A criminal organization somewhere in the Canary Islands with friends in high places is kidnapping famous women and selling them to their fans, which is pretty much the most illegal and immoral version of OnlyFans ever.

Who can stop them?

Two dancers - actually Two Female Spies with Flowered Panties - with the names of Cecile (Lina Romay) and Brigitte (Nadine Pascal) who are currently in prison, but the police ask them if they'd like to solve the case.

If all this movie gives you is Lina in high heels and a gold bikini being chased by a helicopter, is your life so bad?

Also: a magic ring that can hypnotize women.

I'd like to see the script to one of Franco's movies, because I can only imagine it says, "Diamonds are stolen. Strippers become detectives. Zoom in to honeypot. The end."

Starting to get into viewings for 2021,I decided that one of the best ways to start the year off was by watching a "new" title from film maker Jess Franco. Taken by the title,I got set to meet two female spies.

View on the film:

Detailed in Stephen Thrower's superb book Flowers Of Perversion: The Delirious Cinema Of Jesus Franco as being one of the first titles the film maker made on his return to Spain,and at a time when his relationship to muse Lina Romay was starting to become serious, co-writer/(with Evelyne Scott,an actress from some of his past films,in her lone writing credit) co-editor/(with Roland Grillon)co-composer/(with regular corroborator Daniel White) directing auteur Uncle Jess follows the spies with his gloriously disincentive trombone zoom-in button-bashing.

Meeting Cecile and Brigitte, (played by a cute Lina Romay and Nadine Pascal) at the airport, Jess gets into a wonderful Jazz groove in a seedy underworld nightclub, (a major recurring setting in his works) sliding between a continuation of his interest in De Sade imagery with a striking set-piece involving a severed head (!),that glides to a a nifty Euro Spy-style chase from a helicopter across rugged terrain for the captive Estrella Shelwin (played by the alluring Doris Regina, (real name Teodora Segura)making her debut.)

Matching the beat of the stylised directing, the screenplay by Scott and Uncle Jess plays a wonderfully lively tune, that swings Brigitte and Cecile from flirty, Pop-Art strippers,to mad-cap underhanded spies, who in the murky underworld Jazz nightclub,go in search of painted panties.

Prolific Spanish Director Jess Franco's comedies are far from my favourite films: 'Kiss Me Monster', 'Trip to Bangkok, Coffin Included' and 'Red Silk', to name but three, I find progressively challenging to sit through. It could just be that the humour is lost in translation. Whatever the reason, I much prefer his 'serious', more personal, projects.

'Two Female Spies', which begins very much as a comedy, features hapless strippers Cecille and Brigitte (Lina Romay and Nadine Pascal) who are released from prison in order to work undercover for the US Government. Pretty unbelievable, and presumably intended to be hilarious and farcical, their mission immediately takes on a far darker tone with the introduction of Adriana (Susan Hemingway),a very young-looking innocent who is hypnotised, kidnapped, tortured and in very protracted scenes, raped. That events continue to shift in tone in such a way throughout make this a truly unpredictable 96 minutes.

Always prolific, Franco may not have had the time to iron out a more consistent approach. Or, and this is not beyond the realms of possibility, the sudden lurching changes between silliness and horrifying cruelty might be entirely deliberate. In many ways, I like this discordance - you really don't know what kind of story you are delving into. In other ways, it does make for a very choppy experience. And of course, following rape and torture with jollity and titillation is deeply distasteful - but then, this is Jess Franco, who always thrived on being provocative. Problem is, that approach comes at the expense of an involving story, and sadly, 'Two Female Spies' proves to be an ultimately dull experience.

The character of Milton (Mel Rodrigo) is most changed by the various different edits of this film (although other characters are deleted altogether). Introduced as an effeminate homosexual, he proves to be the hero of the piece, before renouncing his old sexual ways and vowing to marry Romay's Cecille. The sight of Romay, dressed in very little but sandals and a shiny swimming cap, tottering over a rocky plain to a void a helicopter, is far from her greatest moment but once again proves that, whatever film she appeared in, she always entered into it whole-heartedly. Sadly her partner in this 'romp', Brigitte, succumbs to a fate which is probably the darkest moment this film has to offer. My score is 5 out of 10.