with the original.  

TUBI CONTINUED… EVEN HITLER HAD A GIRLFRIEND (1992) ****

Marcus (Andren Scott) is a pathetic loser that has nothing going for him.  He works as a security guard at night and spends his days sitting on his couch in his underwear, eating Slim Jim’s and watching porn channels.  When that no longer does it for him, he takes to hiring hookers (but not before lowballing them on the price).  Marcus makes audio tapes of his encounters, and eventually buys a camcorder to make secret videos of his humiliating attempts to score.  

Even Hitler Had a Girlfriend is like a low budget version of Taxi Driver without the extreme violence.  It’s also frequently hilarious thanks to Scott’s tour de force performance.  (I mean, he better be good as he’s in virtually every scene.)  He gets lots of big laughs, especially when he’s delivering his long, whiny narration.  Some of the lines are downright priceless.  (“My chin is being swallowed up by the abyss once known as my neck!”)  He’s so good that you eventually wind up feeling kind of sorry for Marcus in an oddly touching way, even though he is a total creepy perv.

Whenever the lightning pacing threatens to slow, there’s a long scene of Marcus watching “Cable X” where we get to see women doing long stripteases on television.  I don’t always recommend putting padding in your movie, but if it’s an absolute must, then this is the kind of padding I would go with.  When he switches out cable video starlets for hookers, we get lots of scenes of hookers undressing.  Variety is the spice of life as they say.

Even Hitler Had a Girlfriend should be shown in film schools across the globe.  It is a lesson to future filmmakers that even though you might not have much of a budget to work with, you can still make a classic if you have a hilarious guy in the lead role and plenty of extras who are willing to get naked at the drop of a hat.  It’s a one-of-a-kind, surreal experience and one of the best movies I have seen in a long time.

TRAILERS #26: HORROR/SCI-FI (1992) ***

You know, once you get to the twenty-sixth installment in your long-running compilation series of horror and science fiction trailers, you tend to start scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to selection.  Fortunately for Something Weird’s Trailers #26:  Horror/Sci-Fi, I a bottom-of-the-barrel kind of guy.  The first half-hour or so of this collection contains a great grouping of obscure, awful, or just plain weird trailers.  Some of the highlights include:  Curucu, Beast of the Amazon, Pyro, The Navy vs. the Night Monsters, and Island of the Doomed.  Your mileage might vary of course, but for a guy like me, that’s a great way to kick things off.

The trailers tend to get a little more respectable as it goes along, but not too much.  It’s particularly fun seeing previews for H.G. Lewis movies (Something Weird and The Gruesome Twosome) hobnobbing with the likes of Hammer films (Scars of Dracula and Horror of Frankenstein).  Down the homestretch there are a lot of mainstream ads.  We get trailers for everything from The Rocky Horror Picture Show to Jaws to even Star Wars, but not before a few side jaunts into the world of Sunn Classics (The Outer Space Connection), William Castle (Bug), and Ilsa (both She Wolf of the SS and Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks are shown).  That’s the kind of variety I enjoy from a trailer compilation.

Of course, there are a lot of recycled trailers from previous collections.  (You can’t get to your twenty-sixth installment if you don’t pad these things out with repeats.)  The familiar likes of Dr. Phibes Rises Again, The Legend of Hell House, and Beyond the Door are all trotted out once again.  The good news is that at eighty minutes, Trailers #26:  Horror/Sci-Fi is a good forty minutes shorter than a lot of these things (and the pace is a lot brisker), which makes for a perfect night of drive-in fun.

The complete collection of trailers is as follows:  Curucu, Beast of the Amazon, Pyro, The Navy vs. the Night Monsters, Munster, Go Home!, Castle of Evil, The Projected Man, One Million Years B.C., She Freak, Island of the Doomed, The Gruesome Twosome, Something Weird, Torture Garden, Destroy All Monsters, a double feature of Scars of Dracula and Horror of Frankenstein, Lust for a Vampire, Dr. Phibes Rises Again, The Legend of Hell House, Tales That Witness Madness, Andy Warhol's Dracula, The Outer Space Connection, The Land That Time Forgot, Death Race 2000, The Seven Brothers Meet Dracula, Jaws, Rollerball, Beyond the Door, The Devil's Rain, Bug, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks, Logan's Run, The Omen, Star Wars, and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger.