Two Undercover Angels / Red Lips / Sadisterotica / El Caso de las Dos Bellezas (1969) -**½
I’d always heard the Red Lips movies described as Jesus Franco’s response to the James Bond craze that still gripped all of Europe in 1969. That isn’t wrong, but it isn’t exactly right, either. For one thing, the Red Lips girls actually predate Bond mania, having made their debut in Franco’s second feature film (the eponymous Red Lips) all the way back in 1960. When Franco reintroduced the characters for German producer Adrian Hoven in Two Undercover Angels, the reboot unmistakably took its tonal cues from the contemporary Eurospy movies, but at the levels of story and characterization, it was actually something very different. The central characters in Two Undercover Angels, its sequel, and its predecessor from the beginning of the decade are two beautiful and apparently lesbian (or at least bisexual) private detectives who share the disguise whereby they pose as the arch-criminal Red Lips. Their illegal activities are carried out as cover for bringing truly dangerous lawbreakers to justice, but the policemen on the hunt for Red Lips either fail to notice that or just don’t care. And all three Red Lips movies are weird and occasionally macabre, but also lighthearted, comedies. All throughout Two Undercover Angels, I was conscious that it was reminding me of something, but it wasn’t until I watched the interview with Franco appended to the Blue Underground DVD that I realized what it was. I and everyone else who ever failed to put the pieces together can be forgiven, I think, because the true operative theory behind this movie is so totally bonkers that I can’t believe it even now that I’m looking straight at it. Basically, what we’ve got here is a set of increasingly screwy “what ifs.” What if Abbott and Costello had made a parody of Judex or Fantomas? And what if somebody remade that parody in the late 60’s to poke fun at the Eurospy-influenced Fantomas films starring Jean Marais? And most importantly, what if that somebody replaced Abbott and Costello with a pair of sexy lesbians?
We begin with the conclusion to a fashion show of some kind. Afterward, one of the models, an exceedingly cute brunette named Lida Regnier (Maria Antonia Redondo, who looks strikingly like Lina Romay— in fact, Two Undercover Angels is positively loaded with exceedingly cute brunettes who look strikingly like Lina Romay), is summoned to the office of her boss to discuss some matter involving her ex-boyfriend, a man called Radek. It’s never exactly clear what’s going on here (get used to that, folks), but the boss wants Lida to pay Radek a visit— something about the modeling agency or design studio or whatever owing him some pretty big favors. Lida never makes it to the rendezvous, however, and not just because she really doesn’t want to see her ex. While she’s changing out of the last outfit she wore for the show, the dressing room is intruded upon by a werewolf. Or maybe an ape man. Or a yak-anthrope. Or perhaps a Moreauvian manimal. Whatever he is, he’s got deadly claws and hair all over his face. And do you suppose his name might be Morpho? Why, of course it is. Morpho (Michel Lemoine, from War of the Planets and Seven Women for Satan) seizes Lida, and carries her off to the headquarters of his master, a Croatian-German artist by the name of Klaus Thiller (producer Hoven, who can also be seen acting in Mark of the Devil and Castle of the Creping Flesh). There Thiller photographs her while the beast-man tears her to pieces, the photos to serve as references for various paintings and sculptures.
One of those paintings winds up at the Galeria de Horror, someplace in Spain. There it attracts the attention of a masked art thief who infiltrates the gallery after hours by impersonating a wax statue. Proprietor Napoleon Bolivar (Franco himself, looking startlingly youthful and only the slightest bit trollish) comes very close to discovering the break-in— so close that the thief finds it prudent to incapacitate him with a blow to the head. Then she makes off with the painting of Lida. Bolivar tells his story to Inspector Tanner (Marcello Arroita-Jauregui, from Dr. Orloff’s Monster and The Diabolical Dr. Z), but it doesn’t seem likely to avail him much. For one thing, Tanner just isn’t very smart, and for another, he has a preconceived notion of who this thief might be, and what she’s supposed to look like— a notion which bears Bolivar’s report very little resemblance. Before Napoleon has much opportunity to grumble, however, Thiller drops by the gallery, and stabs him to death. Evidently he really doesn’t want the authorities to look too closely at his work.
Okay, so now let’s meet that art thief— or rather, those art thieves. The perp on this last occasion was Regina (Rosanna Yanni, of Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror and Fangs of the Living Dead); the one Tanner was expecting is her older girlfriend, Diana (Janine Reynaud, from Succubus and The Felines). By trading off under the identity of Red Lips, they’re able to stay always a step or two ahead of numbskulls like the inspector. The reason they’re stealing paintings even though they’re really private eyes is that they’ve been hired by Radek to find his missing ex, and they’ve linked Lida’s disappearance to a whole rash of others among dancers, models, and similar professional hot chicks, all of whose likenesses have subsequently appeared in the works of Klaus Thiller.
Obviously that makes Thiller the prime suspect, and someone Red Lips really ought to meet. Accordingly, Regina goes to another gallery where his work is on display, posing as a countess who seeks to buy something of Thiller’s. It proves to be more difficult than she and Diana anticipated. Alberto Carimbuli the gallery director (Alexander Engel, from The Horror of Blackwood Castle and The Mad Executioners) claims never to have met Thiller himself, and that the artist conducts all business strictly through his attorney. Even so, Regina is sure Carimbuli knows something that she and her partner could use, so she invites the director to their villa for cocktails that evening. Apparently it’s a ruse the detectives have often employed— Regina seduces the desired information out of somebody while Diana records the conversation from the next room. It very nearly works this time, too, but right after Carimbuli agrees to sell Regina a particularly suspicious-looking Thiller sculpture, and just as he’s on the verge of revealing the artist’s true name and contact information, somebody shoots him dead from outside the villa. Regina and Diana both give chase, albeit without success. And when they return to their living room, they find that someone has made off with Carimbuli’s corpse! Fortunately, Diana left the tape recorder running, and it caught the body-snatcher speaking to an accomplice. It sounds a lot like Vittorio Freda (Manolo Otero, from The Book of Good Love II and Tales of the White Sheets).
Who? Honestly, the detectives aren’t sure about that themselves. All they know is that he’s been following them around a lot lately, seemingly trying to get into their pants. But if that’s Freda on the tape, it’s a safe bet his real motives are considerably more sinister. Freda also shows up at Carimbuli’s gallery the next day, brandishing a bill of sale for the very same Thiller piece that Regina was supposed to be buying. She lucks out this time, in that Interpol agent Francis McLane (Chris Howland, of The Wanker and The Secret of the Black Trunk) is also present at the gallery, and susceptible to manipulation by a pretty girl; Regina quickly gets McLune to lean on Carimbuli’s colleagues with whatever authority he possesses, so that she can go home with the statue. And if Freda’s performance at the gallery isn’t enough to convince you that he’s no good, then his presence behind the wheel of the getaway car during a drive-by shooting at the Red Lips villa certainly ought to be. Those of you who’ve seen The Mystery of the Wax Museum, House of Wax, or better yet, A Bucket of Blood will not be surprised to learn that all the rigmarole over the statue is due to the presence of Lida Regnier’s corpse inside it. Finding that out satisfies the terms of the contract with Radek, but it neither brings the killers to justice nor gets them (or Inspector Tanner, for that matter) off Diana’s and Regina’s backs. Ironically, though, the meeting in North Africa whereby the detectives mean to conclude their business with Radek sets lots of things in motion toward resolving those bigger and more dangerous issues.
I’ve been spinning my wheels for a while now in finishing this review, mainly because I can’t figure out why I don’t hate Two Undercover Angels. I have very little patience for the Eurospy genre, and I can’t fucking stand Abbott and Costello, so how is it that I enjoyed a Eurospy-flavored caper parody made to embody Jesus Franco’s love for golden-age Hollywood comedy duos? I have no idea, unless maybe it’s simply that Two Undercover Angels has enough of that irreducible Franco-ness about it to overcome whatever else it was supposed to be. I truly do believe that nobody else but Franco could have made this movie. Partly that’s because of the usual things: the salacious nightclub scenes (of which Two Undercover Angels has several), the subhuman henchman called Morpho, the mute or at least silent femme fatale (whom I haven’t mention until now because she doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the story) lurking in the background at the villain’s lair, the reek of sex pheromones pouring from the screen despite the best efforts of censors who were still fairly powerful in 1969. (Those censors, incidentally, are the cause of an amusing bit of fourth-wall breaking, when Regina protests into the camera that she can’t get out of bed until it zooms in, pans up, or turns its attention elsewhere. That bit seems baffling if you’re watching the Blue Underground DVD, which is not at all shy about nudity when there’s a nightclub scene going on, but that’s because Blue Underground uses a German print. In the version that played in Franco’s native Spain, the go-go dancers keep their backs turned to the camera after their tops come off.) Franco has other, subtler eccentricities, though, and this movie puts them on display more prominently than many others. Most notably, the breadth of influences that go into a Franco movie is often extraordinary, as is his willingness to mix and match those influences in counterintuitive combinations. In particular, he has a tendency to use tropes or concepts pilfered from 30’s and 40’s Hollywood in ways that their originators had never imagined, and would barely recognize— and what better illustration of that point than a Eurospy movie that’s also a globe-trotting caper flick that’s really a Judex-like masked avenger film that’s also an Abbott and Costello-style horror comedy about two hot dames who’ll seduce the whole male cast if business calls for it, but always wind up with each other in the end?
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