Orgy of the Nymphomaniacs (1981)

July 26, 2014 | By Mark R. Hasan

Film: Good

Transfer: Very Good

Extras: n/a

Label: Media Target Distribution (Holland)

Region: 2 (NTSC)

Released: n/a

Genre: Sexploitation / Erotica

Synopsis: An innocent hotelier is trapped in sex slave ring after refusing to plead guilty to a concocted embezzling charge.

Special Features: n/a

Review:

The second of Jess Franco’s two films for not really astute writer-production manager Erich Tomek, Linda is a classic Jess Franco mish-mash where story and coherent editing are not required, making this both a fun and frustrating experience. Not unlike Vampyros Lesbos (1971), Franco just hack-cuts between the film’s ongoing stories to maintain some narrative variety rather than logic, but even the strands scribbled by Tomek are wafer thin.

In the extended interview on Severin’s Bloody Moon Blu-ray (Tomek’s prior film with Franco), the director regards Linda as much classier, even though it was produced for much less money. (Franco attests this to banning frivolous crew and executive level production members from the film, many of whom siphoned budget funds during the filming of Bloody Moon.) Linda is also saddled with weaker thespians, but their lack of gravitas (or attempts to attain a quality performance) adds to the film’s fromage factor, and underplays its politically incorrect content.

Linda Norman (Katja Bienert) discovers the hotel where she works routinely sends disobedient women to a forced pleasure palace (er, high class sex slave dungeon). Actually, she’s tossed into the harem when she refuses to incriminate herself for someone else’s embezzling habits, just days before her little sister visits, fresh from her pedagogical term at a convent.

As sister Betsy (Ursula Buchfellner) arrives and rapidly befriends / goes steady local boy Tony (Antonio Rebollo), Linda is encased in a plexiglass box where she’s teased and routinely assaulted, and no one is willing to lift a finger and help her escape – especially Ron (Antonio Mayans, aka ‘Robert Foster’), the stud muffin she adores whose addicted to the body of the pleasure dome’s empress, Sheila (Raquel Evans).

Tomek’s dialogue is moronic, Franco’s scene transitions have the finesse of a drunk driver smashing a semi through a brick wall, and the music score by Bloody Moon composer Gerhard Heinz veers from acceptable lounge porn to aural junk. The camera work and location shooting in Portugal is a little clunky, and all scenes with Linda’s sister Betsy are interminably dull. However, what makes the film is the way Ron becomes a main focus, since he’s the only one who can rescue Linda, dethrone Sheila, and ultimately save the rest of the girls from brutal punishment by Sheila’s scumbag handlers.

Not currently available on DVD in North America (perhaps due to a prolonged gang assault scene), Linda is a kind of companion piece / idiot cousin to Bloody Moon, since there are several actresses ported over to this production, but it’s the weaker film in Franco’s Tomek dyptich.

Mayans also appeared in Franco’s Cecilia (1983) and with Bienert and Rebollo in Eugenie (1980), while Buchfellner co-starred with Mayans in both Franco’s Devil Hunter (1980) and Sadomania (1981).