Released recently from perennial boutique favorite Mondo Macabro comes a crazy sex comedy and bleak crime drama in a perverse and fun double feature. Drop your pants, stick out your thumb and get ready to hitchhike into some action!
Dany (Sandra Julien of Jean Rollins’ Shiver of the Vampire) is a freelance fashion model hitchhiking across the countryside to get to the next job. Along the way she meets up with increasingly weird and horny people willing to help her out but seemingly always with strings attached. There’s the butterfly hunter who likes frolicking in the nude. We have the hearse driver who wants to have sex under his hearse’s corpse. We’ve got a couple who wants to pull Dany into their S&M fantasies. We have a knife-wielding psycho. There’s a female singing hippie cross-dressing as a guy who wants to seduce Dany. And of course, there’s the posh prince who likes to share. Where will Dany’s crazy journey take her next? Next in The Girl Can’t Stop! a down-on-his-luck shipbuilder hatches a scheme to use his wife as bait to blackmail a sleazy mortgage lender. These things never go as planned, do they?
Ravishing Dany is a fun, freewheeling sex comedy with bizarre shifts in tone and a charming lead performance from Sandra Julien (reminding me a little of that same naughty naivete of Desiree Cousteau in Pretty Peaches). Plot wise, it’s certainly not revelatory, essentially using Dany’s fashion gigs as an excuse to have her meet the various zany eccentrics along the way. Speaking of the bizarre tonal shifts, it does seem odd that the film has both scenes like the butterfly hunting and the crazy guy. They feel almost like they’re from different films. It does give the movie a bit of an unpredictability to it, not know who Dany is going to end up with next (although it’s a safe bet that whoever it’s with that she’ll be naked pretty quickly with them regardless). If you like your ‘out there’ sex comedies, give Dany a spin. She might just hit that sweet spot for you. Also from director Willy Tozier (who had a long and respected film career in France making fairly conventional mainstream films), The Girl Can’t Stop! is very different in tone from Dany although it does have some of the same dark sexual deviances (I can see why these films were paired even though they are tonally quite different). It is essentially a fairly grim neo-noir crime drama with a very nice soundtrack. While the film certainly has its fair share of twists and turns, as you’d expect of a noir, it doesn’t engage quite as well as Dany does by virtue of having several expository dialogue scenes that just seem to go on too long and bog down the pacing. Still, it has some very nice cinematography and ultimately offers some nice thrills and weird kinks.
The transfers for both Ravishing Dany and The Girl Can’t Stop are mastered in 2K from the original negatives and both look very natural and clean. There are occasion issues with the source but they don’t detract from the viewing. I think this is best that both of these films will ever look. Both films are offered as mono audio tracks and sound fine with little distracting hiss or distortion. For extras we have a few neat things that help give the films some context. First the disc features an interview with Willy Tozier’s daughter Catherine, and she gives a nice overview of her father’s career and how these two films fit into it. Additionally we have a video of actor/director Christophe Bier reading filming notes of Willy Tozier’s stored in a vault and a video essay called Dany and the Censors also featuring Bier talking about Ravishing Dany’s difficulties in being released. Of scholarly interest is also a few XXX inserts that were shoehorned into Ravishing Dany in some markets (and frankly they’re pretty ugly-looking inserts that could only hurt the film). Plus if you’re one of those lucky folks to get a red case edition, it includes a nice booklet featuring an essay on the movies by Jacques Spohr.
Mondo Macabro delivers a unique euro cult experience once again with this engaging French double feature from director Willy Tozier. If you dig Mondo and the kinds of off-the-beaten-path films that consistently delivers, chances are these will be right up your alley.