A naked girl runs in a park, chased by a man on horseback armed with a whip and a fierce black Alano dog, but to escape the threat, the girl is killed. The architect of the misfortune is Dr. Boris Zaroff, an eminent professional in the field of medicine and murderer, coming from an ancient and rich family that has always had torture as a hobby. In his castle, in fact, Zaroff has terrifying torture instruments, with which he kills poor victims with the help of his butler. But in Zaroff's past there is a tragic event that haunts him.
Clearly inspired by the sado-erotic-horror comics of the '60s and '70s, Michel Lemoine writes, directs, and stars in "Sette femmine per un sadico," a shaky and pretextual horror that over the years has managed to gain a cult aura.
The thing that immediately stands out when watching this film is the lack of a real subject at the base of the work, which goes on in a rather mechanical way between dreamlike scenes, massacres, and gratuitous nudity. It is not clear what Lemoine's need to make this film was, probably believing in it a lot, since it practically lacks the foundations. The frequent dreamlike moments, which apparently serve to highlight Zaroff's tragic past, seem more like a pretext to extend a film that probably would not have reached the minimum runtime required to be released in theaters (in fact, the film barely reaches 75 minutes in length) and have the counterproductive effect of weighing down the work.
Even the idea of paying homage to the black comics of the time is only partially successful, because the atmospheres of "Oltretomba" and company are evoked for the most part in the erotic and torture scenes. The former are certainly more numerous and substantial than the latter, but on a couple of occasions — such as in the successful torture of the "Lettino degli amanti" — even sadism is unleashed with a certain effectiveness.
It is curious to note how the name of the protagonist, Count Boris Zaroff, deliberately refers to the famous Count Zaroff of "The Most Dangerous Game," a novel and later a film of some fame, in which a fanatical aristocrat invited people to his island to then hunt them down like animals. It is not clear whether Lemoine simply wanted to pay homage to the film by Ernest B. Schoedsack and Irving Pichel or wanted to create a kind of apocryphal sequel, although the references to the family's sadistic customs make the second hypothesis more likely.
The veteran Howard Vernon ("The Erotic Nights of the Invisible Man"; "Dracula vs. Frankenstein") is quite fitting as Karl, the butler of the sadistic protagonist, while Michel Lemoine ("The Diabolics Come from Mars"; "The Hot Lips of Emanuelle") is incredibly wooden as an actor and completely incapable as a screenwriter, given the dialogues bordering on the ridiculous.
In the end, what is remembered with greater pleasure about "Sette femmine per un sadico" is the pastel and muffled photography obtained with the classic "veline" in front of the lens and the parade of beautiful naked women who alternate as victims of the Count, who, of course, are not 7, as the Italian title of Bavarian inspiration would have you believe.
Only for connoisseurs of the old sado-erotic films, keeping in mind that "Il boia scarlatto" was quite another thing.
In Italian DVD Mosaico Media.
Watch a clip of SETTE FEMMINE PER UN SADICO
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