Verdict
Summary
Fans of Jess Franco will surely love the film, but newcomers might be chilled by it, as it’s not necessarily “sexy,” but much more macabre and unsettling than the average erotic film.
Plot:
A widow stalks and kills her the medical board who ruined her husband’s life.
Review:
Dr. Johnson (Fred Williams) has an obsession with strange experiments on human test subjects, and his basement is full of weird human remains in tubes and jars. The guy is clearly on the path of Frankenstein, and his beautiful wife (played by Soledad Miranda, who was killed in a car crash the year this was released) doesn’t seem the least bit bothered by her husband’s unhealthy experiments, and in fact loves him all the more for his brilliance. When the medical board orders him to cease his weird experiments, Dr. Johnson’s reputation is destroyed, and when he’s no longer able to practice medicine of any kind, he commits suicide, but the beautiful Mrs. Johnson never reports his death and his corpse begins rotting on their marital bed. Fueled by her hatred for the medical board, she dolls herself up (not that she needs much to catch a man’s eye) and goes on the hunt for the men (and one woman) who are to blame for her husband’s ruination and death. Posing as a prostitute, she lands herself in the bedroom of each and every one of her husband’s colleagues (one of whom is played this film’s director Jess Franco), and starting off with her first victim, she castrates him, which spooks the other board members. But Mrs. Johnson is by now clearly insane and will stop at absolutely nothing at destroying the whole lot of them. Meanwhile, she engages in necrophilia with her dead husband one last time before they both reach oblivion.
From Jess Franco, that Spanish movie maestro who had hundreds (upon hundreds) of credits, but reached his peak in the early 1970s with films such as Vampyros Lesbos and Count Dracula, She Killed in Ecstasy is a stylish if morose and depressing erotica film tainted by the fact that its star was killed before the film was even released. In fact, her character in this film (spoiler) is killed in a car crash, eerily foreshadowing what would happen to her later on. Franco clearly saw her as his muse, having directed her several other times previously, and in this one she has a strangely hypnotic look to her, almost as if she’s in a trance the entire time. Fans of Franco will surely love the film, but newcomers might be chilled by it, as it’s not necessarily “sexy,” but much more macabre and unsettling than the average erotic film.
Severin brings She Killed in Ecstasy to beautiful 4K in a two-disc combo pack that also includes a Blu-ray disc, and the transfer is sharp and stunning with warm, vivid colors and sound. Severin’s high standards are justified for this release, and if you grab it now, the combo comes with a thick slipcover. Bonus features abound for the Franco enthusiasts.
Bonus Materials
- Ecstasy In Rage – Interview With Stephen Thrower, Author Of Murderous Passions: The Delirious Cinema Of Jesús Franco
- In The Land Of Franco Part 13
- Jess Killed In Ecstasy – Interview With Writer/Director Jess Franco
- Sublime Soledad – Interview With Soledad Miranda Historian Amy Brown
- Paul Muller On Jess Franco – Interview With Frequent Franco Star
- German Trailer
