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Four young women (including Lina Romay in her Candy Coster persona) arrive at beach resort. They plan to pick up plenty of men for sex, but if none are available, as they're in a Jess Franco film, they'll make do with each other. They see no one else around, except for the odd manager (Robert Foster) and the even more bizarre gardener. At first they think nothing of the town's deserted nature, but gradually they realize something is wrong, and it has to do with the nearby monastery, where undead Cathars vent their frustration with their cursed state by raping and killing our heroines.The plot is rather more confusing than I've laid out here. The inspiration for the film is pretty clearly Amando De Ossorio's Blind Dead series, though these are pretty talkative bunch of living dead. Silly sexploitation (the first half of the movie is like a depopulated sex comedy) mixes with jerky camerawork, some very nicely spooky shots in the hotel and a completely bizarre amour fou subplot involving a woman chained up in another room. This is far from Franco's best, but it is a film that still has ideas in its head, and the scene set in empty, windswept streets are quite eerie.

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Alice (Lina Romay under her blonde pseudonym "Candy Coster") is haunted by erotic nightmares involving the Princess Obongo (the Amazonian Ajita Wilson). She therefore has her misgivings when she is ordered by her boss to travel to a remote island and sell some real estate to that very person. Doubts notwithstanding, off she goes (got up in an outfit I've never seen a real estate agent wear before) to play Jonathan Harker to Obongo's Dracula. On the island, she falls under the Obongo's spell, and becomes emmeshed in a web of sex, rituals and magic.Director Jess Franco here is reworking the plot from his Vampyros Lesbos, and even reuses some of that film's sun-bleached supernatural-by-daylight tricks. The zoom lens isn't quite as badly overused as in some of his other work, though it definitely makes its presence known. Some of the camera placements are decidedly odd (did he really want us to see Wilson's fillings as she writhes in orgasmic frenzy?), but there are plenty of very lovely shots, too, that manage to conjure a real sense of surreal beauty and mystery on a ridiculously small budget. The studied pace might well put off fans of either sex or horror, but then, that's typical Franco for you, but the film does have an oddly mesmeric effect.

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