I love Jess Franco.  I do.  He started off in the 60s with films like The Awful Dr. Orloff and The Diabolical Dr. Z, the latter being a film I covered on this blog before.  These were black and white flicks that were beautiful and moody and incredibly artistic in style.  Once the later part of 60s came along, he transitioned into much more erotic fare.  He started doing things like Vampyros Lesbos as well as many full on X-rated type stuff with his muse and second wife Lina Romay.

Guess what…  I love that stuff too.  He’s just got a great flair to his movies that register as both incredibly artistic and deeply sensual.  Of course, the aforementioned The Diabolical Dr. Z is one of the finer films ever covered on this blog as it is incredibly well shot.  He also directed my favorite Ilsa film too – Ilsa, The Wicked Warden.  Now, yeah, you can say that isn’t fair because it wasn’t meant to be part of the series, but I’m counting it goddammit.  He also did one of the worst movies on this blog – Oasis of the Zombies.  I won’t get too hung up on that, though.

No, this week’s new B-Movie Enema will intersect his 70s eroticism with his muse Lina Romay.  This week, I’m watching Two Female Spies with Flowered Panties.

Let’s talk about the lovely Ms. Romay, yes?  She ended up starring in at least 100 movies in her acting career that started around 1972, but acted on stage before that.  She was only 18 when she met Franco, but they didn’t marry until 2008, four years before she passed away.  When they met, she was married to a young actor and photographer, but they divorced in 1975.  She and Franco were nearly inseparable.  She even began to socially replace Franco’s then wife, Nicole Guettard.  Guettard and Franco split in 1980 which, from that point until she died 32 years later, left Franco and Romay now able to live together.

While Franco had many lovely ladies starring in his films, Romay was by far his most popular.  She is a sultry dark haired, dark eyed girl who also somehow comes off as cute too.  That’s a hell of a dangerous combination.  She played the part of Juana in Ilsa, The Wicked Warden, Dyanne Thorne’s consort and the ring leader of several of the inmates.  She was also the inspiration to one of my all-time favorite sexy characters on this blog, Val from Amazon Hot Box.

Now, admittedly, I’m sitting here writing this opening while the Severin release of Two Female Spies with Flowered Panties is playing over and over, and…  Woowee…  I’m done writing this fucking intro.  I wanna see these chicks do more of what this menu is giving me and right fucking now.

And goddamn…  The movie wastes no time whatsoever.  Our two spies, Cecile (Romay) and Brigitte (Nadine Pascal), are being transported from prison to a nightclub to perform for a room of people.  First, they don’t know why they’ve been arrested in the first place.  Second, it’s a bit odd they are being told to strip for people they don’t even know or care to get aroused.

It’s a little awkward because they have to make their own music to dance to and they don’t really even remember what their routine was.  Apparently, they were thrown in jail just for going full nude.  The guy who’s brought them to this place calls their routine shit and then says they will do.  Just like that…  They have their yearlong sentence commuted if they perform at a particular club, get very well paid, and stay in a very nice hotel.  They have to spy on a house across the street.  Basically, photograph anyone who enters that house.

However, Cecile cannot tell anyone what they are doing…  Even Brigitte.

So!  Our girls are off to the Canary Islands to get into their nice hotel, and begin working.  Meanwhile, a young girl in a large palatial house is kidnapped by a man and a woman.  Our plot thickens…

The girl is chained to a bed, naked of course.  The women who was part of the kidnapping team studies her, naked of course.  The lady undresses the man, and he kisses the captive’s boobs and rapes her.  The lady kidnapper just kinda hangs out, watches, and rubs the guy’s balding head and small of his back.

There is another lady watching these goings on.  She’s dressed in nice satin clothing.  Her hair is slicked back and wet looking.  She carries herself like a Bond villain.  Like, if you showed the below picture to someone and they said, “Wasn’t she in A View to a Kill?”  You’d probably at least be impressed that they think she fits in with the likes of Christopher Walken, Grace Jones, and Allison Doody.

Now, apparently, this trio of the balding man, the scary Bond villainess, and the sexy chick that massages the balding man while he rapes captives are sex slavers.  They say the girl, named Adriana, who is maybe a porno star or something?  Well, the evil Bond villain lady hypnotizes and brainwashes Adriana to become the sexual property of a client with this opal ring she wears.  That was a sudden turn I was not expecting in this movie, but okay.  That’s where we are at in this thing.

When our lesbian act arrives at the airport, they are picked up by the emcee of the club they will be dancing at, The Flamingo.  They check into their hotel and clean themselves up before going back to the club to practice their routine.  As they practice, the Bond villain lady and the bald kidnapper come in to watch too…  Apparently the lady is “The Boss” and the emcee asks her if she likes them.  Baldy asks the opal lady which one she likes.  That night, Cecile photographs a couple goons outside the sex slavers’ house while Brigitte tries REAL hard to fuck the emcee.  However, I think he might not be into the ladies – if you know what I mean.

I like how much Brigitte is just going for this guy and how much he is NOT into this.  I also like how deadly serious Cecile suddenly is.  She’s all about just staring at that house across the street.  I wonder if she had to give herself a pep talk to remind herself that this is good money and a good situation and she can’t fuck it up by being lousy at her spy job.

Anyway, she hears a couple arguing about a girl wanting to be let out and leave so she doesn’t have to be stuck there with a halfwit brother of the guy she’s arguing with.  To try to get better pictures for the Americans, she sneaks out of her room and climbs a tree right by where the window is in the house that the commotion is coming from.  As she perches herself in the tree, a woman yells out the window that she’s been kidnapped.  She’s pulled back in, thrown in her room, and raped or maybe raped.  Either way, she’s not enjoying this attention this guy is giving her.

She tries to flee back to the hotel, but the goons outside the house hear her and try to catch her, but she climbs a tree to evade them.  When she comes back to the hotel room, she sees Brigitte practically raping the poor gay emcee.  She says, “See? I talked him into it and I think he finally likes it!”  It’s actually a kind of funny scene.  I like how it more or less reverses the power structure by making Brigitte dominant and, while it makes the emcee gay in order to do this, but she emasculates him.

Later, Cecile and Brigitte meet with a Senator from California, the guy who actually picked them up from prison to hire them for this gig and the guy who officially hired Cecile to take the pictures.  Brigitte thinks she recognizes the Senator but she thinks he’s a star of western movies, not realizing that he was the one just a few days ago scooped her up from prison to send them on this fabulous new gig.

So these kidnappers are known as Irene Forbes and Mr. Forbes.  After delivering the porn actress to their client, Mr. Forbes tells his wife that the new dancers are working for the fuzz… before going down on her fuzz.   Apparently Forbes has caught a whiff of the Senator investigating them… before he gets a whiff of his wife’s fuzz.  They are going to find out what they can before they hightail it out of town to avoid any extra heat that is coming their way… but first he needs to send some heat coming her way.

Innuendo.

I like what happens next.  We see the Senator just plowing Brigitte.  She seems a little sweet to the idea that he is enjoying her even though she doesn’t seem to be having too much fun.  She just likes being wanted.  Their banter is kind of cute in the scene.  (By the way, Nadine Pascal is ridiculously hot.)

The Forbes decide to grab Cecile and try to make her talk.  But first, they have a girl in a gold bikini and gold swimming cap chained up in the basement to deal with.  The girl tells them to tell her father something, but Irene says he’s too busy for the girl.  Irene uses her ring to tell the girl she’s in love with their client so they can take her to his yacht for her to fall in love with him.

At the club, Cecile and Brigitte perform in black lingerie and pearl necklaces.  It is, as you might suspect, fairly sexy.

This does beg the question, though…  Yeah, it’s great that their show gets all the ladies at the bar with their girlfriends hot and bothered, and, goddamn I appreciate this plot detail, but… How can Cecile spy on the house across the street if she’s busy performing at the Flamingo?  I mean, are they just assuming they do business during normal business hours and when it’s sexy time at the bar, they just don’t do business?  How does this work?  Is there a backup working the night shift for her?

Yes, I’m typing while still watching the movie.  I am not an idiot here.

What’s kind of funny is that during their performance, various people in the audience comment somewhat negatively about the performance.  Not because they are prudish, but that either a couple is saying how our heroes have nothing on what they have together, or another dancer doesn’t think they are all that hot shit, or one girl just flat out tells the Senator that the girls are pretty but have no imagination.

When Brigitte goes out with the Senator after their performance, a couple girls nab Cecile. and take her to the Forbes.  They rough her up a little bit and toss her into the basement with the gold bikini girl.  Cecile tries to get something from the girl, but she’s just rambling on and on about how she loves that guy and wants to see him today.  The Forbes come in and Irene decides to admire Cecile a little bit by rubbing her fingers along her face and such.  She acts kind to her and calls her goons mean for roughing her up.

Irene places Cecile in a trance with her ring.  She wants to know who sent them there and why.  Cecile tells her Senator Connolly sent them because the police are investigating them and how they’ve been kidnapping girls and stuff.  Later, the goons that snatched Cecile collect the gold bikini girl to load her into the chopper to go to the client, but it’s actually Cecile in disguise.  She escapes and Irene chases her down in the helicopter.  They shoot at Cecile while she tries to escape and nearly kill her several times.

The emcee arrives just in time to get Cecile in the car and escape.  The emcee berates her for being stupid, especially when she says she wants to go back to the hotel.  Instead, he takes her to a friend who can hide her in some catacombs in the side of these rocks in the desert.  These guys are a bunch of hippies.  He asks them to hide her for a few days until the heat is off her and the cops bust the Forbes.

Back at the hotel, Senator Connolly tells Brigitte who he is and what he’s up to.  She gets mad at him and goes into the other room where Irene’s goons grab her and steal her away.  While Mr. Forbes threatens to strangle her, Irene wants to know some information.  Instead of using her ring, she just says that Brigitte won’t be so pretty after her goons are through with her.  She also tries rubbing her tits and puss too to have a little fun with her.

Meanwhile, back at the hippie camp, one of the guys shares some pot with Cecile to help take her mind off the heavy shit she’s been deal with.  As soon as the guy says they should get back with the rest of the crowd, the guy says they should go someplace to fuck.  However, the emcee comes back and tells Cecile about some of the various kidnappings.  He thinks that the Forbes are behind all of them.

Like no duh, dude.

I thought the girls were told they would have a contact inside the club to help them.  I thought that was the emcee, but…  Well.  I guess not.

The Senator gets stonewalled by the local government stooge who refuses to help him with this kidnapping thing.  He says the government is involved.  As is the police.  As is the federal police.  He basically just gives the Senator a shit-eating grin and says, “You’re in too deep, fuckhole!” Even when the Senator says that someday honest people will rise to power, the guy is just like, “Nah, they’ll be corrupt and throw in with the kidnappers as well.  Deal with it, fucker!”

Here’s the rub, right?  These multi-millionaire “admirers” find these hot girls in various professions – actresses, models, singers, OPERA singers, dancers, daughters of other powerful people, etc.  They all throw in and pay out big bucks to a network (yes a literal network) of kidnappers, and the Forbes are considered the best at this, to steal the girls and deliver them to their wealthy admirers.  These girls are then simply, like, erased and written off as just gone or dead or whatever so these rich dudes can get their dicks wet.  The rich folks fix the governments and the authorities to be able to get away with all of it.

Goddamn…  I’m not sure if I want to become rich to get in on this (I’m coming for you, Ana de Armas) or if I finally want to vote for Bernie Sanders to stop all these 1% assholes.

Senator Connolly gets assassinated for snooping, and Cecile arrives at The Flamingo to meet with the Forbes to get Brigitte back.  She finds Brigitte mutilated and dead.  Irene tells her that if she hadn’t run away from them, Brigitte would still be alive.  Irene shows Cecile the ring and it instantly entrances her.  Cecile falls asleep.

Elsewhere, Inspector Garcia, the man who hired Cecile and working on the investigation with Senator Connolly, arrives at the house that Cecile had been watching.  His men gun down the guy at the house, killing even the girls that were with him there.  I…  I don’t think that went over quite right.

Elsewhere, Cecile gets tortured by Irene’s goons with cigarette burns on her boobs and such.  Irene comes in to soothe Cecile with her ring.  Meanwhile, the emcee dude, who, by the way, is named Milton and I really did not know that until less than 10 minutes left to go in the movie, goes back to rally the hippies who immediately want to help save the girl.

Also, I guess the Forbes are having marital problems.  Bummer.  Mr. Forbes says Irene is, like, super fuckable, but he doesn’t love her anymore.  He’s going to buy an island and they are going to move there.  He’s going to do whatever he wants, and she can have some of the native girls or something.  He tells her this while she just writhes around on a bed naked except for a pair of heels.

I could be wrong here, but…  I think the movie is kind of off the rails a little bit.  But I do like watching Irene squirm around in her current state of undress.

In the basement, the goons still torture Cecile and say they will make her talk or they will hurt her more.  But didn’t she already tell Irene what she wanted to know the first time she was captured?  What more does she know that the Forbes don’t already know?  The hippies show up to storm the Forbes’ home.  Irene tries to escape in the helicopter.  It suddenly becomes the darkest night ever just after being a fairly bright, sunny day, and Milton kills Mr. Forbes.  Lead hippie man shoots the chopper down.  A bunch of hippies tear the goons apart with their bare hands.

Milton and Cecile decide to go open a boutique where she will be dressed up like a boy and they will live together married, but she’ll really be a woman, and he wants to see what all the fuss is about putting a penis into a vagina.

This movie is equal parts sexy and bizarre as all fucking get out, man.  The story makes no sense, but I think it is trying to say something about how the rich can control the powerful and the powerful can spin the story however needed.  It’s like when a person who is so pissed off and tired of how everything is being run is just spilling his guts about it all and it’s so slip shot that none of it makes sense.  It only makes sense to the pissed off crazy guy.  He figures out a way to say the rich controls government and government controls media and Lina Romay and Nadine Pascal have sexy, sexy bodies.  I mean, several rewrites later, you might be able to make something out of all those points, but the first time it comes out, it’s all over the place, man.

Let’s talk about something as it pertains to Lina Romay.  What I think makes her extra sexy is that she’s very normal in build.  She’s not as slender as Nadine Pascal.  She is, for a lack of a better term, T H I C C.  However, that makes a her a little more sexy because she looks like the girl you like at work that you think is hot, not the hot girl you see in the magazine ad for Virginia Slims.  I don’t know what that means, but I think you get what I’m getting at.

This is a fun watch.  It accomplishes what you want – it titillates and excites well enough.  It even has a few laughs for you too.  For the most part it really is the Romay and Pascal show.  They are why you show up to watch and they don’t disappoint in their own, unique, individual ways.

Next week, oh boy…  After realizing that I would be talking about Cats, I knew I needed to go back some 25 years to talk about one of those movies that transcends shit and time.  It is one of those amazing pieces of cinema that makes you wonder what the hell a couple powerful filmmakers were smoking when they came up with the idea, but you had to see because you spent your high school years crushing on the lead star every afternoon on Saved By the Bell.  Oh fuck yeah, you know where this is going.  Come back here next Friday to read the magnum opus of B-Movie Enema articles – a massive, 5700-word treatise  on motherfuckin’ Showgirls!