MartinHafer Despite the fact that the gorgeous Maria Rohm is naked through much of "Venus in Furs", it manages to be a very boring and glacially slow film. What makes this worse is that the story idea was excellent and SHOULD have worked. The problem is not just the pacing but the style of the film--which tries to be artsy but which comes off as cheap. An odd combination indeed.The story has very little dialog and is practically a silent movie with voice-over by the leading man, James Darren. However, it is MUCH slower-paced than a silent film. If you speed up a silent film, everyone looks funny as they move about wildly. If you speed up "Venus in Furs" it STILL looks very slow in places.It begins with Darren working as a musician at a fancy party. When he takes a break, he sees a weirdo foursome--with a woman and two men torturing and drinking the blood of a gorgeous blonde. It seems, despite everything, consensual and Darren leaves them to their weird sex revelries. Soon, however, he's walking on the beach and finds this same blonde dead! Darren leaves Turkey where all this occurred and goes to Rio. There he sees the dead woman very much alive. Well, not exactly. Although they have a lot of sex (though often it's out of focus or focuses on anything but the titillating parts), the woman is almost zombie-like through much of the film. However, periodically, she disappears and appears at the homes of the three who killed her. Then, she gets naked and kills them all--one by one.While this sounds like an interesting and sexy idea, it certainly isn't. Too many pieces of what appear to be stock footage used as filler, too many LONG and silent and seemingly meaningless montages, too many seemingly random edits, too many periods where there was no editing whatsoever yet there should have been LOTS and too little dialog or life make this seem like a French art film merged with "Night of the Living Dead"--but with far, far, far less energy. Overall, a completely boring film that seemed to drag on forever. This isn't art, this isn't soft-core porn and this isn't horror--it's just a dull and artless waste of time.

chaos-rampant As likely to be heralded in certain circles as a preeminent figure of stylish erotic Eurohorror as he is to be dismissed as a hack-of-all-trades and purveyor of Eurotrash, often both at the same time given his gargantuan and largely uneven filmography and depending where your affections lie, Jesus Franco if nothing else at least can't be brushed aside easily. If Oasis of the Zombies gives valid claim to the second, Venus in Furs does the same with the first.A jazz player discovers the body of a woman washed up in a beach in Istanbul. Weirdness ensues. Not really 'meaningful' weird, the kind of weird that suggests a certain insight to be gleaned from closer inspection, but 'captivating' weird, 'hallucinogenic' weird, the kind of weird where you buy the ticket and are happy to be simply swept along for the ride. The movie seems disjointed at first, haphazard, low-key voice-over narration transporting us through time and space back and forth until plot and story cease to exist in any one given level. Yet it doesn't take long for a sort of inner rhythm and flow, jazzlike and hypnotic, to emerge. Suddenly we're in a ritzy party and Klaus Kinski is peering wide-eyed into the camera. The dead woman is now alive, scantily dressed and being flogged in a dimly lit basement by Kinski and two of his friends. From Istanbul to Rio back to Istanbul, the strange woman seems to be exacting some kind of revenge while she keeps a love affair with the horn player on the side.For all the casual languid randomness, Franco seems to know what he's doing. Not narrative speaking so much as in terms of atmosphere and overall ambiance. The camera constantly zooms back and forth, the movie pulsating with a jazz vibrato. Shots from the primary narrative (the actual story) are later repeated inside a flashback (fantasy? reverie?) making the boundaries between present and past tense blur hopelessly, turning the linear into cyclical. Something which is further compounded by the bizarre ending where I think Franco reaches for more than he can grasp and comes up mostly with straws. That combined with the little epigraph superimposed over the screen brings the movie down a notch because it reduces the heady surreal noir that precedes it into a "so it was all..." conclusion. By openly stating what we've been suspecting, that everything exists in someone's head and adheres to the fragmented laws of dreams and memory, Franco robs us of the pleasure of understanding for ourselves.Thirty years down the line Venus in Furs is more likely to appeal to fans of Alain Robbe-Grillet and David Lynch than Eurohorror hounds, the emphasis here being on mysterious rather than grotesque.

Scarecrow-88 Jesús Franco fans consider "Venus in Furs" his grand achievement. It concerns the surreal odyssey of a jazz trumpeter who falls in love with the seductive spirit of a murdered young woman, Wanda(Maria Rohm)at the hands of three bourgeoisie types, Ahmed(Klaus Kinski), Kapp(Dennis Price), and Olga(Margaret Lee)who enjoy mixing violence with kink. Jimmy Logan(James Darren) discovers Wanda's body floating in the ocean becoming instantly attracted to her. Jimmy is a troubled soul who has found displeasure with his trumpet, even considering quiting his occupation as a musician. The desire and passion is missing, that is until a spark ignites when he finds a woman eerily similar to the dead woman he discovered. That is indeed the spirit of Wanda, returned to get revenge against those who left her for dead after their game of rough sex goes awry. Or, is anything we see even real, or just a series of images and stories flashing through the dreams of Jimmy, concocted at the moment of his death? What we do know is that Jimmy's lover, singer Rita(Barbara McNair)realizes that her man is falling for another, and, despite her pleas for his love, knows their relationship may never recover. Like those Wanda returns to seek revenge, Jimmy is yet another casualty, desiring something he can not obtain.That's the best way I have to describe this film which uses the image of the lovely Maria Rohm, often partially naked, breasts uncovered, underneath a fur coat and wig, as a haunting tool towards those who long to embrace her. Director Jesús Franco admits that his main objective was to tell a story about a troubled musician and his love life with a lover of a different race. Producers pushed for the whole "Venus in Furs" idea. He also mentions in an interview that it wasn't his idea to edit those repeated images of Wanda to her victims, over and over, repeating throughout, calling it "gratuituous." I think he does accomplish the idea that this trumpeter is at the moment of death reliving past occurrences and possible desires that were just out of reach. Every kind of visual trick is used, color schemes, slow-motion, penetrating zooms into faces, disorienting picture techniques as Jimmy runs for Wanda, and some very unusual uses of the dark and light. The settings for the film(..Jesús Franco reflects that he shot in several places like Rome and Istanbul)are stunning and bring an atmosphere needed for such an erotic fantasy. The beach front is especially put to striking use. Attractive leads and an overwhelming melancholy and exuberant spirit in equal measure. I felt Jesús Franco achieves his goal regarding the musician and his difficulty separating the real from unreal by placing him within such a setting as the lively nature of Rio, a carnival with a people embarking on a journey of joy as he struggles to find his way. As odd as the death sequences were, they made sense to me this time around unlike my previous viewing..a desire for such an unattainable beauty can haunt you to the point of death.

Michael_Elliott Venus in Furs (1969) *** 1/2 (out of 4) Terrific, trippy and haunting love story/mystery about a jazz musician (James Darren) who finds a body washed up on the shore of his house. He recognizes the woman (Maria Rohm) from a party he attended a few nights before but she is now dead. Two years later she reappears to him but is she alive or just a part of his obsession with her? This is an incredibly well made film from Jess Franco. It just goes to show he certainly had the talent to come up with something great but he often wasted it on cheaper pictures. Rohm does an incredibly job and Franco's use of a wonderful jazz score really helps the dreamlike nature of the film. There are plenty of twists and turns throughout the film and a ending that comes out of nowhere. A wonderful mystery set behind a very good love story. Klaus Kinski and Dennis Price co-star.