Les Demons (Blu-ray Disc) (Fre/Ger) 1972

Cult filmmaker Jesus Franco (as "Clifford Brown") directed this semi-sequel to his own Der Hexentoeter von Blackmoor without Christopher Lee but with copious amounts of sadism and sleazy sex. Cihangir Gaffari takes over Lee's role as the witchfinder Lord Jeffreys, cursed along with Lady de Winter (Karin Field) and her lover Capt. Renfield (Alberto Dalbes) by a dying witch. The witch had two daughters, Kathleen (Anne Libert) and Marguerite (Britt Nichols), whom she vowed would avenge her death, so Lady de Winter sets out to find them in a convent. After a great deal of explicit lesbianism, Lady de Winter learns that the girls' father is actually her own husband (Howard Vernon). Much sex and torture follows, but just how much depends on the version. Prints range from 83 to 116 minutes, with the most complete version including plentiful sadomasochism. Luis Barboo is suitably nasty as a hangman and Doris Thomas acquits herself quite well as a Mother Superior. Rather than a strict sequel, Les Demons appears to have been inspired mainly by the success of Ken Russell's The Devils (1971). Raoul Artigot's cinematography, replete with alarmingly frequent zooms, is frequently criticized, but it didn't stop Artigot from trying his own directorial hand at the genre with the same year's La Noche de las Brujas. ~ Robert Firsching, Rovi