Les nuits brûlantes de Linda, The Hot Nights Of Linda, Who Raped Linda?

Softcore master piece.

Today's entry will be a return to the very roots of this cult cinema blog: Sexploitation! a genre which despite its name, offers way more than softcore/hardcore scenery for usual wankers, and as you can see, our blog has been completely redesigned for the first time since 2008! The original template grew old and the back up files that gave it that retro design died a couple of weeks ago since the original website who had them ceased to exist forever. Nevertheless, our humble blog remains the same: Regular people like you and me enjoying films that belong to an entirely different category, a sort of Anti-Hollywood vision, not against Hollywood, but against Hollywood movies stereotyped labels like blockbuster, must-watch, summer hit, watchamacallit, Julia Roberts-Type-of-Film, you name it. Hoping you enjoy our new updated design (with integrated social networking and a newly enhanced like system) 

In order to celebrate we have chosen a Euro Cult classic that was recently re-released in home format for the first time ever in High Definition. Today's entry is one of the best creations of film maker Jess Franco and her lifetime wife Lina Romay (believe it or not, it's not a hardcore film) Les nuits brûlantes de Linda is a 1975 must watch, so let's cut to the chase. 

The original crappy VHS edition.

The newly restored Blu-Ray/DVD combo pack.

Number one Euro-Sleaze film maker, Jesús Franco AKA Jess Franco was a dedicated artist with a wide filmography that steps into softcore, drama, comedy, straight pornography, hardcore and then softcore again, his list is nearly impossible to label under one category since he wrote and directed approximately 200 films. Franco’s The Hot Nights of Linda is actually titled But Who Raped Linda? onscreen and the direction is credited to one J.P. Johnson (an American jazz pianist whom Franco admired). Franco used dozens of pseudonyms. Many of his films are cut and recut and retitled, with hard-core sex scenes added or removed, depending on the whims of distributors. Franco inserted identical scenes from his own films into different movies he directed. His films referred increasingly to his previous work. Franco created his own universe, his own mythology. In his earlier movies, Franco was capable of classical construction and a cinematic elegance that waned as the speed at which he cranked out movies escalated.

The Hot Nights of Linda was made in 1973, one of the busiest years in Franco’s career, with 11 films completed and three films started but incomplete. The early 1970s was the white heat of Franco’s creativity, according to Thrower. Franco craved cinematic freedom but at the price of discipline and rigor. His later work was often shoddy and slapdash. Once in a while, Franco made a good, solid film: Venus in Furs (1969) is an extraordinary fantasy-thriller about a woman who returns from the dead, but Franco followed it with the abysmal Count Dracula (1970), which wasn’t the step up from the Hammer Draculas that Franco and Christopher Lee hoped it would be.

The banana fellatio scene.

Sure go ahead!

To be honest with my fellow connoisseurs, I've never been a diehard fan of Franco's work. To me he was number one B movie film maker in a time where I didn't have any idea about what made a good movie in the first place. Nevertheless, I did understand why he constantly worked with her wife Lina Romay in most of his films. The love they had was surely a big thing, since she had no hesitation on working on straight pornography for him. Today, I can tell you he's a varied film maker with his hits and misses like many directors who are still out there. However, his rich contribution to the Euro-Sleaze label can neither be denied nor diminished. He was the best at what he did and The Hot Nights Of Linda prove it with ease.

According to film writer Stephen Thrower, The Hot Nights of Linda delivers on basic softcore thrills but can be viewed as a psychological chamber piece that doesn’t have any really obvious exploitation hooks, which is one reason it may have been overlooked in the Franco canon. The themes of The Hot Nights of Linda are incest, a family patriarch who is concealing a dreadful secret, and the family unit in decay. The Hot Nights of Linda is one of the strangest and most claustrophobic of Franco’s films.

I love reading in the nude.

I love listening to music in the nude.

Actually Linda isn’t the main character, which makes the storyline all the more confusing: Linda (the slim and raven-haired beauty Catherine Lafferière) is a paraplegic who lives comfortably in her uncle’s seaside Greek villa but is constantly hit on by her more strong-willed nymphomaniac cousin, Olivia (Franco’s uninhibited and beloved muse Lina Romay). The estate belongs to Olivia’s debauched father (Paul Muller). The simple-minded manservant Abdul (Pierre Taylou) provides stud service to the sexually insatiable Olivia. The lead role actually belongs to the alluring and statuesque Alice Arno as Marie-France Bertrand, who is hired as a live-in nurse/secretary and whose pulchritudinous presence brings some of the household’s darkest secrets to light, leading to lesbianism, sadism, murder, suicide, horsewhipping and bloodshed. Ultimately, the ending is an “it was all a dream” cop-out.

Multiple versions of The Hot Nights of Linda were released throughout Europe but, as with most Franco films, Linda was never given an American theatrical release. Unfortunately, video versions for all of these versions were absolutely dire, with blurry VHS copies suffering from murky quality, random edits, and brutal cropping of the original scope photography. Considering its dismal history, Severin Films is to be saluted for releasing what can only be termed the first watchable copy of this film ever issued on home video.

Smoking is bad for your health.

Yoga with Lina.

The 80-minute But Who Raped Linda? soft-core release version was Franco’s preferred cut and the longest version out there. The longer 80-minute cut is the primary one on Severin’s dual-format Blu-ray/DVD edition, featuring the English language track. It’s a professional dub overall (with only one annoying voice actor), and The Hot Nights of Linda can finally be appreciated for its rich aesthetic beauty—including some scenes absent entirely from the more commonly circulated hardcore version. But the film meanders and The Hot Nights of Linda is too restrained to classify as a horror movie. I’d also advise anyone who doesn’t “get” the Franco phenomenon to give this one a miss. Franco is an acquired taste. You’re either attuned to him or you’re not.

Here's a sample of the film: