Fifty Shades of Jess and Lina--Quality Sex and Sleaze: Pulp Trash from the Video Boom (Naked Pulp)

When half-assed film director Jess Franco met full-figured Lina Romay, it was lust at first sight. She became his muse, leading lady, girlfriend and wife, all the time the two of them were making the most outrageous exploitation cinema ever churned out from the bottom of the barrel. Franco’s films were eighty percent rubbish and twenty percent awesome, but one hundred percent more interesting than much mainstream cinema. Their most prolific and productive period was the 1970s and’80s, and the video and DVD boom of the 1980s and ’90s gave their efforts a second lease of life beyond the fleapits, as they acquired a whole new legion of intrigued admirers…

Jon Abbott has been writing about popular culture of the 20th century for over thirty years, with over four hundred magazine articles in around two dozen different publications, trade, specialist, and populist (visit my author's page by clicking on my name in blue above). This one of a series of Naked Pulp Specials offers prolific coverage of Franco and Romay, alongside some of the other weird and wonderful exploitation films of the late 20th century, including the lurid and sensationalist Schoolgirl Reports from Germany, the melodramatic Christina Lindberg sex soaps from Sweden, laughable bondage films of the ‘70s, and the eye-popping Bound Heat video series from Czechoslovakia. It was a period of adventure and exploration of the film medium that will never happen again, so catch up with it now by hunting as much of this stuff down as you can… before Countess Perverse or the Slave Huntress hunts you…!

To the one star reviewer: Read the book carefully, and you'll see that I like a lot of Franco’s work. But I do think it helps to be honest about what’s actually on the screen. Franco was an exploitation film-maker. And a damn good one. Not a mysterious genius waiting to be discovered and interpreted. Sometimes, what you see is what you get. In Franco’s case, that’s just fine.

Please note: The text in this book previously appeared in the author’s earlier 700 page Strange New World: Sex Films of the 1970s (2015), also available on Amazon.