Review of Succubus

Nightclub striptease artist Lorna Green (ravishing redhead Janine Reynaud in peak sultry and enigmatic form) performs a racy S&M act that threatens to become a deadly reality. Pretty soon Lorna is having trouble distinguishing fantasy from reality. Is Lorna some kind of agent for Satan? Or is she just going mad? Director Jess Franco, working from an oblique, yet intriguing script by Pier A. Caminecci, delivers an artful blend of elegance and decadence that along with the languid pace, tasteful, but still highly arousing nudity and kinky sex stuff, a supremely hip and groovy jazz score by Friedrich Gulda and Jerry van Rooyen, a nifty array of eclectic literary and cinematic references, and an extremely abstract narrative that keeps you guessing right up until the end exactly what is going on all combine together to create a heady and hypnotic mind trip that casts its own singularly off-kilter spell and radiates its own heavy and unique psychedelic vibe. This movie is a true work of boldly unconventional and experimental avant-garde cinema that plays by its own decidedly obscure and esoteric rules, with a wealth of gorgeous visuals courtesy of the vibrant color cinematography by Jorge Herrero and Franz Xavier Lederle and such inspired moments of sheer weirdness as a bunch of people at a posh party acting like dogs and mannequins that for some inexplicable reason come to creepy life. The insanely lovely Reynaud looks positively smashing in fancy dresses and even better in the buff. Moreover, there are fine performances by Jack Taylor as Lorna's suavely evil manager William Francis Mulligan, Adrian Hoven as concerned psychiatrist Ralf Drawes, and Michel Lemoine as the sinister Pierce. Howard Vernon briefly pops up in a neat bit part as the flaky Admiral Kapp. An admirably bizarre and uncompromising little curio.