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Blue Rita
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray ALL - America - Full Moon Features Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (19th December 2023). |
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The Film
 "Blue Rita" is a Paris strip club and its owner Rita (Je brűle de partout's Martine Fléty) is the main act, bearing her body on stage but completely untouchable by men. The victim of sexual abuse and torture, Rita has turned her club into a front for intrigue, programming her girls with the help of chemist Franchesa (Sarah Strasberg) and procurer Gina (Sexy Sisters' Pamela Stanford) to seduce and abduct unsuspecting men, extracting information on behalf of spy Bergen (Perceval's Guy Delorme) and money from their bank accounts towards her plans of getting away from it all for good. The latest to disappear is journalist Sebaski (The Sadist of Notre Dame's Olivier Mathot) who is kept in a state of chemically-induced arousal at the risk of his heart condition until he breaks and tells them all about his foreign government connections; however, Bergen who desires Rita thinks he has found an even bigger fish in foreign boxing champion Janosch Lassard (Mad Foxes' Eric Falk) who may be planning to defect using top secret information as a bargaining chip. With Rita having recently experiencing betrayals from some of her girls, Bergen supplies her with his own secretary Sun (Wicked Women's Dagmar Bürger) to lures Jansoch away from his government minders. Sun falls for Janosch, however, and uses Rita's attraction to her to undermine their program of sexual torture to give Janosch some sexual relief. With Interpol's Inspector Tanner (White Fire's Henri Guégan) spying on her operations, Rita suspects a mole within her organization and Sun gets to see first hand what Rita does to people who cross her. One of director Jess Franco's rare dips into the Eurospy genre – a genre he attacked as a jobbing director in the sixties with films like Attack of the Robots, Residence for Spies, and Lucky the Inscrutable – Blue Rita follows the Pop Art vein of his The Girl from Rio to sexualized ends only suggested in less permissive times. Although shot in Paris and featuring familiar locations and Eurociné regular Mathot in a quite "revealing" performance – along with reuniting Lorna the Exorcist's Delorme and Stanford, the latter given little to do – the film looks less like one of Franco's increasingly cheap and ugly productions for uncredited producer Robert de Nesle, bearing all of the stylistic marks of his Swiss Erwin C. Dietrich productions through and through from a more varied score of original and recycled tracks by Walter Baumgartner to eye-poppingly colorful photography by Ruedi Küttel (Love Camp) - usually the camera assistant to Dietrich's regular cinematographer (and Walter Baumgartner's nephew) Peter Baumgartner – which favors static shots composed in depth to Franco's more exploratory, zooming, focus-lagging coverage of films from the period. The nudity is copious and the softcore sex scenes enthusiastically-performed, making up for the fact that the espionage plot really is just window dressing. Rita is at least interesting in that her hatred of men stems from sexual torture, but Franco does not really know what to do with her and she spends the climax undermined by a series of increasingly sillier reveals of double crosses and secret identities before a shootout and a limp actual attempt at comedy. Perhaps more so than Franco's other collaborations with Dietrich – a fruitful partnership whose relative creative freedom allowed Franco to indulge in his practice of shooting side projects on someone else's dime like the visually-stunning hardcore Doriana Gray – Blue Rita is eye candy at best... but what eye candy it is. 
Video
Blue Rita, the title of which is actually "Das Frauenhaus" with the opening "Blue Rita" logo presumably meant to look like a neon sign but cheaply done as blue text on a black screen, was only released theatrically and on video in Germany and France despite being dubbed into English for export. The film became more widely available in 2003 when Dietrich started remastering his properties for DVD, with the Franco titles part of a multi-lingual (some of the English dubs were brand new), region free, NTSC line marketed towards international buyers while a German-only edition followed in Germany as part of the stripped-down Erotic Classics line while in the U.K. Anchor Bay released a PAL edition with English subtitles for the German track (it was one of the few Anchor Bay Dietrich/Franco titles to get through the BBFC without cuts). Dietrich remastered the films again 2014 for the German Jess Franco Golden Goya Collection Blu-ray line.  In 2015, Full Moon licensed the Dietrich titles but only for DVD and featuring the English dubs only – apart from Slaves which was subtitled because Dietrich did not prepare an English dub track – and their DVD of Blue Rita followed suit, although it did carry over and subtitle an interview with actor Falk. Full Moon's Blu-ray/DVD combo under review carries over the 2015 DVD, while the 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen Blu-ray utilizes the same HD master as the Golden Goya line and, as such, only offers marginal improvements over the HD-mastered 2015 DVD with better delineation of colors – the use of yellow looks more golden and less sickly – slightly better shadow detail, and slightly better rendition of solid surfaces of bright and saturated color that still features some macro-blocking and perhaps some evidence of digital corrections that originated with Dietrich (who had been rather heavy-handed with Paintbox's clone stamp in cleaning up the Franco titles during the DVD era), although there is certainly room on the single-layered disc for a higher bitrate. We have not seen the Goya Blu-ray, but this is a serviceable presentation in keeping with most of Full Moon's uneven treatment of their catalogue on Blu-ray.
Audio
While the DVD only included a Dolby Digital 5.1 upmix of the English dub, the Blu-ray features the same track but also includes the French dub in Dolby Digital 2.0 mono – the English and French tracks were lossless 5.1 on the German import but only Japanese subtitles – and optional English SDH subtitles so you can sort of watch the film in French with English dubtitles. Both tracks sound clean given that the dialogue and effects are post-dubbed, and the French sounds more "authentic" given the setting. 
Extras
Besides a photo gallery (1:50), a vintage Jess Franco VHS trailer reel (6:44) – consisting of a mix of eighties Wizard Video promos and more recent ones created for their "Grindhouse Collection" DVD line – and a selection of Eurocult Trailers including some Dietrich Franco titles (of which only Barbed Wire Dolls has been released on Blu-ray although Voodoo Passion has been announced for February 2024) and recent Blu-ray titles like Naked Girl Murdered in the Park, the Blu-ray includes an audio interview with filmmaker Peter Strickland by Chris Alexander (24:06) previously included the aforementioned Barbed Wire Dolls release. Although the introductory text tantalizingly reveals that his film The Duke of Burgundy started out as a remake of Lorna the Exorcist but focuses more on their admiration of Franco whose films they feel reveal one person's obsession rather than a film by committee. Strickland also discusses the influence of Franco film scores before they turn the talk to his own film and its treatment of sadomasochistic relationships, focusing on the power dynamics rather than the sex itself.  The DVD included in the combo includes the aforementioned Franco VHS trailer reel but also includes the exclusive of "Slave in the Women's House" (7:54), an interview with actor Falk recorded for the Goya Blu-ray in which he discusses his acting style – including playing the "slave" role in this film compared to his other Dietrich works – his memories of Franco and porn actor Roman Huber (Rolls Royce Baby) who has a small role late in the film and who Falk describes as a "master fucker." and little else on the film apart from keeping the suits he wore.
Packaging
The disc comes housed in a slipcover whose odd original artwork obscures the more explicit Blu-ray sleeve artwork based on a promotional still. 
Overall
Perhaps more so than Franco's other collaborations with Dietrich, Blue Rita is eye candy at best... but what eye candy it is.
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