“Buddy Cop” movies – Jess Franco-style.

Okay, so Jess Franco never really did a “buddy cop” movie, but what he did give us was a handful of dual-female-agents defying the odds stacked against them and using their sexuality to flirt and striptease their way through a sabotage of heists, corruption, and conspiracy through a low-budget series of Bond-esque sexy/comedy films in the late sixties. The most famous of these types of Jess Franco's films are, of course Two Undercover Angels (aka Sadisterotica) and Kiss Me, Monster!, released to home video over fifteen years ago on VHS and DVD through the original incarnation (pre-Starz-owned) Anchor Bay Entertainment, which were released alongside Franco's gorgeous Succubus (also late-sixties), which also starred the strikingly beautiful and androgynous Janine Reynaud. Since the Anchor Bay releases, Blue Underground has re-released an upgraded double-feature of the two titles on DVD.

A decade after making Two Undercover Angels and Kiss Me Monster, Jess Franco shot a reworking of the premise titled Two Female Spies in Flowered Panties. As the title might suggest, this latter entry in the double-female-spy arena was a lot more explicit than its PG-style sixties counterparts, and quite frankly, I'd never actually even heard of this Jess Franco film until Severin Films saw fit to give it an HD transfer and release it onto Blu-ray last year. This time, Franco's wife Lina Romay (Female Vampire) takes the lead alongside Lynn Monteil (Sadomania – not to be confused with Sadisterotica) playing a pair of prisoners who are released by the government on the condition that they act as double-agents to foil the plot of a sex-slave ring. Of course, many sexual encounters and shenanigans leap from this concept, and while Jess Franco obviously intended to keep some of the inherent humour attached to the somewhat ridiculous (yet entertaining) plot turns, at on point everything actually gets a little intense, when Romay is captured and tortured with cigarettes. Well, it seemed intense to me, anyway, because I actually liked Romay and the quirky character she was portraying in Franco's otherwise lighter-hearted spy/sex spoof. Following this scene of flesh and embers, however, the film goes wildly off-track and the humour and enthusiastic playfulness starts to shine through again, as Romay's character continues to run around wreaking sexy havoc with the inclusion of a somewhat flabbergasting helicopter chase and subsequent pistol shootout. Even writing this now I have the sudden urge to go back to the movie for a second viewing.

Severin Films included two different cuts of Two Female Spies in Flowered Panties on their blu-ray release, Franco being no stranger to several versions coming out of his movies. Ultimately, fans of Franco's female-spy-spoofs of the late sixties should have a lot of fun with this darker, more exploitive turn on the charming scenario, which works very nicely in the context of this niche sub-genre in the director's own canon.

--V.