Suman Roberson
It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.
Aneesa Wardle
The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.
Philippa
All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.
jadavix
"The Frightened Woman" is a boring title for a boring movie. It's really only worth watching for some striking, surreal imagery, like the giant molded legs with the doorway in the middle. Who can forget the moment where the doorway shuts from both sides, forming teeth?Indeed, the filmmaker seems to be throwing around a bunch of psycho sexual ideas about men and women, and perhaps the fear men have of women and the attraction women have to powerful men.Either way, the movie makes no real statement of interest, we get the aforementioned striking image here and there but it is hard to care less about the characters, and the conclusion at the end was so predictable it only left the question why we had to wait so long for it to arrive. But then, at an hour and twenty six minutes, the movie felt at least twice that long.I'd seen this one before, and coming back to it, all I could remember was the main guy's hair, which is sort of red-blonde. I have seen this referred to as "sexploitation", but there's basically no sex, and very little nudity.
Witchfinder General 666
Piero Schivazappa's "Femina Ridens" (aka. "The Frightened Woman"/"The Laughing Woman") of 1969 is a picturesque and rather bizarre Italian Sexploitation effort that combines sadomasochistic sleaze with a psychedelic art-house atmosphere. Both in terms of style and theme, the film strongly reminded me of another artsy European Exploitation highlight from the same year, Jess Franco's "Venus in Furs" (aka. "Paroxismus"). Although quite tame in explicitness, especially compared to the vast load of European Sleaze films from the early 70s, "Femina Ridens" is delightfully perverted and deranged, and a visually overwhelming piece of psychedelic atmosphere.The wonderful Dagmar Lassander plays Maria, a beautiful journalist with feminist views. One day, she gets kidnapped by the demented Dr. Sayer (Philippe Leroy), a rich and powerful man, who has a sort of paranoid misogyny which leads him to believe that the female species wants to exterminate the male, and who therefore delights in the degradation and fear of women. Sayer holds Maria hostage in his personal castle of demented tortures and humiliations, where he intends to make her his slave; while submitting her to all sorts of degradations, he also shows her pictures of women who had shared her fate, and whom he says he murdered during intercourse, at the point of orgasm. I spite of his cruelty and sadism, Maria grows a strange, Stockholm-Synrome-like fascination for her kidnapper... or does she? The film is highly surreal, sometimes like a fever-dream. Sayer's mansion alone holds a vast variety of bizarre items, and the entire film oozes a surreal atmosphere. Even though feminism may not be a usual trait of European cult-cinema, it was pretty obvious to me that Maria was going to turn the tables towards the end. The style is very peculiar, but supremely elegant, with a great cinematography, fantastic set-pieces and a wonderful musical score by Stelvio Cipriani that sometimes mixes the art-house atmosphere with archaic, Spaghetti-Western-like tunes. Dagmar Lassander is beautiful and fantastic as always, and Philippe Leroy seems to be predestined for the role of the narcissistic, misogynistic and perverted psychopath. Overall, "Femina Ridens" is definitely an unusual and innovative experience that is highly recommendable to fans of European cult-cinema. Definitely not for everyone, but not to be missed by fans of Italian Cult. My rating: 7.5/10
MARIO GAUCI
As with FOOTPRINTS (1975), I became aware of this one purely by accident: it was mentioned in a review of THE LIBERTINE (1969), which I researched when that film turned up on late-night Italian TV, as being in a similar vein; incidentally, I missed out on that screening of THE LIBERTINE (though I acquired it via the same channel later on) but did manage to watch the film by way of a rental of the English-dubbed R1 DVD during my sojourn in Hollywood in late 2005/early 2006. Actually, in view of the enthusiastic reviews for it, I was let down by THE LIBERTINE – being too light-hearted in nature for what was essentially a serious theme (the sado-masochistic relationship between a young couple)!; to be honest, for much of the time, I was afraid that THE FRIGHTENED WOMAN would go the exact same route…but was subsequently amply redeemed by a wicked (if not exactly unpredictable) final twist.The film concerns the freethinking social attitudes and dazzling creative arts prevalent in this era: an eminent philanthropist (Philippe Leroy) invites a female journalist (Dagmar Lassander) at his fashionable home for the week-end; however, it transpires that he’s a misogynist who distrusts all members of the opposite sex and would rather dominate (or even kill) them! Therefore, for the first half of the narrative, we see the heroine enduring pain and humiliation at Leroy’s hands (including being forced to make love to a dummy in his own image!)…until the tables are subtly, but unsurprisingly, turned: she not only emancipates herself from his control, but teaches him that Man and Woman can co-exist harmoniously – except that Lassander’s following her own personal agenda as well!! The leads are perfectly cast, and the film itself often darkly comic for those in the mood; furthermore, it’s greatly abetted by a typically effervescent “Euro-Cult” score (from the ever-reliable Stelvio Cipriani) and the imaginative – even outré – look (the giant structure depicting the lower section of the female form, with a steel-trap where its sexual organ should be, seems to emanate from Freud: incidentally, this prop figured prominently in stills I’d seen previously from THE FRIGHTENED WOMAN…but it barely registers in the film proper!). Other bizarre touches include the preposterous radio program “Sexual Aberrations And The Stars”, and an idyll at a castle belonging to Leroy’s family complete with secret passage through the wardrobe and a dwarfish manservant. One of the highlights, then, is easily Lassander’s erotic dance virtually in the nude – an episode which actually spearheads the ‘humanization’ of Leroy; eventually, the two characters have a ‘showdown’ in the latter’s pool – amusingly set to a Spaghetti Western-type theme! In the long run, for all its stylishness, the film emerges as inferior to the similar but much more extreme contemporaneous Japanese masterpiece by Yasuzo Masumura BLIND BEAST (1969). Finally, it’s worth noting that THE FRIGHTENED WOMAN was distributed in the U.S. by film-maker Radley Metzger’s company Audubon Films; he would even employ its production designer (Enrico Sabbatini) for his own CAMILLE 2000 (1969)! To get to the edition I watched: apart from the usual shortcomings in the English-dubbing department, the presentation here was further marred by a rather washed-out appearance and brief instances of distracting extraneous noise on the soundtrack! By the way, there seems to be some confusion with respect to the film’s running-time: its length given on various sources ranges anywhere from 84 to 108 minutes – all I can say, however, is that the copy I own ran for 87 minutes!
Infofreak
'The Frightened Woman' is a wonderful slice of 60s sexploitation - stylish, erotic and camp to the nth degree! Fans of Jess Franco's non-horror movies like 'Succubus' and 'Sadisterotica', or Dallamano's underrated 'Venus In Furs' (aka 'The Devil In The Flesh') will eat this baby up! Philippe Leroy is well cast as Sayer, the rich, jaded sadist who likes to degrade women for kicks, and Dagmar Lassander (who some may remember from Fulci's so-so 'House By The Cemetery') is equally good as the inquisitive journalist who unexpectedly finds herself trapped in his vicious games. She surprises Sayer (and us) by subverting his tricks and tortures, and takes him on a journey that he could never have foreseen, and the ending may be slightly predictable, but is still worth waiting for. Like much of Franco's output from the same period, this movie is equals parts art and trash, with many psychedelic touches, some very effective, and others unintentionally hilarious. You either dig this era and these kinds of movies, or you don't. I do, and I loved it. An underrated movie that deserves a much larger audience.
