She Killed in Ecstasy (1971)

Why so much hype?

Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

Excellent adaptation.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

The young and idealistic Dr Johnson (Fred Williams) proudly presents his work with human embryos, but has his expectations crushed by 4 experts (Howard Vernon, Paul Muller, Ewa Strömberg and Jess Franco himself) who ridicule the work of his lifetime and destroy his experiments. Dr Johnson commits suicide, and his widow (Soledad Miranda) decides she will kill the 4 enemies of her husband - in interesting ways. Meanwhile she keeps the body of the doctor and continues to talk to him as if he were still alive...A thriller with a remarkable straightforward story for a Jess Franco movie. Soledad Miranda is scorching the screen, the director gives her plenty of opportunity to stare with her dark eyes at her future victims. Not even a silly blond wig can damage her maniacal presence. The jazzy lounge music contributes a lot to the freaky atmosphere, but also the locations near Alicante/Spain are beautifully chosen. The only weak point to me is the role of the police inspector (Horst Tappert), because he seems to do a really lazy and sloppy investigation, considering there are several murder cases. Oh, and maybe it's the only time in cinema history that a car falls down a cliff and just breaks apart, it doesn't explode like it's full of dynamite - movie cliché avoided. Most likely it were only the costs which mattered, though.

Dr. Johnson (Fred Williams) is happily married with his beloved wife Mrs. Johnson (Soledad Miranda) and is researching human embryos using animal cells. When he brings his findings to the Board of the prominent Dr. Franklin Houston (Paul Müller), Prof. Jonathan Walker (Howard Vernon), Dr. Crawford (Ewa Stroemberg) and Dr. Donen (Jesus Franco), the committee rejects his researches and destroys his laboratory. Dr. Johnson has a nervous breakdown and commits suicide, and the disturbed Mrs. Johnson seeks revenge, seducing each member of the Board and killing one by one while having sex with her victims. "Sie Tötete in Ekstase" a.k.a. "She Killed in Ecstasy" is a movie of revenge that uses a storyline very similar to François Truffaut's "The Bride Wore Black" with a grieving woman seeking revenge on the responsible for the death of her beloved lover. However, this film follows the usual style of the director Jesus Franco, with kinky sex, nudity, lesbianism and murders. The hot Soledad Miranda is very beautiful and sexy. My vote is five.Title (Brazil): "Ela Matou em Êxtase" ("She Killed in Ecstasy")

You never know what you're going to get with a Jess Franco film; whether it's going to be a well-done horror picture ("The Awful Dr. Orloff"), a trippy head scratcher ("Venus In Furs"), an ineptly put-together adventure movie ("The Devil Came From Akasava"), vile and sleazy garbage ("Ilsa The Wicked Warden") or stylish, good-looking junk ("The Girl From Rio"). Having over 140 (!) films to his credit, this slapdash director is certainly a dicey proposition at best. "She Killed In Ecstasy" (1970), I feel, falls into that last category. A German-language film that was shot in Spain, it is yet another filmization of Cornell Woolrich's "The Bride Wore Black," which had been excellently brought to the screen by Francois Truffaut just two years earlier. But Franco is no Truffaut, to put it mildly, and he seems to have only a single trick in his director's kit--zoom in, zoom out; zoom in, zoom out...and that gets tiresome very quickly. Soledad Miranda (here credited as Susann Korda, for some reason) plays the widow seeking murderous vengeance on the quartet of doctors who denounced her husband's embryo experiments (an even touchier subject today!) and led to his suicide, and gorgeous as she is, she's no Jeanne Moreau. (She may do lesbian, but she sure ain't a thespian!) The seductions of the four doctors (one played by Dr. Orloff himself, Howard Vernon; another by Franco; and still another by a beautiful blond woman) are well done, but the homicides themselves are fairly lame and unconvincing, and a funky, sitar-laced, completely non sequitur soundtrack does not help matters one bit. The film doesn't wrap up after 80 brief minutes so much as suddenly stop and fade; very strange. On the up side, "She Killed In Ecstasy" features some striking sets and gorgeous scenery, and the DVD that I just watched from Image is one of the crispest-looking I've ever seen; an absolutely lustrous, first-rate transfer. By the way, I can almost imagine a 21st century updating of this film's classic story line; call it "She Killed ON Ecstasy"!

When a non-talent hack like Jess Franco admits he has little respect for his own work then why bother trying to argue with him? This pile of amateur-hour sleaze is a blatant rip-off of "The Bride Wore Black' written, directed and musically scored on what appears to be a drunken bender. The revenge plot of 'Black' couldn't be simpler, yet Franco can't hold it together. The dead-by-suicide doctor that sets off the vengeance is left in his bed by his maddened wife for God knows how long without the slightest change from decomposition (unless we are to believe that the wife killed off all the other characters in a few hours---nope, just directorial stupidity) and to cap it off the wife doesn't notify anybody about his death, yet the other doctors seem to know. She goes off on a killing rampage, yet the doctor-targets don't tell the authorities what they know about the wife's designs on them--in fact some of them simply allow her to kill them without resistance. Right. For instance, the obvious producers-need-nudity-to-sell-the-film lesbian scene concludes with Killer Korda simply putting an air-filled pillow over her victim, who promptly suffocates without the least struggle. Franco's directorial lethargy is so complete he has the last doctor-victim simply slump back in a chair and allow himself to be cut to pieces. And the topper is an abominably amateurish death-by-car-wreck finish---we're supposed to believe our "heroine" would die from a soft slide down an embankment that would barely cause a ripple to the shock absorbers? Oh, and there's a music score of sitar-laden late-60's go-go schlock that is slathered over the film without thought or point, except to prove Franco's incompetence is complete. Of course there are viewers who will love this film because there are always empty heads who enjoy any film they have eye contact with. What is really a stream of urine appears as a shaft of gold to these non-discriminating types who find "enjoyable" and "stylish" all the stupidities and sleazy goings-on, and sadly describe this dreck as "better than usual from Franco." That they would spend enough time watching Franco's body of work to be able to make such judgments is a pathetic admission of too much time on their hands and too little taste.