Coming Soon
FRANCOMANIA: MANSION OF THE LIVING DEAD + MACUMBA SEXUAL
1982/1983
Director
Jess Franco
Starring
Lina Romay
Runtime
197 min
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Select Showtimes
Severin Films and The Oscarbate Film Collective present FRANCOMANIA, a never-ending tour celebrating writer/director Jess Franco arriving in Seattle on April 12. Severin will be in attendance with a pop up in the lobby selling discs!
Hailed by The Guardian as “a dedicated exponent of weird sex, shocking sadism and surreal horror, and one of the cinema’s great individualists” – Jess Franco left an astonishing legacy of over 180 films that Sight & Sound says “occupy a liminal terrain between exploitation cinema and the avant-garde, playing with the porous structure of dream and nightmare, indeed the nature of reality itself.” Franco’s singular career remains championed by filmmakers ranging from Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, Pedro Almodovar, Sean Baker, Quentin Tarantino, Pere Portabella, and John Waters, resulting in a 2009 honorary Lifetime Achievement Award from Spain’s equivalent of the Oscars. Not bad for a guy who made dozens and dozens of porno films!
We begin the night with one of the absolute standouts from Franco’s 80s period. MACUMBA SEXUAL is a late-career masterpiece starring (of course, again) Franco’s wife and radiant muse Lina Romay as a sexually repressed woman tormented by visions of ‘the goddess of unspeakable lust’ (an unforgettable performance by pioneering transgender actress Anita Wilson) in a fever dream of erotic cruelty and carnal duality. With more than a nod to previous works in Jess’ canon, specifically VAMPYROS LESBOS and LORNA THE EXORCIST, this humid sexual nightmare expands the Franco universe into the blinding horizon of the beyond.
And we follow that up with the infamous MANSION OF THE LIVING DEAD is a depraved subversion of raunchy comedy, erotic thriller and heretical horror. When four topless cocktail waitresses – led by Lina Romay at her most luscious – arrive at a deserted resort, they’ll unlock a perverse netherworld of lesbianism, sadism and unholy violation by a zombie religious sect inspired by de Ossorio’s BLIND DEAD series. Part looney satire, part surrealistic nightmare, MANSION OF THE LIVING DEAD is an essential fetishistic feast that has to be seen to be believed.
Hailed by The Guardian as “a dedicated exponent of weird sex, shocking sadism and surreal horror, and one of the cinema’s great individualists” – Jess Franco left an astonishing legacy of over 180 films that Sight & Sound says “occupy a liminal terrain between exploitation cinema and the avant-garde, playing with the porous structure of dream and nightmare, indeed the nature of reality itself.” Franco’s singular career remains championed by filmmakers ranging from Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, Pedro Almodovar, Sean Baker, Quentin Tarantino, Pere Portabella, and John Waters, resulting in a 2009 honorary Lifetime Achievement Award from Spain’s equivalent of the Oscars. Not bad for a guy who made dozens and dozens of porno films!
We begin the night with one of the absolute standouts from Franco’s 80s period. MACUMBA SEXUAL is a late-career masterpiece starring (of course, again) Franco’s wife and radiant muse Lina Romay as a sexually repressed woman tormented by visions of ‘the goddess of unspeakable lust’ (an unforgettable performance by pioneering transgender actress Anita Wilson) in a fever dream of erotic cruelty and carnal duality. With more than a nod to previous works in Jess’ canon, specifically VAMPYROS LESBOS and LORNA THE EXORCIST, this humid sexual nightmare expands the Franco universe into the blinding horizon of the beyond.
And we follow that up with the infamous MANSION OF THE LIVING DEAD is a depraved subversion of raunchy comedy, erotic thriller and heretical horror. When four topless cocktail waitresses – led by Lina Romay at her most luscious – arrive at a deserted resort, they’ll unlock a perverse netherworld of lesbianism, sadism and unholy violation by a zombie religious sect inspired by de Ossorio’s BLIND DEAD series. Part looney satire, part surrealistic nightmare, MANSION OF THE LIVING DEAD is an essential fetishistic feast that has to be seen to be believed.