A delightfully loopy surprise, DRAGUSE manages to strike the perfect balance between gothic horror and weirdo, off-kilter atmosphere. Apparently France's first homegrown X-rated release (at least according to the supplements on its new video version), DRAGUSE barely seems interested in being porn, featuring only about five minutes of actual hardcore, most of which are inserts that could easily be lopped out again (I guess if France's porn-legalization law of 1975 was repealed). Weirdo plot finds an author dreaming of a ghostly woman in a cursed mansion, then getting assigned by his publisher to go to a country hideaway to work on some erotic novels. Arriving there, he's oddly delighted - rather than creeped out - to find it's the house from his dreams, complete with the woman.
Featuring a fantastic score and great cinematography, DRAGUSE has ambiance to spare. Early shots roaming the manor are fantastically eerie, as are great sequences like Monica Swinn lasciviously licking a femur or other such spooky nonsense. Nevertheless, the film is also not without a sense of humor, and features a fantastic scene early on where the author (Jess Franco vet Olivier Mathot) wanders around looking at sex shops and porno theaters, commenting ironically on the titles on the posters - many of which the cast and crew of DRAGUSE worked on! As a snapshot of the nascent French sex industry, DRAGUSE is first rate, and if it starts to lose a little steam by the back half, when it devolves into a series of disjointed flashbacks (after doing a truly admirable job of sustaining narrative - rare among French sex films), it nevertheless has built a large enough reservoir of goodwill that it emerges relatively unscathed. Mainstream porn patrons in 1976 were probably miffed to find the film featuring so little hardcore, but for viewers like me looking for an enjoyable cult-horror oddity, it's just the ticket.
