This is, without a doubt, my favorite Franco film.

It's a really great piece of work, there's no doubt about it. I went into it hearing all sorts of great things, and it still managed to exceed all of my expectations. Franco does that quite frequently, actually. My first exposure to it was last year via the U.S. DVD release. I remember seeing, in a local video store in the 1980s, the VHS box for what I assume was the version with the Rollin dream-sequence inserts. Great cover art (and, if I recall correctly, displayed across the front of one of those oversized boxes), but, for some reason, I never watched the movie. It's probably just as well. I wouldn't have understood Franco back then anyway.

As to the matter of favorites, I think about this every time I start to write about his work, and I've finally decided that I can't pick a favorite Franco. There are too many of them that are too good, and that are too different to compare, even when they're telling exactly the same story. I can prefer one to another, but I always feel as though I'm unfairly slighting the one I don't denote as a preference. I've stopped trying to pick a favorite. I am a Franco fan. That's enough for me.

That leads me back to something about which I tried to start a thread when I first came here (still haven't figured that one out). I doubt I have to sell anyone here on the merits of Franco's work. His shortcomings are always radically overstated by his critics. Something I've discovered, through my increasingly extensive delvings into that work, though, is that those shortcomings have probably also been radically overstated by his admirers. You find reviews all over the place hailing a given Franco film, but prefacing laudatory remarks by saying something like "most Franco movies are worthles drek, but this one...." I'll be the first to acknowledge Franco can churn out a complete waste of cinematic space with no redeeming value, when he's at his worst (OASIS OF THE ZOMBIES, I'm callin' you out!), but I've come across a lot fewer examples of this than what most commentary on his work suggests. His resources are limited, but he really is a top-notch filmmaker, and, in context, the pooches in his pound come across as simply the inevitable consequence of having made so many movies for so many years, and for so little money. No one can be at the top of their game that often and under those circumstances. It would, in fact, be a remarkable credit to his skills as a filmmaker if he'd only managed to turn out even two or three really good flicks at the impoverished budget levels and breakneck pace at which he worked for decades, but he has dozens of bona fide classics under his belt. I think he's been terribly underestimated, even by many of those of us who admire him.