Good concept, poorly executed.

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Traumatized trumpet player Jimmy Logan (a solid and likable performance by James Darren) discovers the beautiful dead body of mysterious femme fatale Wanda Reed (smoldering and mesmerizing blonde Maria Rohm) on the beach in Istanbul. Things take a turn for the strange after Wanda shows up still alive in Rio. Logan and his singer girlfriend Rita (a delightful portrayal by the delicious Barbara McNair) soon find themselves caught up in a dangerous whirlpool world of deception and debauchery that also involves predatory lesbian Olga (luscious brunette Margaret Lee), depraved rich playboy Ahmed Kortobawi (Klaus Kinski in peak suavely slimy form), and art dealer Percival Kapp (a brief appearance by Dennis Price).Director Jess Franco, who also co-wrote the abstract, yet intriguing script by Malvin Wald, relates the engrossingly outer story at a hypnotically deliberate pace, does an ace job of crafting an arrestingly far-out, oblique, and enigmatic dreamy atmosphere, pulls off a neat supernatural twist ending, makes nice use of the exotic locations, and delivers a satisfying serving of tasty female nudity along with a sizzling smidgen of sizzling S&M-flavored soft-core sex. Angelo Lotti's stylish cinematography provides a sumptuous bright look and boasts lots of funky visual flourishes. The supremely groovy jazz score by Manfred Mann and Mike Hugg hits the swanky'n'swinging spot. Both Frnco fans and aficionados of oddball 60's psychedelic cinema should totally dig this one.

This is meant to be Franco's masterpiece which says it all.It's a bad film in many ways though worth viewing as a product of it's times.Most of the budget must have been spent on the copious amount of downers it took to keep James Darren in the zombified state in which he sleepwalks through the film.He's a long way from his Hollywood pretty-boy heyday and must've been wondering how his career had reached such a nadir.That said there are some rather lovely ladies getting their kit off-it is a Franco film after all.And the hauntingly deranged score complete with the payoff line sung accapela after each of the title character's murders will linger in the mind.What it's all about is anyones guess but the ending almost made me feel it made some kind of sense and was worth watching....almost.

No doubt in Spain the name Jesús Franco is a perfectly normal one, no stranger than, say, Harry Brown or Jack Robinson would be to us, but to English eyes the combination of the name of the Son of God with that of a notorious dictator seems rather disconcerting. Senor Franco may have realised this, because for English-speaking audiences he dropped the second vowel from his Christian name, becoming simply "Jess". His supernatural and erotic thrillers from the sixties and seventies have won him a reputation in some circles as a cult director, but to my mind he has always seemed a classic example of the talentless hack director who suffers from delusions of grandeur and imagines himself a great auteur. The original novel "Venus in Furs" was published in1870 by the Austrian writer Leopold von Sacher Masoch, the man who gave his name to masochism, but apart from the title, the name of the heroine (Wanda) and her love of wearing fur coats (and very little else) there is very little connection between the novel and the film. Sacher Masoch's name does not appear in the credits, which state that the script is "from a story by Jess Franco". The hero of the original book was named Severin, but here, more prosaically, he becomes Jimmy. The film opens with Jimmy, a young jazz musician, wandering along a beach near Istanbul, where he discovers the dead body of a young woman washed up on the beach, and realises with a shock that the corpse is that of his girlfriend Wanda. The body appears to have been mutilated, but no precise information is given as to how she died. In fact, the film does not really give us any precise information about anything. From Istanbul Jimmy travels to Rio de Janeiro where he finds Wanda alive and well, but the causes of her sudden return to life remain even more mysterious than the causes of her death. The one clue is given in the film's Italian title, "Puo una morta rivivere per amore?"- "Can a dead woman return to life through love?" (This is officially an Italian film, even though the dialogue is in English). Jimmy revives his relationship with Wanda, much to the discomfiture of his new girlfriend Rita. I mean, sharing your boyfriend with another woman is one thing, but sharing him with a reanimated corpse quite another. Trying to summarise the plot any further would be a vain enterprise, as this is the sort of film which generally avoids plot altogether. The rest of the film is generally taken up with various love scenes involving either Wanda or another mysterious fur-clad beauty named Olga. It ends with Jimmy returning to Istanbul, wandering along the same beach and discovering Wanda's corpse for the second time. The sex-scenes are fairly tame by modern standards, but in 1969 sex-scenes of any description were something of a novelty so they were probably well- received by audiences of the day. None of the cast made any impression, except for the wrong reasons. Maria Rohm as Wanda has something of the look of a porcelain doll, and about as much acting ability. She was so wooden that I wondered if Franco had instructed her to play the role in a deliberately emotionless way. James Darren as Jimmy is no better, although I was surprised to see Dennis Price among the cast-list. In the 1940s Price was one of the rising stars of the British cinema, especially after his starring role in Robert Hamer's great comedy "Kind Hearts and Coronets", but his career went into something of a decline in the sixties, largely due to problems in his personal life, and he ended up acting in some rather unsuitable films, especially low-budget horror. I never realised, however, that he declined quite as far as this. There is no real reason for the action to take place in Istanbul or Rio- none of the characters are Turkish or Brazilian- but Franco doubtless fancied a trip to somewhere exotic. Some of the shots of the two cities are quite attractive, but in general the photography is highly eccentric, Franco making the maximum use of such devices as shaky hand- held cameras, blurry soft-focus and colour filters. Some of these devices can, in other hands, be effective, but here they only give an overall impression of ineptitude and of a director desperately trying to show off his cleverness while betraying his lack of it. I came very close to awarding this film the ultimate insult of a 1/10 mark; I only refrained because I normally reserve that for films which fall into the "so bad it's funny" category. "Venus in Furs" never quite sinks that low- it's more a question of "so bad it's boring"- but it did nothing to change my impression that Franco was the man who tried to do to the European film industry what his infamous namesake did to Spanish democracy. 2/10

Young man with a horn freaks out after witnessing an S&M orgy/murder; the victim, a rather mannish-looking woman, washes up topless on the beach...appearing to the musician not long afterwards at a club in Rio de Janeiro for a sexual affair. Inept 'art' movie taking advantage of the new permissiveness in cinema (flashes of naked flesh, a few lesbian clinches). Star James Darren looks appropriately confused by it all, though he does manage to keep his clothes on! All the women in the movie look like first-day drag queens, and none of the action on hand is erotic or colorful in the slightest. If you do watch, try to figure out why every fourth or fifth scene is in slow-motion. Childishly jaded, hopelessly derivative, bungled and benumbed. NO STARS from ****