Seven Women for Satan
(Les week-ends maléfiques du Comte Zaroff, 1976)

Michel Lemoine

France

82 min, color, French (English subtitles)

Review © 2006 Branislav L. Slantchev

Mildly entertaining sleaze that is pretty tame by today's standards despite the big selling slogan that the film was banned in France upon its release. Whereas it is true that this little Z-grade trash was banned, I just don't see what was it that could have shocked the censors so badly. There are some women, mostly attractive and mostly in various states of undress, who never quite reach the average life expectancy of their gender despite the main villain's atrocious lack of dedication to the killing cause. There's very little full frontal nudity and no sex to speak of, so perhaps the censors were just offended by the film's bad taste?

Training at Count Zaroff's Nude Athletics	Back when hitch-hiking was stylish

Whatever the reasons for banning it, now this film will barely make the R rating. However, despite being shot on a budget rivaled by third-grader's lunch money, the film is not your average horror exploitation fare despite striving mightily to fit the genre. As look and feel it has more in common with the artsy and dreamy fantasies of Jean Rollin than the unbearably clumsy sleaze of Jess Franco or the brutal horror action of almost any random American film. Since the film does feature many naked women, it's obviously not Spanish either. In other words, it's French. And we all know the French don't make horror films. However, they do make pretty weird fantastique extravaganzas, to use the pretentious term that somehow manages to capture the quintessential Frenchness of these outings better than any other.

Champagne-tasting for decadent aristocrats	I truly, deeply, did not mean to kill you!

Now, Lemoine is no Rollin, so his flashes of brilliance are rare and as a whole the film only manages to avoid being boring by offering a never-ending cornucopia of very stupid women who contrive to lose their lives only slightly more slowly than they lose their garments. Storywise, the film is a sequel to the cult The Most Dangerous Game, if you recall the artsy schlock about the Cossack Count Zaroff who hunts humans on his remote island for fun. This time, the family inhabits a rococo French chateau and seems to have lost its Russian roots if you don't count the butler Karl (Howard Vernon) who exudes Slavic menace despite his Aryan name. Director Lemoine stars as the current Zaroff, a mildly boring aristocrat whose paper pushing day job leaves him too much time to dream about violence perpetrated against naked women.

Just to see how goofy Howard looks with a beard	Barn Romanticism

In obvious homage to the original, the film opens with a nude woman running through a forest (can't say that I envy the actress doing this barefoot) and being pursued by the Count on horseback and his hound on four paws. Naturally, she is caught and somehow achieves instant death after one closeup and what appears to be a fairly mild smack with Zaroff's whip. But this turns out to be a daydream, for the Count is truly conflicted about his dark desires. This is now an interesting twist: the original Zaroff was quite murderous and loved it; this one actually does not want to hurt anyone; it's his servant Kurt that is the evil force manipulating the Count to yield to his ancestral urges. There is some cockamamie story about the ghost of Kurt's dad imploring the son to get the Count to kill people but I think it was just an excuse to put Vernon in a beard. If not, then these people have a truly bizarre conception of purgatory.

The dark desires of a sexually repressed secretary	It's good to be the king... or failing that, the count

The result of all this is that all women who die do so by accident, Kurt's machinations, or sheer bad luck. This is where the film's English title can be seriously misleading. There's no Satan in this film, and absolutely no references to any demons or supernatural forces (Kurt's dad's ghost's appearance excepting). Also, by my count there were only five women, not seven, and even if we generously count the secretary who did not die and kept her clothes on, there would still be six. (The first nekkid bimbo is obviously Jeanne (Patricia Mionnet), the maid Kurt procured for the Count's enjoyment.) So if you are counting the number of chicks that are yet to get naked and die, then the film will be about twenty minutes too short.

The count's pretensions notwithstanding, it does matter what you look at	Martine Azencot turns out to be somewhat less sexually repressed than previously believed

This is not to say that it isn't long enough. The first real girl the Count encounters is the hitchhiker Stephanie (Maria Mancini), who exudes that 1960s free love aura so palpably it's a minor miracle that the Count did not attempt to seduce her until the next day after they met. After spending the evening dreaming how to waste expensive champagne by pouring it all over Stephanie's body in soft focus and dim red light, Zaroff takes her for a walk in the woods. The next few minutes are truly memorable: first he tries to strangle Stephanie but quits midway and apologizes offering the lame excuse that he only wanted to feel her life "slip through his fingers." This sort of confession would send any reasonable female screaming for the nearest road, but Stephanie actually relaxes and starts enjoying Zaroff's caressing and undressing her. The guy is incorrigible, so he bites her on the tit, which at least causes her to jump to her feet. But he again soothes her and hugs her until she yelps out another scream at which point he gets pissed off at her constantly changing moods and kicks her in the butt. Stephanie finally gets the hint and makes a beeline for the road where, wouldn't you know it, Zaroff is waiting in his car. Needless to say, the girl does not survive the encounter, more because of her own efforts to fail to survive than the Count's pathetic attempts to kill her.

Obligatory gratuitous shot of Joëlle Coeur	This naked bimbo hounded to death

We then find out that Zaroff is actually conflicted (no shit, Sherlock, I'd day anyone dreaming of killing naked women is at least a tiny bit running on less than four cylinders). In this case, there's a severe psychological trauma that involves the death of Anne (the always dependably pretty Joëlle Coeur). Now, this death occurred way back when (before World War I, in fact, judging by the inscription on her crypt, which would make the Count at least 70 when the events of the film take place, but nevermind). It's never clear just what happened there despite her apparition showing up numerous times to explain the backstory both to us and the Count. One thing is clear, she was a married woman who fell in love with Zaroff and who got shot (?) while dancing in a barn with her paramour. (This is not an euphemism, she was dancing at the time, quite demurely at that. But they were planning on doing the dirty deed in the hay afterwards, no doubt about that.) At any rate, after dying very unconvincingly (I have never seen a murdered women bat her eyelids so much), Anne has somehow left an imprint on the Count that drives him to do good things. By this I don't mean engage in Christian charity but rather not viciously torture and kill women.

Some more victims, I mean visitors, Count	Who let this guy operate a camera?

The influence of her departed spirit is embodied in a portrait which draws the Count away from his violent sexual desires and as such constitutes Kurt's nemesis because the servant is fully dedicated to pushing Zaroff down the path of joyful implementation of the manual of Marquis de Sade. To spice things up, Lemoine employs the services of a decent porn star, Martine Azencot, to play Joëlle, a voluptuous temp hired ostensibly to help Zaroff do his inventory. This girl has some rather formidable sexual urges on her own and after one mild drink imagines herself dance in front of huge statues of black men, one of whom then comes alive to do things that no statue can. If that were not enough, she then proceeds to seduce herself during a long solo performance on a bed that would not have been out of place on an interactive porn DVD. This is the occasion for some vacuous philosophy by the Count in which he stares at the unsuspecting nude Joëlle through a two-way mirror and mutters rather inane observations of the sort that it does not matter what one stares at, what matters is the stare. Or something. I admit I wasn't following that too closely. In fact, I was so out of it that I nearly missed how Joëlle managed to get herself defenestrated by a dog.

Just because this is the only thing Nathalie Zeiger can act convincingly	If Edgar Allan Poe wrote eurotrash, this is what it would look like

Two victims being insufficient to establish anything more than bad luck, the film obligingly provides another. Two of them, in fact. This time, it's a couple made up by Francis (played by a very French Robert Icart) and his girlfriend Muriel (Nathalie Zeiger). If there ever was doubt that women have the attention span of pigeons, the scene in the room would provide evidence beyond reasonable doubt. Muriel (suitably topless and dancing to a tune only she can hear) notices a dead body (Joëlle's) outside the window. While she screams and waits for hubby, Kurt removes the body, so when Francis comes to take a look, there's nothing to see. At this point, Muriel shrugs and keeps dancing! A few moments later, she notices Kurt carrying the body in the woods. She screams again, calls Francis, and the entire sequence repeats. Francis is predictably miffed, which is understandable, but Muriel again shrugs off the incident, which is not. Little surprise then when she expresses an unhealthy interest in the chateau's torture chamber even after Zaroff almost says in the Emperor's voice "Now witness the firepower of this fully operational torture chamber!" Somewhat less believably, Francis also gets stupid, but then again, what should we expect from a guy whose bedtime reading was "A Werewolf in Paris"?

The butler and his nemesis	Just because they could get Martine to undress again

All this wall to wall nudity cannot obscure the fact that there's very little content in the film. This is a pity because the basic story is interesting even if one does not need a sinister butler to express the conflict of a mildly insane person. It's also not quite clear just how Anne draws the Count to the light side, and it does not matter how often they filmed Joëlle Coeur through fog, in soft focus, wearing nineteenth century gowns, wading in a romantic lake, or being buck-naked in the hay. The only things that saves the film as it currently stands is the occasional inspired shot or the merciful absence of emphasis on pubic hair, a tribute to good taste sadly missing from many similar films of the period. In other words, you will like the film if you don't care about how stupid a plot is but do like arresting visuals and do not mind the troughs between them being filled with copious amounts of soft-core rendering of the female form.

Joëlle Coeur is not too bad as a decomposed corpse either	This guy is sick (he's not checking to see if she still breathes)

The Mondo Macabro DVD offers an anamorphic transfer at the film's OAR of 1.85:1 and is as good as we shall ever get to see this. This is not to say much about the quality: the colors bleed out, the contrast is bad, and everything bespeaks low budget, bad lighting, and very bad preservation efforts. Some remastering would have helped but a lot of the problems are inherent in how the film was shot, so one cannot hope for much of an improvement. I watched it with the French audio and English subtitles, and have no complaints there. There's an interesting interview with Lemoine (subtitled), and some talent info as well as a trailer. Overall, a decent enough release that fits the film it offers.

December 31, 2006