Smartorhypo Highly Overrated But Still Good

BoardChiri Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

Plustown A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

Suman Roberson It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

FacemeltingFilms The way the mainstream chooses to see humanity is very strange. It is excepted that on the norm we are kind, generous, loving people. All and all innocents. Their view is some people are lead astray by greed or mental imbalances and do crazy things. At our heart humans are all good, "normal", healthy people. This is the view point most have as a child also.Unfortunately this is a very skewed outlook. Yes humans have the ability to be kind, and loving and we do it often. But in reality, I believe, it is in our nature to also be mean, disrespectful psychos. The mind is not an easy thing to deal with and each person reacts differently. To think otherwise you must completely ignore the news on TV, most of your friends and family, and the overall sense of lunacy that you feel in your heart when things go wrong.This mental illness that we all have largely stems from wanting sex. It may not look that way a lot of the time. A lot of your actions may be very round about ways to getting there but everything in the end comes down to finding another person to be with intimately. If you have not realized this within yourself there is a good chance you are scared and embarrassed of the way you truly feel and are burying these emotions deep within you. When people do this they manifest in different ways. Mostly it ends up being anger towards themselves or towards others. This does not account for all the anger in the world but I think may account for a large majority of the religious anger.One of our hardest jobs growing up is dealing with this. As children most of us do not understand any sort of sexual interest. As we grow older we are perverted and start noticing the strange new feelings we have. How we deal with them based on our situations becomes a large part of who we are for the rest of our lives. Jess Franco's 1970 film Eugenie addresses this part of our lives directly though the story of a young girl named after the title.Eugenie is a beautiful young girl who becomes captivated by an older woman named Ange. Ange invites Eugenie to spend the weekend with her on her private island in Spain. What Eugenie doesn't know is Ange and her step brother/lover Mirvel have brought her to the island to seduce her.(SPOILERS) After taking a bath with Ange and a little light kissing she is drugged at dinner and molested. The next day she wakes up not sure if it was a dream or real. As the vacation continues Eugenie is molested more and more to the point of rape and whippings. Ange and Mirvel invite a sect of Marquis De Sade followers who enter the house to kill her. Eugenie stabs Mirvel while he tries to rape her and kills him. The Marquis de Sade group decides not to kill Eugenie but instead Ange. After torturing Ange Eugenie runs off naked into the beach only to be confronted with a large graveyard of sacrificed victims. In a fit of anger and terror she runs aimlessly through the beach collapsing on the sand sobbing. (END SPOILERS)Eugenie's "journey" is a beautiful, truthful and disgusting metaphor for the perversion each one of us must go through in our lives. The difference is her journey happens in two days therefore it is much more extreme. We start as children with strange dreams. Thoughts of kissing, of touching bodies, all confusing ideas thoughts that we cannot place. This was represented before Eugene got to the island. In one scene she lays on her bed staring at a picture of Ange. This is the first hint of perversion entering her life. She is then confronted with Mirvel who confesses his crush to her. Being confronted with a powerful sexual presence such as a person or a sexual picture is a second step we can all relate to. Eugenie crosses the boundary when she first kisses Ange in the bathtub. She has now confronted a part of her that can never be taken back. As the film progresses we see each step of Eugenies perversion. Confusion (not knowing if it's a dream or reality) Blind acceptance (kissing and touching Ange and Mirvel while stoned) Guilt and Self Hate (represented as Mirvel and Ange beating her with whips) Recovery (the bruises are gone!) More Sexual Partners, Betrayal, Anger at others, Confusion and ultimately insanity cover the rest of the film.The final scene where she is confronted by the graveyard represents humanity and her realization that everyone has been through this journey in some way and many have died from it. She weeps for herself and she weeps for the world, for humans, for the insanity of being human.Not to say this is how everyone's journey is. Some are easier than poor Eugenie's and some are much harder. The simple act of accepting this as a part of life and depicting it in two days is what is so genius about Jess Franco's film.Expecting to see a shlocky, sex filled, Eurotrash film I was blown away by the power and brilliance of Eugenie and the Story of her Journey into Perversion. Anyone willing to be truthful when contemplating the human condition can relate and be effected by this film.

christopher-underwood It seems I thought even more of this when first seen and I felt it, 'Absolutely sublime.' and 'Faultless' but now I feel maybe 'Venus in Furs' is even better. Beautifully made with sumptuous set design and costumerie and performances including a menacing one from Jack Taylor, are all fine. Featuring one of Bruno Nicolai's better scores this maintains an eerie sexiness throughout and thanks to Christopher Lees' central performance as narrator/De Sade all is most satisfactory. I think on this second viewing I was left feeling that it could either have been a little tougher and/or a little sexier but maybe it just caught me in the wrong mood and another viewing will have me purring with delight as before.

lazarillo "Eugenie" is a scandalous story from the Marquis de Sade about a naive young girl who is sold by her father into the servitude of a married pair of depraved libertines who proceed to seduce and debauch her. Not surprisingly, it has not received a lot cinematic treatment (and could probably not even be made these days). Even the incredibly prolific and repetitive Jesus Franco only made two versions of the story, this and one in the early 80's called "Erotismo" ("Eugenie de Sade", made a year later with Soledad Miranda, is also based on a De Sade story, but is about a very different character also named Eugenie).This is no doubt the better version. It was made at a time when Franco had access to plenty of a money through producer Harry Allen Towers and quality international stars, not only Maria Rohm and Jack Taylor as the libertine couple, but even Christopher Lee (who apparently had no idea what he was getting into) as the leader of the strange sex cult the pair belong to. As the title character Eugenie, Swedish actress Marie "Inga" Lillejahl is a typical Franco actress of the period--not as talented as some Franco collaborators like Soledad Miranda or Rosalba Neri, but very beautiful and classy unlike many of his later actresses (including his wife Lina Romay, who beautiful as she was, had a bad tendency of indulging the director in his most tasteless cinematic fantasies). Lillejahl, I might also add, was older than the character she played, and it turns out it's much better to cast a twenty year old as a fourteen year in a fairly explicit role than an actual fourteen year old as he did in "Erotismo" (Katja Beinert, who ironically could have easily passed for twenty), not only for moral reasons but also artistic ones--just as a drunk is best played by someone who is not actually drunk, a naive innocent is most effectively played by someone who is NOT actually a naive innocent.The beautiful, dream-like style of the movie also does a lot to mitigate the inherent sleaziness of the subject matter. The scenes of Lillejahl stumbling naked along barren sand dunes with lots of phallic jutting rocks as the morning sun comes up are very memorable (even if they don't make a lot of sense). The repetitive opening and closing sequences Franco uses is a hoary device that goes all the way back to the British classic "Dead of Night", but it is quite effective and really adds to the dream-like atmosphere. One of the "good" Franco movies.

alice_resnais Franco fans like to hold up EUGENIE as proof of his technical prowess. In fact, it only stands as further testament to his ineptitude. Okay, so Franco had access to the crane on this one... and so excited is he that he uses it again and again, with no imagination or purpose. The cinematographer was clearly a bit more accomplished than usual too, in fact the budget is clearly higher than your average Franco pic. But don't worry, his amateurism shines right through. Ridiculous casting (Liljedahl is way to old and tarty to play an 'innocent young girl'), lame dialogue, bad acting, inappropriate and clueless use of the camera, lame attempts at surrealism, un-erotic soft porn sequences... all the usual Franco 'trademarks' are here in abundance. If you want to watch porn, then buy the real thing. If you want to watch a movie, don't waste your time here.