How Long Is “Blue Rita”?

This terminally odd, psychedelic outing from exploitation king Jesus Franco constitutes a rare attempt to combine the adult and spy genres. The premise concerns Rita (Marianne Flety), a Parisian gentleman's club owner who secretly works undercover as a Communist spy; her approach involves using her strippers to lure political VIPs into the basement of the club, where she imprisons them and extracts information from them using a number of effective but unspeakably bizarre methods at her disposal. An avowed lesbian, Rita wants to avenge the men for the sexual torture she suffered decades prior. When Rita's Communist liaison sends a young woman named Sun (Dagmar Burger) to the club, Sun permanently renounces all romantic and sexual contact with men and falls into a relationship with Rita, but Sun's first mission involves seducing and entrapping Janosch Lassard (Eric Falk), a Communist boxer from the Eastern Bloc who supposedly has plans to defect. Matters grow more complicated for all concerned when Sun and Janosch start developing feelings for one another; meanwhile, Interpol begins closely observing the doings of the club's proprietors. Two versions of this film allegedly exist: a softcore one that is widely available on video, and a version with hardcore sequences.