Rodolfo lives an empty, cold existence next to his second wife. While his first wife Graciela and their teenage daughter Ana go through decisive moments in their lives, Rodolfo will discreetly try to make his way back to them after abandoning them ten years earlier. 3 is a comedy centered on three characters condemned to the same absurd destiny: to be a family.
Not a very ambitious movie, but it’s cute. It was being written by him, Gonzalo Delgado and Juan Pablo Rebella when the latter committed suicide in 2005.
Quote: The life of a family of peach farmers in a small village in Catalonia changes when the owner of their large estate dies and his lifetime heir decides to sell the land, suddenly threatening their livelihood.
The Crime of Cuenca is a Spanish drama film, directed by Pilar Miró and based on historical facts from the early 20th century in the Spanish province of Cuenca. On 21 August 1910, in the small town of Osa de la Vega, in the province of Cuenca, Jose Maria Grimaldos, known as «El Cepa», is seen on the road to the nearby village of Tresjuncos and then disappears. His family fears foul play and reports it to the Guardia Civil (rural police). In the subsequent judicial investigation the family and others express their suspicions that two men, Gregorio Valero and Leon Sanchez had killed him for his money. This first case was closed in September 1911 with no convictions. In 1913 a new, young and overzealous judge named Isasa arrives. Influenced by the local boss, Judge Isasa decides to reopen the case. The two suspects are arrested by the Guardia Civil and under torture, confess to having killed the man and destroyed the body. The fiscal (district attorney) asks for the death penalty for both. Finally, on 25 May 1918 a popular jury convicted the two men of murder and they are sentenced to 18 years in prison. After serving eleven years, they are released under a general pardon on 20 February 1924. Two years later, in early 1926, it is discovered by chance that the reputed victim, Grimaldos, «El Cepa», was alive and had been living in a nearby town. The ugly truth is thus revealed and the innocence of the convicted men becomes evident. With many legal difficulties, the case is reopened and eventually reached the Supreme Court, where the convictions were overturned.
Based on these facts, writer Ramón J. Sender, wrote the novel El lugar de un hombre (The Place of a Man) in 1939 and later, in 1979, Pilar Miro directed the movie based on the story. The film is an attack against torture and it is understood that the crime in the title is committed by the Guardia Civil in torturing the suspects. The torture scenes are depicted in great detail and crudity and the movie was initially banned in Spain and the director subjected to military courts martial. Only in August 1981 was the film allowed to be shown in Spain where it was a box office success.
Nina is a 20 years old girl from Valladolid who lives with her divorced father, an autoritarian and conservative man. Trini is of the same age and has lost her mother. For both Valladolid and their families have nothing to offer and therefore they go on a risky voyage to the Costa del Sol at the south of Spain. Making stop in Madrid they search for inducement, work and independence.
Despite the title, there ain’t no Victor Von Frankenstein nor his patchwork of a monster in this film! A man suffers from the curse of lyncanthropy and seeks out the aid of a German doctor and his wife who are experts in the occult. Unknowingly, the cursed man has summoned two vampires instead, who have plans of their own for the werewolf.
Quote: Director Jonás Trueba captures the spirit of a group of teens in Spain in an empathic, compelling, and moving way. In 2016, Trueba asked the teens to participate in a five-year project, in which they recreated situations from their lives. They talk about their insecurities, wanting to be accepted, loneliness, and what they are supposed to do with their lives. They demonstrate against school privatisation, debate politics and, like many adults, worry about the planet’s future.
A doctor unleashes a nightmare of hypnosis curtailing mad violence on the family of a crippled young woman. Quote: The Eyes. The penetrating eyes of the seemingly kindly Dr. Orloff glare into Melissa’s very soul as his soothing voice drones on and on. Melissa Comfort (Montserrat Prous) is a crippled young woman living with her wicked witch relatives (Kali Hansa and Loretta Tovar). Melissa is disturbed by recurring dreams of her father (played by director Franco) dying in front of her, dribbling blood onto her nightgown. What she doesn’t realize is that her relatives have a hidden agenda and her relatives aren’t aware of Orloff’s own sinister plans to wipe out the remnants of the Comfort family.
William Berger is well cast as the evil Doctor who controls Melissa with hypnosis and drugs. His presence and Franco’s whistling, haunting score cast a spell over the proceedings which is only broken by the rather abrupt ending. This psychological horror film is deliberately paced but absorbing throughout. There’s no sex or nudity and stylistically it is almost zoom-free, a break from Franco’s other early 1970s sex-horror projects.
Montserrat Prous is a Lina Romay look-alike who is excellent at playing innocent victims of evil plots (cf. 1972’s UN SILENCIO DE TUMBA), one wonders what ever happened to her after her mid-70s association with Franco. In the end, though, this is Berger’s film. All he has to do is walk into a room and our attention is riveted.
The theme of an innocent woman turned into a programmed killer was a familiar one for Franco (see MISS MEURTE, SUCCUBUS, LES CAUCHEMARS NAISSENT LA NUIT, AL OTRO LADO DEL ESPEJO and MIL SEXOS TIENE LA NOCHE for comparison) and this particular film was remade in 1983 as SOLO ANTE EL TERROR with Romay taking over the role of Melissa.
The film’s most atmospheric scene occurs on a mist shrouded road where Melissa murders her loyal butler (Jose Manuel Martin). Franco also uses the exotic vegetation of the Canary Islands locations to maximum effect. Robert Woods and Edmund Purdom are on hand to act out some last minute heroics, and look for Lina in the very small role of Woods’ jealous girlfriend.”
A young woman travels from the 60s to the present day, via the 80s, crossing the thresholds of femininity and history, until she meets Carla next to the blue sky of the Catalan coast.
In the Austrian Alpine town of Holfen, a young woman is found murdered. Theo and Hansel, two wood-cutters, stop off at a bar where they tell Dr. Kalman, an academic studying local folk tales, about the history of the von Klaus family, in particular the murderous cruelty of the first Baron von Klaus, whose 17th century ghost is said to haunt the mists and quagmires of the surrounding countryside. Soon after, the wood-cutters discover the dead body of another young woman. The current patriarch of the von Klaus family, and chief suspect for the murders, is Max, who lives with his elderly sister Elisa. Elisa is dying, which prompts a visit from her son Ludwig, accompanied by his fiancee Karin. Elisa reveals to Ludwig the whereabouts of a key to the von Klaus dungeon which has been locked for many years. She begs him to end the family curse for all time and to take his fiancee far away. Ludwig enters the dungeon and finds a memoir written by the original Baron von Klaus, expounding his amoral philosophy…
In this surreal and sensuous mystery/noir, Lina Romay (The Female Vampire, Lorna the Exorcist) plays Irina, a partner in a male-female mind reading act. At night she experiences vivid and charged dreams which end in murder. It seems that the people whose minds she reads are being killed off one by one. In the 1980s, after the death of the Spanish dictator, Jess Franco returned to his native country and made a series of films in which he was given almost total freedom. Night Has A Thousand Desires is one of the most artistically successful of these films. It’s filled with familiar Franco touches – artful cinematography, atmospheric locations, naked women, an avant garde soundtrack – and it features one of Lina Romay’s most committed performances.
In an unnamed Central American state on the eve of a crucial election, a young police informer working for police officer Miguel Mora bent on uncovering the shady works of popular politician Maurice Leprince is killed. However, thugs working for Leprince began to be killed one by one as well…
After the death of Victor Frankenstein (Dennis Price), two figures vie for control of his metallic-skinned monster (Fernando Bilbao) and the radical technology that created him: the scientist’s daughter, Vera (Beatriz Savon), and the immortal wizard Cagliostro (Howard Vernon), who is assisted by a blind bird-woman with an unquenchable thirst for blood (Anne Libert). With THE EROTIC RITES OF FRANKENSTEIN, controversial filmmaker Jess Franco merged his fondness for old-school horror with his unique and perverse tastes in sex and violence, partly inspired by the garish adult European comics of the early 1970s.
Initially a documentary about the making of Jess Franco’s “Count Dracula” (a 1970 vampire movie starring Christopher Lee), “Cuadecuc, Vampir” presents “an intervention”: an atmospheric, silent, black and white film-essay, serving as an alternative version of the original movie, showing grainy footage of the performers–both in and out of their characters–wandering through the Gothic sets and the natural locations; a ghostly narration between fiction and reality.
Quote: Director Jonás Trueba captures the spirit of a group of teens in Spain in an empathic, compelling, and moving way. In 2016, Trueba asked the teens to participate in a five-year project, in which they recreated situations from their lives. They talk about their insecurities, wanting to be accepted, loneliness, and what they are supposed to do with their lives. They demonstrate against school privatisation, debate politics and, like many adults, worry about the planet’s future.
With the intention of stealing the compensation for a work accident, Enrique kills an old man. However, it turns out that he had not yet collected it, so he will try, then, to falsify the signature of the check. Meanwhile, at the same time that the police are investigating the case, the son of the police inspector investigates on his own.
Amaia has just become a mother. Her partner is away from home for months and she feels overwhelmed, incapable of looking after her baby and going back to her job as a translator. She decides to take refuge in her parents’ home with the hope that they will look after her and her baby in her childhood home, in a lovely coastal village in the Basque Country. But life has other plans, her mother falls ill and it’s Amaia who will have to look after all of them. She finds herself living the life her mother had thirty years before. She becomes a housewife, with an absent partner, caring for a baby and a sick grandmother. Family roles are reversed, changing their relationships forever. The daughter becomes everyone’s mother. Amaia, who until now only loved her mother, will start to understand her. 7 wins, 3 nominations
Reckless (Spanish: Balarrasa) is a 1951 Spanish drama film directed by José Antonio Nieves Conde. It was entered into the 1951 Cannes Film Festival.
Quote: Javier Mendoza, a Spanish missionary known as Balarrasa, recalls his life while waiting for the worst after being trapped in a snowstorm in Alaska. Of disorderly life in his youth, during the Civil War he suffered a traumatic event, when playing cards with the guard that played with his companion. He loses and dies while replacing him. Followed by the sensation of guilt, he decides to straighten its life and enters the seminary.
The most-remembered film of the religious cinema that was filmed with certain frequency in Spain at the time. The outstanding filmmaker José Antonio Nieves Conde (Surcos) impresses an enormous realism with the advice of several priests, introduces with talent some coups of humor that contrast with the most dramatic sequences, and obtains memorable interpretations of the distribution, headed by Fernando Fernán Gómez, in one of his best works.
Quote: Pedro Almodovar’s films are a struggle between real and fake heartbreak–between tragedy and soap opera. They’re usually funny, too, which increases the tension. You don’t know where to position yourself while you’re watching a film like “All About My Mother,” and that’s part of the appeal: Do you take it seriously, like the characters do, or do you notice the bright colors and flashy art decoration, the cheerful homages to Tennessee Williams and “All About Eve” (1950) and see it as a parody? Even Almodovar’s camera sometimes doesn’t know where to stand: When the heroine’s son writes in his journal, the camera looks at his pen from the point of view of the paper.
“All About My Mother” is one of the best films of the Spanish director, whose films present a Tennessee Williams sensibility in the visual style of a 1950s Universal-International tearjerker. Rock Hudson and Dorothy Malone never seem very far offscreen. Bette Davis isn’t offscreen at all: Almodovar’s heroines seem to be playing her. Self-parody is part of Almodovar’s approach, but “All About My Mother” is also sincere and heartfelt; though two of its characters are transvestite hookers, one is a pregnant nun and two more are battling lesbians, this is a film that paradoxically expresses family values.
The movie opens in Madrid with a medical worker named Manuela (Cecilia Roth) and her teenage son Esteban (Eloy Azorin). They’ve gone to see a performance of “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1993) and now wait across the street from the stage door so Esteban can get an autograph from the famous actress Huma Rojo (Marisa Paredes). She jumps into a taxi (intercut with shots from “All About Eve” of Bette Davis eluding an autograph hound), and Esteban runs after her and is struck dead in the street. That sets up the story, as Manuela journeys to Barcelona to inform Esteban’s father of the son’s death.
There is irony as the film folds back on itself, because its opening scenes show Manuela, now a transplant coordinator but once an actress, performing in a video intended to promote organ transplants. In the film, grieving relatives are asked to allow the organs of their loved ones to be used; later Manuela plays the same scene for real, as she’s asked to donate her own son’s heart.
The Barcelona scenes reflect Almodovar’s long-standing interest in characters who cross the gender divide. Esteban’s father is now a transvestite prostitute. In a scene worthy of Fellini, we visit a field in Barcelona where cars circle a lineup of flamboyant hookers of all sexes, and where Manuela, seeking her former lover, finds an old friend named Agrado (Antonia San Juan). The name means “agreeable,” we’re told, and Agrado is a person with endless troubles of her own who nevertheless enters every scene looking for the laugh. In one scene, she dresses in a Chanel knockoff and is asked if it is real. As a street hooker, she couldn’t afford Chanel, but her answer is unexpected: “How could I buy a real Chanel with all the hunger in the world?” There are unexpected connections between the characters, even between Esteban’s father and Sister Rosa (Penelope Cruz), a nun who works in a shelter for battered prostitutes. And new connections are forged. We meet the actress Huma Rojo once again, and her girlfriend and co-star Nina (Candela Pena): “She’s hooked on junk and I’m hooked on her.” When Nina flakes out, Manuela is actually able to understudy her role, having played it years ago. And Agrado finds a job as Huma’s personal assistant. Meanwhile, the search goes on for the missing lover.
Manuela is the heroine of the film and its center, but Agrado is the source of life. There’s an extraordinary scene in which she takes an empty stage against a hostile audience and tries to improvise a one-woman show around the story of her life. Finally she starts an inventory of the plastic surgeries that assisted her in the journey from male to female, describing the pain, procedure and cost of each, as if saying, “I’ve paid my dues to be who I am today. Have you?” Almodovar’s earlier films sometimes seemed to be manipulating the characters as an exercise. Here the plot does handstands in its eagerness to use coincidence, surprise and melodrama. But the characters have a weight and reality, as if Almodovar has finally taken pity on them–has seen that although their plights may seem ludicrous, they’re real enough to hurt. These are people who stand outside conventional life and its rules, and yet affirm them. Families are where you find them and how you make them, and home, it’s said, is the place where, if you have to go there, they have to take you in.
Jose Manuel Gomez Perales, “El Jaro”, lives alone in Madrid, with no other company than his band and his “girlfriends.” One day he meets Mercedes, a prostitute of Mexican origin. Mercedes falls for him and offers him her home to take him apart from his life of crime.
