Je brûle de partout film review

Burning Up Inside (1979)

– 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:

  • Susan Hemingway as Jenny
  • Brigitte Lahaie as Lorna
  • Jean Ferrère as Al Pereira (credited as Jean Ferrere)
  • Didier Aubriot as Tom
  • Filo Lemoine as Mr. Goldstone

Rating:

Two proud pervs, Gallic porn queen Brigitte Lahaie and Jean Ferrère, set their sights on a 16-year-old virgin (Susan Hemingway) in this grossly sleazy Uncle Jess ScuzzFest. First, they bang her, then they sell her to a swanky bordello where sick fantasies come to life. But it’s all for nothing: the pair of callous degenerates suddenly repent when they discover that the teenager is the daughter of a wealthy businessman—someone who could have made her far more valuable as a ransom than as a plaything. So they embark on an elaborate scheme to get her back.

Susan Hemingway, a recurring face in Franco’s filthiest fare, delivers an unnervingly passive performance in a gauntlet of graphic sensuality that manages to out-sleaze even the usual EuroSicko standards. Lahaie, strutting and sweating like she owns the genre, gives it everything but subtlety. The rest is a stew of sluggish sadism, wobbling camera shots, moaning-for-hire, and Franco’s trademark narrative incompetence.

What ultimately invigorates this esoteric, onerous experience is its rare confluence of miserabilism and hedonism. It delivers more than shallow debauchery or bleak atmosphere—it evokes a genuine sense of menace and thrill, a discomforting space where misery and pleasure converge at a dialectical intensity rarely achieved in exploitation cinema.

Sweaty bodies writhe under a narcotic haze, shifting from pure orgy to something closer to lamentation. For a moment, Franco stops leering and starts listening—to the way pleasure can mutate into humiliation, ecstasy into ache. It’s not top-tier Franco sleaze, but among his more explicit work, this may be one of the strangest, most unexpectedly affecting. Still, don’t worry—he keeps the kink intact.

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