Eugenie (1970)

Purely Joyful Movie!

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

The idea of making a narrative film of de Sade's philosophical dialogue Philosophy in the Bedroom is an attractive one, and certainly any adaptation would have to (if it were to have any dramatic life at all) take liberties with the original text. Jess Franco's 1970 adaptation Eugenie… the Story of her Journey into Perversion takes the basic situation and the characters and transforms them into a quite different Sadeian tale. For my money, the original offers more interesting aspects, with the complete seduction of the young heroine into Dolmance's libertine lifestyle and the murderous abjection of the mother at the end.Franco's film has Eugenie, a young middle-class girl invited by swinging Madame de St. Ange and her pervy step-brother (a dilution of Sade's incestuous siblings) and falling prey to an elaborate plan of Madame's to set the girl up as a sacrificial victim as a punishment for taking the step-brother's love. Dolmance becomes a side-figure, appearing to help with Madame's scheme but turning it on her in the end, getting his twisted pleasure out of seeing everyone come to ruin. The most intriguing feature of this is the tacked-on revelation that the action has all been Madame's dream, a fantasy in which she is tricked out of her life – that a woman should have such fantasies is certainly provocative.The anti-Christian, republican and homosexual aspects of Sade's book are jettisoned. What we get in their place is a lot of softcore nudity and brittle upper-class decadence. The film is certainly creepy, although the creepiness is second hand, the idea of dreams which turn out to be real a direct lift from Polanski's Rosemary's Baby. Franco certainly knows how to direct the camera, although it is hard to tell whether the often out-of-focus camera-work was deliberate or not (a case could be made that it is, and behoves the dream that the film's action is). The pace is very slow.This is not a bad film about decadence, Sadism and being driven mad by sex, but there's surely a better narrative to be extrapolated from Sade's extraordinary book.

I bought this DVD a few years ago when my appetite for old obscure films was in full swing, and I was spending entire paychecks on DVDs. I bought this not knowing at all what to expect, and was pleasantly surprised all around.Eugenie is the story about the defiling and corruption of an innocent girl, by a step-brother/step-sister love-couple who are members of a sadistic cult, a cult which has the goals of re-enacting the works of De Sade using the flesh of young female virgins. The whole film has an air of dreamy, drugged hallucination, and Franco was on top of his game when he made this.Everything seems to fit together with this film better than other Franco films of the same era. It's best counterpart would be Venus in Furs, my other candidate for favorite Franco film. The soundtrack and scenery from 1970 now serve as a time capsule, excellently crafted and executed, along with copious amounts of full frontal female nudity, a trait still in it's infancy at the time.If you like films from the early days of the Ratings system, and like Franco-style exploitation films, than this is the perfect treat for you.

This is an film which is based on the book "Philosophy in the Boudoir" by the Marquis de Sade. Originally written in 1795, it is perhaps the most representative of all the Marquis de Sade's works. The script very cleverly adapts the original story for the modern time (that is 1970). Dialog is brilliant (Christopher Lee is mostly reading the original text by de Sade). Music is excellent. Acting is superb by all actors, most notably Maria Rohm, Jack Taylor and Christopher Lee. Marie Liljedahl is very convincing as the innocent young girl (she was just 19 while shooting). I don't like the idea to have an even younger actress for the part (like some other comment here seems to advise)! The cinematography fascinatingly uses the space on screen in focusing (and sometimes not focusing) different aspects of the image. But I must admit that this technique works much better on the big screen. Luckily I had the possibility the see this amazing piece of art in a theatrical screening. The film is highly recommended if you like the work of Luis Bunuel, Orson Welles, Douglas Sirk, Roman Polanski, Perdo Almodovar or David Lynch. That all said, avoid the film if your just looking for a cheap skin flick. You won't find it here. Go to your next videostore and rent something else: "If you want to watch porn, then buy the real thing" (like one other reviewer said). This one has absolutely nothing to do with porn. If you never heard of de Sade and if you have no interest in art and an experimental approach of film-making, you will find this film boring, stupid and you won't understand what's it about.

Eugenie is a film that shocked 1969 audiences, with interracial kissing, woman-to-woman fondling, and brother-sister sex games. It is beautifully filmed, sublimely acted (within its cult pedigree), and has reams of coolness, which makes it a good bet for modern audiences. If you get bored watching Connery drive his Aston Martin to a romantic rendezvous for some witty repartee, Eugenie will likely bore you. If you prefer graphic to simulated, you might find it lame. But if you can buy into the characters and appreciate the care of the filmmaking, Eugenie is a rewarding, disturbing piece of celluloid. In the interview, Franco states "Of all my films, it is the one I hate the least." If you know Franco and his staggering body of work, that's saying something.