Stephen Thrower

Genre is an unstable boundary in Franco's work; detective mysteries are suffused with explicit eroticism (Les Ebranlées), brutal sex dramas shade into horror (Ilsa the Wicked Warden) . Franco's chief hallmark is sex, often perverse or sadistic, but his films are only occasionally 'porno films' per se. So bearing in mind that some of you may dispute the precise point at which a crime drama with lots of sex becomes a sex film, or a sex film about
torture and degradation becomes a horror film, my rough guide to
Franco's genre landscape is as follows:
56 horror films (the supernatural, monsters, or multiple murder)
42 crime films (criminal exploits, spies, crime fighters)
39 sex dramas (dramas involving frequent erotic situations)
18 porn films (films in which the primary element is sex)
13 adventures (heroic tales, picaresque stories)
02 musicals (dramas with numerous songs performed by the cast)
02 experimental films (foregrounding formal experimentation)
01 historical drama (in this case about the Nazi period)

In Flowers of Perversion, we pick up the story in 1975, when major changes are looming. In his never-ending search for new financing, Franco has become aware of a Swiss producer making waves in the erotic film industry with a string of successful softcore movies which play not only in Germany and Switzerland but also in the USA and Great Britain. [...] Without further ado, Franco grabs his passport and catches a plane to Zürich to meet the man who will finance his next sixteen films, including some of the most shocking and sleazy of his career.