Wicked Women (Jess Franco, 1978)

Another movie where uncle Jess is trying to bring the erotic element up on the surface and make a game with it. Wicked Women is a movie about trauma but is also a movie about sexuality in general. And where others would deal with sexuality in a totally banal way Jess Franco is giving us all of his talent in order to make us horny in the most eccentric way. Sexuality and madness go together hand in hand and the outcome of the film is that there is no recipe for sexual manners. There is no recipe for pleasure. Pleasure can be found in the most weird places like a psychiatric clinic and be still incredibly stimulating. Power and lust go together hand in hand and there is no saying which of the two shall win. Dominance is a dirty game and there are no rules, there is no clear playing in that field. And inside that dirty environment you can see true innocence. You can distinguish it from all the other behaviours. Innocence stands clean and unspoiled regardless the dirty games that are been played upon her. Jess Franco is making a dirty movie but his goal is to talk about purity. Lina Romay stands as the epitome of purity. She stands as the one and only true sane person who inside her trauma is struggling to find another soul that she can trust. But that other soul is nowhere to be found. Inside that clinic there are only dirty games that are been played. And Lina Romay will suffer from these games. Lina Romay is the one and only hero of the movie that is been abused and used constantly in the movie. There is this fight, this fight over power. This fight that will say who is the strongest, who will find the answer to the secret first, who will be the one to dominate all the others. And Lina Romay has no part in that game. Her soul is pure. Her goal, innocent. She just wants to live and that's the whole of it.

Wicked Women is a movie that has all the ingredients of a trashy B movie. And yet again there is something else in that film a certain type of aura, a charm that makes it one of those X rated films that have certainly much more to say. Jess Franco was the master of B movies, there isn't any other director that worshipped that specific type of films like he did. And is completely understandable why her worshipped B movies and that's because they give you such amount of freedom in the process. In a B movie everything is possible. There is no rule that is telling not to do that. And Jess Franco was a real rebel of cinema. He understood cinema in his own, highly idiosyncratic way. So Wicked Women might for some people to be another stupid and pointless softcore movie, but if look closer you will understand that it is and it will always stay a shout screamed from the depths of the human subconscious. It's the fight of innocence against absolute power. It's the struggle of the one against the many. It's Jess Franco.