According to the Internet Movie Database, the Spanish film-maker Jesús Franco, who has died aged 82, directed 199 films, from El árbol de España in 1957 to Al Pereira vs the Alligator Ladies in 2012, a record few can match in the era of talking pictures. Given that many Franco films exist in three or four variant versions, sometimes so radically different that alternative cuts qualify as separate movies, his overall tally might be considerably higher.
Born Jesús Franco Manera, he was most often credited – at least on international release prints – as Jess Frank or Jess Franco, though he used a host of pseudonyms, writing scripts as David Khune, composing music as Pablo Villa and co-directing pornographic films (with his long-term muse Lina Romay) as Rosa Almirall. He was a true man of the cinema, whose CV ranged from directing the second unit for Orson Welles's Shakespeare project Chimes at Midnight (1965) to shooting hardcore pornography.
Franco began and ended his career in Spain, but spent much of the 1970s as an exile from General Francisco Franco's film industry, making international co-productions in a bewildering number of countries (including France, Brazil, Turkey and Germany) and gaining a reputation as a master of a distinctive brand of psychedelic gothic horror.
Of Cuban and Mexican parentage, Franco was born in Madrid and studied at the city's Instituto de Investigaciones y Experiencias Cinematográficas, from which he was expelled, and the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques in Paris. In the 1950s, he worked as an assistant director on Spanish films (including Juan Antonio Bardem's Cómicos, 1954) and Hollywood productions shot in Spain (King Vidor's Solomon and Sheba, 1958). After short films, his first feature – which, beginning his habit of assuming auteurist authority over projects, he wrote, directed and scored – was a teenage comedy, Tenemos 18 Años (1959).
He did not establish his own identity until the horror film Gritos en la Noche (1962), released internationally as The Awful Dr Orloff. With a style derivative of British and Italian gothics of the period and a plot lifted from Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face (1960), not to mention a soon-to-be-recurring mad scientist villain (played by Howard Vernon, a Franco regular) named after the Bela Lugosi character in The Dark Eyes of London, Franco instituted his practice of collaging influences into his own distinctive forms.
He would remake Gritos in disguise several times (including Faceless, 1987), and delivered sequels resurrecting Orloff, but he also found other touchstones in Cornell Woolrich's novels (especially The Bride Wore Black, inspiration for Miss Muerte, aka The Diabolical Dr Z, 1966); pulp serials (he made a brace of Fu Manchu films); gothic horrors (he made both Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein and The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein); the Marquis de Sade (he made multiple versions of Justine and Eugenie); and private-eye fiction (with his two-fisted Al Pereira and the Red Lips, a detective agency staffed by two daffy blondes).
Cartes sur Table ( also known as Attack of the Robots, 1966), starring Eddie Constantine, is a companion piece to Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965). Though they gravitated to different areas of cinema, Franco and Godard both borrowed from and subverted high and low art in a manner that resonates still in the postmodern genre cinema of Quentin Tarantino.
With the German-made Necronomicon – Geträumte Sünden (aka Succubus, 1968) Franco added a quirky, pop art eroticism to his genre cocktail, often expressed through bizarre nightclub acts. In the late 1960s, he teamed up with the British producer Harry Allan Towers on comparatively well-funded, widely distributed exploitation pictures, including Count Dracula (1970), a rare sober adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel, and the pioneering women-in-prison picture 99 Women (1969). These films took advantage of relaxed international censorship, and had casts including Christopher Lee, Jack Palance, Herbert Lom and Klaus Kinski alongside Euro-starlets such as the short-lived Soledad Miranda, around whom Franco built several films including the memorable Vampyros Lesbos (1971), whose "sexadelic" soundtrack became a dance-club favourite in the 1990s.
In 1972, Franco began working with Romay, his star in Female Vampire (1973) and an indispensable part of his film universe thereafter. His filmography became more hectic and fractured as the demands of exploitation required more explicit sex and violence. Female Vampire was made in varying degrees of excess, with cuts that could serve a horror, sex, underground or art audience. On low budgets, Franco kept filming obsessively, switching to video in the 1990s, scaling down his crews when his budgets shrank but still keeping the spirits of Orloff, the Red Lips and Al Pereira alive. In later years, perceptive critics such as Lucas Balbo, Tim Lucas and Stephen Thrower highlighted his distinctive vision and made tentative attempts at nailing down a filmography Franco had been too busy making movies to keep track of.
Romay died last year.