Jess Franco plumbs the genitals of his performers to elicit CRIES OF PLEASURE, on Blu-ray from Severin Films.

Hedonist Antonio (Antonio Mayans, CECILIA) brings mistress Julia (Lina Romay, FEMALE VAMPIRE) to his seaside villa for a very special occasion: the return of his wealthy wife Martina (Rocío Freixas, THE SINISTER DR. ORLOFF) from a stay at an asylum, with the express purpose of overstimulating her to death with sex. The bizarre love triangle unfolds under the watchful eyes of mute servant Fenul (cinematographer Juan Soler, BLOODY MOON) and Berber maid Marta (Elisa Vela, MANSION OF THE LIVING DEAD), a sex slave to the couple unto death. Loyalties seem to shift with bumping of nether regions, and more corpses than anticipated fall by the wayside as Julia's libido takes a pounding and one wonders whether she is the patsy or the real intended victim of the couple's sexual games.

A return to director Jess Franco's favored Sadeian themes and atmospherics during his prolific Golden Films productions period upon his return to Spain in the late seventies, CRIES OF PLEASURE is not so much a Sade adaptation as a weaving of various threads, the most familiar being the Bressac episode of "Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue" which got lip service in Franco's Harry Alan Towers but was more explicitly explored in the later SINFONIA EROTICA although it also wove its way through the loose "Philosophy of the Boudoir" adaptations HOW TO SEDUCE A VIRGIN and EUGENIE 80/EROTICISMO (also featuring Mayans and an underage Katja Bienert as the virginal heroine). What sets this film apart from those other tellings is Franco's decision to capture it in a series of ROPE-like long takes with the Techniscope frame not only panning and handheld tracking with the performers across the sun-drunk seaside locations (which call to mind his earlier EUGENE, THE STORY OF HER JOURNEY INTO PERVERSION) but also in and out of the bare, thrusting bodies of Franco stalwarts for the most part very convincingly simulating rough sex through various diffusing and reflecting elements from curtains to windows. Although one murder is planned from the start, another more brutal one seems like a natural outcome of the abstraction of the bodies of their sexual partners into things to be used and disposed of (with narrator Fenul recalling the first time their games took this turn). While Romay and Freixas effortlessly generate heat, the film's non-sexual sadomasochistic relationship between Antonio and Fenul is a novel inclusion in a Franco film, with Soler's variation on the Franco mute servant being the film's most pitiable character. The film manages to look pretty slick for a Franco film despite the skeleton crew, with Mayans doubling as production manager, Romay as assistant director and editor, Franco operating the camera under Soler's lighting, and a score partially composed of library tracks from Eurocine collaborator Daniel White (REVENGE IN THE HOUSE OF USHER) under his shared pseudonym with Franco "Pablo Villa."

Released to panned-and-scanned VHS in America undubbed and unsubtitled for Spanish-speaking audiences, GEMIDOS DE PLACER was easiest to see in a Spanish-imported kiosk budget DVD featuring a non-anamorphic but letterboxed barebones transfer (the source for some fansubs online). Transferred from a 4K scan of the original camera negatives, Severin's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 2.35:1 widescreen Blu-ray looks faded during the opening credits but bold colors make themselves known in the interiors and detail in the close-ups while an overall softeness appears to be an effect of the camera focus lagging with the many improvised zooms in and out of the compositions. The LPCM 2.0 Spanish track is relatively clean, thanks as much to the underuse of the element as the post-dubbing of the entire soundtrack. Optional English subtitles are available.

Despite the passing of Franco and Romay, Severin have still kitted the disc out with some nice extras. First up is "In The Land of Franco Part 1" (21:01), the first of a multi-part tour of Franco locations, with this one starting in Portugal, visiting Cascais and Sintra, where Franco found several of his well-utilized locations often within feet of one another but seemingly miles apart in the films (conversely, some locations that appeared singular in some of his films were actually composed of multiple places seen here) including places familiar from the Robert de Nesle productions (like THE DEMONS), Eurocine, and even Erwin C. Dietrich films (which it turns out were not all lensed in Switzerland and Germany), with some attractive views of the Guinmares castle seen in A VIRGIN OF THE LIVING DEAD (although known in the film as Monserrate Mansion, it was not the Palácio de Monserrate which turned up in a number of other Franco films). "When Donald Met Jess and Lina Part 1" (11:24) is the first part of an interview with Donald Farmer conducted in 1993 during the aborted production of JUNGLE OF FEAR, in which they muse on their newfound recognition internationally, Romay as sex symbol, and Franco's views about censorship.