• HOME
• ESSENTIALS
• GIALLO
• HALLOWEEN
• ITALY
• MISCELLANY
• U.S.A.
• THE BLOG

SWEDISH NYMPHO SLAVES

Did it even have a chance? Did a film titled SWEDISH NYMPHO SLAVES, directed by the one and only Jess Franco, ever stand a chance of being good? Probably not. I certainly didn't expect a good film when I started watching it. So I can't say I was disappointed when it turned out to be a total waste of time. I enjoy a good piece of sexploitation fluff as much as the next guy, but this film fails to contain anything of interest. Sure, it tries to tell a noir-ish story and has enough exposition to choke three or four films, but none of it is particularly memorable or easy to follow.

The story, as such, goes a little something like this: a woman stumbles into the police office (how do we know it's the police office? Because there's a piece of paper with "Police Office" stapled onto the wall) and tells them all about how she was kidnapped and tortured by a woman known as Princess Arminda (played by Franco regular Lina Romay). We then find Arminda escaping from jail and being taken prisoner by an implausibly fat millionaire named Amos Radeck and his henchman (played by Franco himself). Radeck wants to know what happened to his daughter, Martine, a fetching blonde who was kidnapped. After the ransom was paid, his daughter was never found and he believes Arminda knows her whereabouts. Through a series of flashbacks, we get the rest of the story. Arminda picked up Martine one day and the two made love. She eventually drugged the girl and forced her into sexual slavery at her high class brothel. But things went from bad to worse once Martine's identity was found out and the possibilities of extorting money from her father came to mind...

That's honestly about all I can remember. I'm writing this a little less than two days after seeing the film and I simply cannot remember anything else that happens. There's a little bit of torture exacted upon Arminda at the hands of Radeck's henchman, a lot of softcore fumbling around, a few strip teases and a laughable rape scene. Everything else is kind of a blur. There were several moments during the film when I honestly had no idea what was going on. I considered skipping back a few minutes to see if I blinked and missed some kind of important revelation or plot machination, but decided against it. That would have just prolonged my exposure to this piece of nonsense. I didn't care if it all made sense in the end. I just wanted it over with.

I've always thought Franco was one of the few filmmakers who really understood the voyeuristic tendencies of his audience. When watching a particularly, ahem, titillating sequence, we tend to search through the scene and then latch onto some particular, ahem, asset or feature we find most pleasurable to us. In a way, that's what Franco's directorial style is. Franco often starts his seductive (or nauseating, depending on the casting) sequences from a medium distance before zooming, pausing, zooming, pausing, until the scene ends. Unfortunately, unless you share Franco's particular interests (and by that I mean fetishes), you'll likely not get much out of the scene at all. His visual desires take complete precedence over ours. I think that's why I don't enjoy many of his softcore romps. We're simply on two opposite ends of the "what turns ya on?" spectrum. Spending minutes staring at some woman's mouth or, even more commonly, asshole doesn't quite get my temperature up.

Unfortunately when discussing these films, your opinion of them tends to rest solely on whether or not you found the cast appealing. So it's difficult to state an opinion without sounding a bit sexist. The bottom line for me is that, aside from Lina Romay (who was a few years away from going straight downhill) and Martine Stedil, none of the women in this film did it for me. In fact, some of them were downright hideous. I know, I know, it sounds awful for me to say that, but it's the truth. For all the yawns and nonsense, the pain would have been worth it if the eye candy did it for me. But I found neither the women nor the story appealing and in the end, I was just left limp... so to speak.

Horrible.