Short and Sweet: Your Thursday Night Open Thread

I had to leave work early today because I legit thought I was going to fall asleep at my desk. This has been happening occasionally and here we are again. I’ve seen specialists of many ilks and all have given me a clean bill of health. Now as mentioned, I can go for a long swim and there’s no issue but deliver nine 20lb cases to a community center and I’m exhausted. At these junctures cutting the lawn is simply out of the question. I just have no idea what is going on.

Btw, that’s Lina Romay in the banner pic-I’ll get to her in a bit.

Let’s forget about NFL News tonight.

One thing I did want to mention that happened to me recently and perhaps it’s occurred to you, whereby you somehow overlooked the existence of some artist that was a huge influence or is just very well-known. What came to mind was that a few commenters were not aware of Christopher Moore and had to go about remedying that.

I’ve spiraled down Sploitation Boulevard and am dumbfounded that I’d never heard of Jess Franco. And if you haven’t I’ll fill you in. He’s a Spanish fella that participated in the making of 157 films(!) between 1954 and 2013. He started off in the horror genre and branched out from there into almost any category you might mention. His primary influences in the early days were James Bond movies and the writing of the Marquis de Sade. Okay.

How does one make that many films? Well, one habit of his was to have three scripts going at the same time on one producer’s budget so it was important that he had a regular crew of actors that he could intersperse among the various plots. (though some discovered years later that footage that was ‘cut’ from one movie was actually used in another, meaning they didn’t get paid for their work.

He put it into another gear when he met the actress Lina Romay. She was a self-described exhibitionist (“The only reason I’ll have clothes on in a movie is if the script says so) that expanded the boundaries of soft core and Franco’s natural inclination towards hardcore. Quite the Muse.

Franco’s genres include hard and soft porn, Samurai stuff, westerns, spy movies, revenge stuff, Cannibals, sci-fi, jungle adventure, Nazi crap, mysteries-it just goes on and on.

And now a few of his movie titles-Death has Blue Eyes, The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein, Nightmare Comes at Night, Love Letters of a Portugese Nun, Two Female Spies With Flowered Panties, The Corpse Packs His Bags and She Killed in Extasy.

That’s one hell of a run. Good night. I’m tired.