Succubus 1998 Horror Movie Review

Va-va-voomish Janine Reynaud (Kiss Me Monster) plays Lorna, the star of an underground nightclub’s Grand Guignol theater who harbors a dark, haunting secret. She performs elaborate S/M fantasies nightly with a bound naked couple before she pretends to kill them, but she’s losing her grip on reality. Dreams, flashbacks, and erotic fantasies blur with her waking world and pretty soon she’s murdering her sexual partners for real… or is she? The answer may have something to do with a furtive stranger on the fringes of her consciousness and a plot to drive her insane, but it’s hard to tell for sure. Sexploitation master Jess Franco creates an alienated but gorgeous vision of the decadent grotesque-chic world of European high society with oblique camera angles, distorted images, and disorienting editing, turning a kinky erotic thriller into a heady (if abstract) psychological fantasy. If it’s ultimately too obscure to make sense, it’s nonetheless an ambitious, intoxicatingly dreamy piece of Eurotrash cinema. German leading men Howard Vernon and Adrian Hoven lend their aristocratic bearings in costarring roles. —Sean Axmaker