SEVEN WOMEN FOR SATAN (1974) Blu-ray
Director: Michel Lemoine
Mondo Macabro USA

Is the last-living descendent of Count Zaroff a psychosexual killer? Only his butler knows for sure in the French fantastique sleeper SEVEN WOMEN FOR SATAN, on Blu-ray from Mondo Macabro.

Businessman Boris Zaroff (writer/director Michel Lemoine) daydreams of hunting naked women for sport in a sexualized variation on the exploits of his ancestor the Count Zaroff (of the much-adapted Richard Connell story "The Most Dangerous Game"). On weekends at his recently-purchased medieval castle looked (complete with torture chamber), Zaroff puts his fantasies into practice with the assistance/encouragement of sinister servant Karl (Howard Vernon, THE BLOOD ROSE) and vicious mastiff Ingmar. Having promised his father (also Vernon) on his deathbed to reawaken the Zaroff bloodlust in the Count's last-surviving descendent, Karl finds his efforts complicated by the beckoning ghost of Anne de Boisryvault (Joelle Coeur, LES DEMONIAQUES) who was either a past victim of Boris or his ancestor who often frustrates Boris' desires. Although housemaid Jeanne (Patricia Mionnet) is perfectly submissive, Zaroff hires comely secretary Joëlle (Martine Azencot, 11,000 VIRGINS) to do little more than get drugged and frug naked before a two-way mirror before he sets the dog on her, while a stranded comic-relief motorist couple (assistant director Robert de Laroche and Nathalie Zeiger of Robbe-Grillet's PLAYING WITH FIRE) may be a hindrance or provide more fresh meat.

SEVEN WOMEN FOR SATAN was the fifth directorial effort of Lemoine, a French actor who made a name for himself in the sixties in Italian costume pictures before meeting Jess Franco and appearing in a trio of German co-productions SUCCUBUS, SADISTEROTICA, and KISS ME MONSTER – along with CASTLE OF THE CREEPING FLESH directed by the Franco films' producing partners Adrian Hoven (MARK OF THE DEVIL) and Pier Caminneci (THE VAMPIRE HAPPENING) – with his then-partner model Janine Reynaud. Like the British advertising of another Mondo Macabro French rarity DON'T DELIVER US FROM EVIL, SEVEN WOMEN FOR SATAN has been touted as "The French film BANNED in France..." under the grounds of promoting necrophilia and "incitement to murder." While the ruling seems pretty ridiculous, one does baffle at the uneven tone of the film in which he seems at one point merely fantasizing, then another tormented by his violent urges and accidentally killing a victim, then casually and coolly sadistic as he dispatches another, and yet another time completely unaware of his actions until he sees something that suggests Karl has lied to him about the whereabouts of a victim. The film is not particularly gory but sometimes blunt in its violence; however, while the vignette featuring the motorist couple seems like blatant comic relief, other moments of humor seem simultaneously black and unintentional. It is difficult to imagine anyone else but Lemoine in the lead role voicing the filmic philosophy of the gaze while spying a nude Azencot through a two-way mirror (“You are not reflected in the mirror, but in my gaze. It is looking itself that matters... not what we see”), and Coeur is effective in a role that might have gone to Lemoine's previous muse Janine Reynaud only a couple years before.

Vernon, who had also appeared in Jess Franco's sexy variation on the Zaroff tale THE PERVERSE COUNTESS, seems to be parodying his own Eurocult typecasting but is always a welcome addition. Besides Franco, Lemoine presumably picked up some directing tips under Max Pecas when he and Reynaud starred in I AM A NYMPHOMANIAC, erotica filmmaker Jean-François Davy in whose more art film horror effort THRESHOLD OF THE VOID he appeared, and particularly José Bénazéraf who first cast Lemoine in the earlier SIN ON THE BEACH and then the later FRUSTRATION which Lemoine co-wrote (an ideal candidate for Mondo Macabro release since it played on U.K. television in the nineties in a subtitled version for the Eurotika series). In the particularly French genre of the fantastique or the midi-minuit, SEVEN WOMEN FOR SATAN comes somewhere between the more sadomasochistic art films of Alain Robbe-Grillet and a somewhat less poetic but more focused version of Jean Rollin's pornographic film PHANTASMES. Like a number of French filmmakers during the seventies and eighties, Lemoine did transition to hardcore pornography (including a number of efforts with Marilyn Monroe-lookalike Olinka Hardiman), and those works are much easier than his earlier softcore films to find stateside having been dubbed into English and distributed by labels like VCA and Cabellero. Although Lemoine's feature debut LES DÉSAXÉES made it stateside, it did so in shortened, dubbed form with added hardcore inserts under the title MARIANNE BOUQUET (Lemoine later remade the film as a straight hardcore title as HOT BODIES replacing himself in the lead role with French porn star Gabriel Pontello).

Previously released in a cut X-certificate version in the U.K. under the title SEVEN WOMEN FOR SATAN, the film was forgotten until rescued by Mondo Macabro when they released the film on DVD in 2003 as one of their early U.S. releases. Earlier this year, French boutique label Le Chat Qui Fume put the film out on a limited 4K UHD/Blu-ray combo edition with a selection of deleted scenes, as well as an interview and commentary with the film's assistant director. Mondo Macabro has utilized the same 4K master for their 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.66:1 widescreen Blu-ray, and the transfer is definitely an improvement. No longer do the exterior scenes appear to have been shot through diffusion, and the colors are bolder than before, while the more druggy and delirious moments now look deliberately soft. There are some issues related to the low budget lighting and the age of the materials, and some shadows during a daylight sequence have a bluish tinge to them that seems more appropriate to the subsequent evening exterior scene, while the blacks in the interiors range from inky to slightly diluted. The damage that was evident in the DVD transfer has all been cleaned up, and the reds of the lettering and opticals are finally of the NTSC overheat apparent on several early Mondo Macabro DVDs. French and English DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono tracks are included along with optional English subtitles, and both tracks sound cleaner than on DVD, although it seems the cleanup was more attentive to the original French dub.

Both Le Chat Qui Fume and Mondo Macabro feature the film's uncut, banned theatrical cut (85:25) while Mondo Macabro has also used seamless branching to reinstate some of the deleted scenes in an extended version (90:20). Since there were nearly eighteen minutes of deleted scenes transferred in HD for the French edition, it is admirable that Mondo Macabro have been selective in what they have utilized for this alternate cut. The first addition is titled "Café Conversation" (2:09) in the deleted scenes section and adds an additional degree of framing onto the story with Midi-Minuit Fantastique co-founder Jean-Claude Romer and author/photographer Alain Venisse discussing the nature of fantasy versus reality, and the willpower needed to sustain certain fantasies as the observe Zaroff (known full well his ancestry) leaving his office for the weekend. Also reinstated is "Hitch-hiker Part One" (1:59) which extends Zaroff's encounter with the hitchhiker past tying her up and drizzling champagne down her body to reveal that Lemoine left quite a bit of himself on the cutting room floor (one might have assumed otherwise that his staying clothed throughout his encounters with the women in the film was either out of self-consciousness about his age or his character asserting dominance over vulnerable nudity), along with "Seventh Victim" (1:22) which was shot later after a screening when Lemoine was told that there were only six victims – actually, there were only five other female victims if one does not include Anne who it is never truly established was murdered by Zaroff or his ancestor – suggesting that although the film's French title is LES WEEK-ENDS MALÉFIQUES DU COMTE ZAROFF, the alternate title SEPT FEMMES POUR UN SADIQUE may have been thrown around originally and not just as the title used for the later reclassified cut. Although the difference in image quality of the other two scenes does stand out during transitions in and out of the footage, this third scene sticks out because it looks so different and is also the most bluntly violent of all the kills. While the latter two additions do not really add much of consequence of the film, it is nice to this as an option (the deleted bits are also included in the deleted scenes section on their own).

The disc carries over from the Mondo Macabro disc "Formidable!: The Michel Lemoine Story" (15:37), a 2003 interview in which Lemoine – who still has the portrait of Coeur from the film in his apartment – builds on his character's monologue about the mirror in the film by stating that one is never making love to their screen partner in a film but always to the "cyclops" or the camera lens. He discusses his early career – including stage work for Jean Cocteau and his first Italian work on THE PRISONER OF THE IRON MASK – working with Franco and Reynaud, learning from Bénazéraf, writing LES DÉSAXÉES with the intention of directing it and ending up starring in it because the producer wanted to save money, his subsequent erotic films, and his intent with SEVEN WOMEN FOR SATAN to make a fantastique film disguised an erotic film.

In "Movie Memoirs" (57:33), actor/assistant director Robert de Laroche reveals that he had been working as a freelance film journalist when he was asked by a women's magazine to interview Lemoine and Reynaud, later ending up acting in an episode of Lemoine's LES PETITS SEINTES shot in England with actress Zeiger – and ending up in a second role when Lemoine shot a wraparound bit – and noting of SEVEN WOMEN FOR SATAN that Reynaud bowed out due to self-consciousness about her age (she was already thirty-three when she did SUCCUBUS in 1967). He also notes that Lemoine was also sensitive about his age, recalling the director's reaction when it was mentioned that he and Vernon's friendship went all the way back to Lemoine's film debut in Sacha Guitry's THE LAME DEVIL (1948). De Laroche also recalls trying to get him interested in then-unknown Sylvia Kristel (EMMANUELLE) before Lemoine went with Coeur.

The aforementioned deleted scenes also includes two additional scenes with the hitchhiking victim, the second being the morning aftermath (3:20) and the third (2:14) actually being an outtake with the actress shot for LES PETITS SEINTES, while "Master and Maid" (6:02) gives more screentime to the Jeanne character, and there are also some outtakes from the "Seventh Victim" scene (2:43), as well as a reel of alternate takes (7:36) including more grappling by Azencot with the dog, and some additional cutting room floor snippets (2:26). The disc also includes the film's French theatrical trailer (1:34) and the usual "More from Mondo Macabro" promo reel. The limited red case edition of one thousand copies comes with a reversible cover – both sides featuring brand new art by Justin Coffee – and a booklet featuring new writing on the film by Pete Tombs, seemingly an updating of the wonderful film notes he wrote for the Mondo Macabro DVD, who places the film in the company of other rare examples of French horror films of the 1960s and 1970s – also noting the brief resurgence of interest in French horror in the eighties when "various tax laws drove porn back into the ghetto" – and discuses Lemoine career from his stage work and early French films and his growing interest in the technical side of filmmaking while in Italy (Lemoine has cited both Mario Bava and Antonio Margheriti as inspirations), and the influence of Bénazéraf – Tombs does draw some parallels between Lemoine's film and FRUSTRATION – and his feature debut as director/writer/star in LES DÉSAXÉES and his immediate follow-ups before coming to SEVEN WOMEN FOR SATAN, citing the inspiration being a conversation with Midi-Minuit's Jean-Claude Romer like the one heard in the extended version of the film, as well as the film's censorship woes (Tombs reveals that the theatrical version was intended to be shown to censors and the extended version actually screened but there was a mix-up and the censors saw the longer version and banned it). He also discusses the contribution of editor Bob Wade who may have told Robbe-Grillet about the dog scene since actress Zeiger suffers a similar fate in PLAYING WITH FIRE, as well as some of the film's cinematic and literary antecedents. It is a pity that standard edition viewers will miss out on this extra so grab that limited edition while there still are copies. The red case edition of this title is currently available HERE. (Eric Cotenas)

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