– XXX is Celluloid Dimension’s latest weekly column featuring the hottest and naughtiest side of cinema. –
Directed by Jess Franco
Written by Jess Franco
Starring:
- Martine Fléty as Blue Rita
- Sarah Strasberg as Franchesa
- Dagmar Bürger as Sun
- Pamela Stanford as Gina
- Eric Falk as Janosch Lassard
Rating: 
I must be bananas for saying this, but I found this gaudy, overly daft Euro-spy flick immersed in sexploitation shenanigans to be a delightful arty anomaly in Uncle Jess’s voluminous, salacious oeuvre.
The synthetic setting of this rushed but slick Jess Franco routine – a flamboyant tableau of shapely strippers lit in glowing nightclub décor – is chock-full of sexual trickery and lewd manipulation, and I expected nothing less from a partnership between prolific Swiss producer Erwin Dietrich and the equally prolific Spaniard director. Their fecund collaborations consistently live up to their promise by delivering high doses of Euro sleaze. But Blue Rita feels different; an exquisite rarity among the customary foolproof porno fare by the pair Dietrich/Franco. Even these arresting anomalies rise above the physical plane of the flat and haphazard storytelling and end up exerting their formal dominance over the typical Francoisms – obtuse in-and-out zooms, close-ups of female genitalia and clumsy framing – rendering them all subtle, even oddly non-existent at times.
It’s as if Franco has spotted an ethereal beauty behind the prosaic mechanics of the plot, so he plans to discard his habitual visual scheme to show us that underlying beauty that in the debauched lens of his more elemental style he would not have been able to reveal. The plot is dead simple, but Jess Franco’s filmmaking tradition keeps it unnaturally convoluted. It’s about the eponymous inexpressive night dancer (Martine Fléty) who uses her place to entice rich men and then torture them. She is a murderous misandrist – due to the sexual abuse she suffered as a child – and she performs these sordid misdeeds with her coven of sapphic female servants who pledge allegiance to her with blood covenants and lesbian romps. To all this add a spy conspiracy, a green potion that turns you into a sex freak and a hell of a lot of pop hooey. The aesthetic panorama works as a futuristic Barbarella-esque anachronism in the midst of contemporary France, but it is wonderfully satisfying to see how all these antithetical components form such a practical and palatable association to deliver shallow but compelling thrills.
The dazzling cinematography – too good and insanely gorgeous to come from a cinematographer who has only three women-in-prison films under his belt – being guided by lethargic camera motions serves as a means of experimentation for Jess Franco, who forsakes the unseemly zooms for the static and the alienated. As a result, Jess Franco’s film has as much sex as any of his other films but done with grace and exuberance. Nonetheless explicit, but nice and understated. Something I never thought could be claimed for a sex scene helmed by Uncle Jess. Snappy and edgy, yet ferociously weird when you reflect on what the heck you’ve just seen. But it’s pretty clear to me that’s part of the fun.