Look, when you have a movie called White Skin, Black Thighs and Jess Franco directs it, you may know what to expect.

What I did not expect was to see a love making scene where people are horizontally dancing on what appears to be dry ice, as smoke pours out all over the place.

One of the movies that Franco made with Erwin C. Dietrich, this is pretty much a remake of Le Journal d'une Nymphomane - thanks Adrian from Letterboxd - this is mostly a series of couplings with only the slightest of connecting story, but hey - there's an alien that lives in the basement and he gets to make love to one of the actresses, which is pretty wild, when you get your mind around it.

There's are some great production values, but someone must have yelled at Franco to keep his hands off the camera, because there are no zooms in and out. In fact, I felt kind of strange watching one of his movies without the constant camera moves.

The main story is about Marga (Diotta Fatou, who is also in Franco's uncredited Girls in the Night Traffic and Swedish Nympho Slaves) trying to kill herself after catching her girlfriend Lena (Kali Hansa, Night of the Sorcerers, Demon Witch Child) making love to Victor Kühn (Erik Falk) on stage.

Franco said in a commentary track that Hansa disappeared after this movie, possibly back to her native Cuba "because she was against Fidel Castro...she wanted to be there to fight him because she was a very strong woman. I never heard about her again."

Victor is married to Lola (Pilar Coll, Around the World In 80 Beds) and when she finds out that her man has led a woman to her suicide attempt, she's not mad. She is upset that he slept with a black woman, however, and then ends up exploring her other more sapphic side with Lena, so man, that rich Kühn couple just can't resist that lady, huh?

All in all, this wasn't as good as the film it's remaking, which is true nearly all of the time but always definitely true when it comes to the many, many times Franco tried to make his movies again.

At first this sounds like a good thing. 1970s porn usually has so silly story lines and so low production values, even Franco could have made it better. This time he was able to try anything sexy without worrying about the rating. Even his annoying sudden zooms are in place in a 70s porn flick: back then everybody used to zoom in on the genitals an awful lot. And these years in Switzerland were a strong period for Jess Franco, with relatively decent budgets and finer work than his usual. This disaster is close in time to Barbed Wire Dolls, which is good by exploitation standards and to Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun, which is rather good by any standards.

The Swiss businessman Robert visits a strip club-brothel and decides to sleep with one of the girls, black-skinned Marga. Then disaster strikes: while he actually sleeps the girl jumps from the window. While she's in coma in the hospital, the police arrests him for attempted murder. His wife Lola does not want to let him rot in prison (which would be very understandable in my opinion) but decides to investigate the background, to clear his name and then leave him as a free man. So she applies for work in the brothel, which is now lead by Lena, an exhibitionist hobby-stripper and also the Lesbian girlfriend of Marga (who may look like a cheap whore -- as Lola refers to her -- but actually she owns the place).

At this point the direction and cinematography seem to be rather good: everything happens in the same small rooms with a claustrophobic feel. The compositions are dominated by strong black-red-white and the bright stage lights are always shaded with clouds of cigarette smoke. Even the shaky camera work seems to emphasize Lola's anxiety. Regretfully all this remains so till the end of the film and consequently gets tedious rather soon. (It is strange in a Franco film, but there is no tropical island sequence here.)

Lola had no real reason to be anxious in the end. Lena sees through her from the beginning and after seducing her she quickly produces Marga's diary which proves that she was intent on suicide. (The police really should have sent a pretty female officer to question her!) I'm not going to discuss her reasons here, but if you've seen anything from Franco, it won't come as a surprise.

The trouble is, Marga's experiences are told with an amount of realism that is not enough to make this a realist movie, but enough to ruin this as an erotic one. For example, all the men she has sex with skip foreplay, this might be a realistic touch but unpleasant to view. Once she even leads a BDSM session that is unbelievably pathetic -- there's no doubt a lot of people do it this way (there must be a reason why the sex shops of the world sell bad jokes for whips and not the real thing),but I'm sure nobody can feel aroused from seeing this on screen.

There is another problem and again a very surprising one in a Jess Franco film: the women are not beautiful. Well, Lena has a beautiful body with a nice puffy you know what, but her face is rough and her voice is hoarse. (Unpleasantly so, not Amanda Lear-style sexy hoarse, although the soundtrack is in German and I admit, I rarely find this language sexy.) Still Lena is the local sex goddess because she is the only one character in the whole film who knows what foreplay is. She also knows how to trim a bush -- the other two are so natural, I never consider them really naked. And she actually can act a little, which is not the case with the other two ladies.

Lola has a pretty face and nice legs but her upper body is almost frightening, with small artificial breasts and a vertical groove. Lina Romay would have been so much better in this role! And I found nothing beautiful in Marga, although she is slender, with narrow boyish hips. This and her black skin (which seems to be rare in this town) might be enough to get her clients indeed. But she is the one who has most screen time, without any beauty, acting abilities or graceful movements, which makes this movie almost unbearably boring.

All the male actors, including Robert and especially Victor, are so bad that they seem to be extras in the actors' places.

So, why not one star? As I mentioned before, cinematography seems to be rather good for ten minutes or so. And the score is better than Franco's usual, it is stylish and almost good sometimes, in an Emmanuelleish sense.