Verdict
Summary
What does it amount to? Not a whole lot, but Franco fans might need to own it and study it, but everyone else will feel like they’ve been bamboozled into Blue Rita’s dingy basement for an endless tease of something that they’ll never quite obtain.
Plot:
A naughty nightclub is actually a hub of brainwashing, torture, and espionage.
Review:
On the surface, Blue Rita’s nightclub is a hotspot of totally nude dancing, erotically charged artistic displays of performance art, and weird jazz music. Blue Rita herself (played by Martine Flety) is a very accommodating madam of sorts, offering her curious and wealthy patrons just about anything they could ask for: heaping doses of drugs, alcohol, and psychedelics, with the cherry on top being sex with her special dancers if they meet the criteria of being influential, wealthy, and / or can reciprocate with big tips, top secret information, or funneling more clients into her joint. You see, Blue Rita is working for the government, and her establishment is a hub of brainwashing, kinky torture, and espionage. She brainwashes beautiful young women with bizarre voodoo rituals, implantations of electrodes into her nubile dancers, and all these girls are used to mess around with the minds, bodies, and spirits of those unlucky men who might have intel that Blue Rita can use to relay to her superiors. Unsuspecting men are lured to the basement where they think they’re about to get laid with some of Rita’s dancers, but like lambs being led to the slaughter, the men are stripped, humiliated, and chained in cages where they’re teased with sex. Blue Rita only cares about the information!
From director Jess Franco, Blue Rita is a topsy-turvy sex and nudity heavy tease of a movie with a paper-thin plot that almost resembles any number of trashy European adult comic books from the ’70s and ’80s where the whole point is to feature sex, boobs, bush, and a color scheme to keep you turning to the next page. It’s outrageously bad, and ends up feeling like only half a movie with its nonstop nude dancing and parading of naked women across the frame. What does it amount to? Not a whole lot, but Franco fans might need to own it and study it, but everyone else will feel like they’ve been bamboozled into Blue Rita’s dingy basement for an endless tease of something that they’ll never quite obtain.
Full Moon’s recent Blu-ray / DVD combo pack of Blue Rita comes with an English-only audio, but it’s presented in a nice widescreen high definition transfer. Special features include a photo gallery, a handful of trailers for films directed by Franco, and an interview with Franco with former Fangoria editor Chris Alexander.
