Lake of the Virgins (1987)
** (out of 4)
Rare sleaze from Franco is actually an adaptation of a novel by Robert Louis Stevenson! In the film a drunken fisherman and his stud partner wash up on an island, which just happens to be the location of the Virgins Lake. The old man is interested in all the gold pieces laying around but the young stud wants the woman including the leader of the female gang played by Katja Bienert. This is yet another Franco film that's never been given a decent release. The print running around is the uncut Spanish version but it features no subs and even worse is the print itself, which is in pretty bad shape with it being a tad bit too dark and grainy plus there are several video dropouts. When you try tracking down all these rarer Franco films this is to be expected but it didn't take away from the film too much. As is to be expected, there's a lot of nudity and softcore sex scenes and of course those lovely zoom shots that the director is so well-known for. The story itself is somewhat hard to follow without any subs but doing a basic search on the original story to the novel will lead you in the right direction. There's seems to have been plenty of liberties taken with the source but that's to be expected. Bienert made several films with the Spanish director and she's always a pleasure to watch as she can act quite natural and she's certainly the best thing Franco had during this period. This movie was filmed in 1981 but not released until 1987 and that puts Bienert at the age of 15 so this here will undoubtedly bother many due to her nude and sex scenes. The rest of the cast includes Antonio de Cabo, Eduardo Fajardo and Lola Gaos. The film does benefit from some nice locations and some of the cinematography is pretty good. The music score by Franco (under the name Pablo Villa) is another winner. In the end, this really isn't anything too special but then again there are much worse out there from Franco. If you must see everything the man's done then check this out but others should certainly start with some of his better films.
