The director of THE SADIST WITH RED TEETH and FORBIDDEN PARIS is showcased in another double bill of mondo weirdness with their Blu-ray of THE LADY KILLS and PERVERTISSIMA.

In THE LADY KILLS, young Françoise (Carole Lebel, TWO WEEKS IN SEPTEMBER) witnesses the brutal gang rape of a woman by five men and then sets about crossing Europe to seduce and murder them: among them nightclub choreographer Christian (Christian Duc, NAKED MASSACRE), photographer John (Albert Simono, STOLEN KISSES), and race car driver Karl (Paul Descombes). Along the way, she meets a number of equally odd men like pilot Ficheux (Claude Beauthéac) who wears ladies garters under his uniform and a handsome sailor with whom she could fall in love. These men fail to arouse her murderous impulses, but they must nevertheless serve as means to an end. Each time Françoise offers up her body as a trap, she may wind up in over her head given the sadistic impulses of the perpetrators.

Deriving its skeletal framework probably more so from Francois Truffaut's adaptation of THE BRIDE WORE BLACK than its Cornell Woolrich source, THE LADY KILLS – originally titled PERVERSE ET DOCILE – is an episodic slice of French erotica that uses nudity and sex in a functional manner less for titillation to than to set the stage for exploring quirky characters and scenarios through the stoic gaze of Lebel who resembles in some shots Jean-Luc Godard's muse Anna Karina (PIERROT LE FOU). Like the Truffaut film and the Jess Franco films similarly-inspired like SHE KILLED IN ECSTASY, her devotion to revenge is so laser-focused that we are as resigned to a tragic ending as she; however, director Jean-Louis Van Belle throws in one last twist that is very different from that of the Truffaut film but no less disquieting.

In PERVERTISSIMA, Françoise (Maelle Pertuzo) is inexperienced in more than just journalism when she answers an ad seeking a woman with a great body who is ready for anything to do "investigative work" for a scandal magazine doing a story on "Love in Paris". Both the editor and his handsome nephew Christian are vying for the virgin's maidenhead upon meeting her, but her adventurous spirit has her more inclined to explore a variety of roles including streetwalker, call girl, and even investigative reporter infiltrating love cults and lesbian spas. When she fakes an illness to sneak into the clinic of the mysterious Dr. Villard (Albert Simono again), however, she discovers that sex is not all fun and games.

Starting out as a rather tame mondo film PERVERTISSIMA is carried along by the quirks of human behavior specific to Paris in the aftermath of the 1968 student riots and the influx of avant-garde artists tackling social and cultural issues with their crafts (or grafts); and it is made all the more palatable with Pertuzo's charismatic naiveté. Things take a sudden dark turn in the second half when the storyline switches over to a more linear narrative; but it is the absence of Pertuzo's heroine mentally and at times physically that makes this section and its resolution feel more ordinary than the narratives of THE LADY KILLS or THE SADIST WITH RED TEETH.

Unreleased in the United States and seemingly anywhere outside of France, THE LADY KILLS and PERVERTISSIMA both get new HD scans from the original 35mm camera negatives. Neither exactly pops apart from some reds and blues, and the overall softness is at least consistent suggesting that it is a matter of the shooting rather than the mastering. Close-ups are crisp enough not to always flatter the subjects in spite of the heavy use of Max Factor cosmetics on both productions. The elements of both are free of damage but the filming is generally rough and ready, and a comparison to the DVD of THE SADIST WITH RED TEETH also suggests a consistence in the filming and materials. The French DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono tracks are clean-sounding, and the soundtracks are mostly post-dubbed so everything is intelligible, and optional English subtitles extend their translation to even trying to transcribe phonetic games of an avant-garde poet.

Extras start off with "Who is Jean-Louis Van Belle?" (31:29), a reworked version of the Peter Van Lyris piece created for THE SADIST WITH RED TEETH in which Van Belle (his face always obscured) appears at the Cinematheque Francaise at first disappointing his audience by claiming to remember little of his films before launching into a series of anecdotes about the adventures of finding film funding with shaky ideas. There are cutaways to collaborators including Jean Rollin actress/editor Nathalie Perrey (LIPS OF BLOOD) – others make note that her life partner and Rollin's assistant director Jean-Noël Delamarre (TWO ORPHAN VAMPIRES) also worked with Van Belle – reminiscing about being ready for anything the director threw at them day to day on a shoot.