Karry Best movie of this year hands down!

LouHomey From my favorite movies..

GazerRise Fantastic!

Rosie Searle It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Nigel P As this is a Jess Franco film, it isn't surprising to learn that there are at least three versions. French, Spanish and Italian. In the Spanish version, the always excellent Howard Vernon plays Ana's father, and it is his spirit that leers through the mirror. In the French version, Vernon all but disappears and scenes featuring Lina Romay replace Vernon's death throes, and it is her spirit – that of Ana's sister Marie – that causes all kinds of hallucinogenic problems.Ana Cohen is played by wonderful Spanish starlet Emma Cohen. A musician and singer, Ana provides an innocent presence, which is a rarity in a film at this stage of Franco's career. This makes her descent into that of a mindless killer more pronounced.Of the two variants I have seen, I prefer the Spanish 'director's cut' version. It undoubtedly flows better, and we get a much sharper sense of horror with Vernon's suicide (complete with bulging eyes and protruding tongue) and his subsequent calling to her, seemingly from beyond the mirror. I can understand Franco's decision to replace this with images of Romay (I wonder how Vernon felt about this?): firstly, his fascination with her (which is understandable), and secondly as a means to attract more exploitative interest (which is useful – although Romay's scenes aren't restricted to titillation; they are fairly graphic and intrusive). And yet Romay, wonderful though she is, provides a distraction away from the story and although her scenes are inserted with smoothness, she nevertheless exists on the periphery, so we don't feel the sense of closeness between her and Ana like we do with Vernon.All that aside, this is quite a haunting piece of work, occasionally poetic by Franco's standards, although afflicted with his heavily meandering directorial style at times. The rolling gardens and spacious rooms offer us a chance to buy into Ana's serene surroundings and upbringing, whilst her scenes in a jazz band could have done with a lot of pruning.The inevitable smashing of the mirror is far more interesting in the Spanish version seeing, as we do, the final image of a hanged Vernon caressing his naked daughter, followed by the inexorable splintering of glass. In the French version, of course, Vernon's character never hung himself and therefore the climactic scene had to be shorn of 80% of its impact.The Obscene Mirror then: difficult to find, sometimes heavy-handed in its direction and overlong in places, but beautifully acted (especially the baleful Cohen) and rather haunting.

melvelvit-1 Ana (Emma Cohen) and her father (Howard Vernon) have always meant the world to each other but their idyllic life together shatters when the girl wants to get married and, going into his study to show him her wedding gown, she finds her dad dangling from the end of a rope. Devastated, Ana puts her piano skills to good use by running away to become a singer in a lounge band only to find the pain's inside. She's a beauty and men are interested but whenever Ana reciprocates, the image of her father's suicide appears to her in mirrors and she sees herself stabbing those men to death. Unfortunately, whenever that happens, she either hears or reads in the paper that the men really were murdered. Devastated again, Ana tries to commit suicide but her best friend intervenes and takes her to a beautiful island to rest and recuperate - the island where Ana and her father lived... The Spanish version of this film is considered to be the "director's cut" and I don't know how personal the film was to Franco but I took it personally. There's a fairytale quality to this adult nightmare about guilt and the burdens of the past we all carry but since it sounds like an oxymoron to put "expertly realized" and Jess Franco in the same sentence, suffice it to say that THE OBSCENE MIRROR was downright hypnotic. So much so, I didn't mind the time it took to get where it was going -and it certainly took its time. There were too many non-essential musical interludes and the camera's meaningless meandering makes Franco the most frustrating director I've ever encountered. All the zoom-in, zoom-out, pan right, scan left would be OK if it meant something but doing that to a flower bed or a harbor? Not only that, he'd go in for a close-up on a patron in a nightclub audience and linger so long I felt the person was bound to become part of the story but, no, they were just extras. Credit must go not only to the screenplay but to the cinematographer because there were long stretches where the film didn't seem like it was being "directed" and was quite beautiful to contemplate. All I can say in defense of my 8/10 rating is "there's something about it".

chaos-rampant Here is another of those elusive Franco films that in its proper context is neither horror, nor porn or sexploitation, in spite of the hardcore inserts, but wandering around urges. Now I appreciate Franco in the way you do with a friend or co-worker you have known forever. I appreciate him, in part, because of how familiar his flaws and habits. So I won't mollycoddle him or pretend in his face: he was often sloppy, charmless as a thinker and embarrassing in a number of ways. Whereas some fans read profundity in this film, for me all the stuff about mirrors, madness and theater as staged inner life are as sophomoric as it gets, for instance that whispers of a damaged mind will issue from a mirror. Let me say here that it's not the elements themselves, which others like Rivette, Resnais and Ruiz have used to similar effect, but the narrative distance they are placed away from the viewer, distance that leads up to them and away from.But I accept it as part of the experience of shared intuition that is possible with a good friend; Franco is worth knowing because, going past conscious narrative impositions, I can relax in a fluid fabric of images which he seems to spontaneously stir up from life as he walks through it. The more of his films I watch, the more I relax because I have shared in previous travels.It's all in the last scene here.Leading up to it we have obviously layered madness about a woman reliving guilt from her past, inserts of incestual cunnilingus and hardcore sex (in the Italian version I saw), and relaxed wandering around bars and later exotic Madeira. As a whole the film evokes Franco's films with Soledad, She Killed in Ecstasy and Eugenie. It is not as 'pure' as Female Vampire, nor on the other hand as testing.The idea, tremendously simple, is that a woman wanted to get married, but her beloved sister killed herself out of desperation and perhaps spurned love, and she carries this burden in unfulfilled affairs with men.The Spanish version without the inserts may flesh out the story a bit more, but story is not the main point, it's swimming across to where images acquire life of their own.In the last scene we have all this, the wandering, madness, and repressed emotion, coalesce together in a beautiful way as a bridal veil fluttering in the wind.

johnbernhard As most know, there are 3 versions of the film. The Spanish is considered to be the true director's cut. The French changes the plot and swaps actors, while an Italian print adds hardcore bits to the newly added sex scenes from the French version. While it is frequently cited that the material in the French and Italian films were shot later, this is not entirely true. The Lina Romay footage was lensed later, but there are 3 extended nude scenes with Emma Cohen that were from the initial shoot, and I believe Franco would want them in any 'director's cut' DVD that will hopefully appear. They can easily be edited back into the Spanish print ( I've made myself a copy for future viewings ). Are the nude scenes essential to the plot, well perhaps not. But knowing how Franco adores the female form, coupled with Cohen's beautiful presence....I'd strongly feel he wanted them in the Spanish cut but was prevented by the strict censorship of the Spain at the time.