Countess Perverse (1974)
** 1/2 (out of 4)
The Countess (Alice Arno) and Count Zaroff (Howard Vernon) seem like your normal type of people but what horror lies within their castle walls say the otherwise. It turns out that the two are actually cannibals who are provided women by another local (Robert Woods) who the Countess hunts down with her arrow. Soon another woman (Lina Romay) is delivered for their wicked game but things don't go as planned.
Jess Franco's LA COMTESSE PERVERSE is a sexed up version of THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME and like many of the director's work from this period it's available in several versions. The film was originally a hard sell anywhere so the producer had Franco shoot more sex scenes including some hardcore ones. The film would find a release via the hardcore version and this was what was on the market for years. Finally, a 76-minute director's cut of the original version was released as well as a new hardcore version under the title SEXY NATURE.
This was my first time watching the director's cut and it's certainly better than the hardcore versions but I'd still say it falls short of being one Franco's better films. There are some interesting things scattered throughout the picture including an early sequence where one of the women are on a boat and headed towards the island. There's a really weird music score here and the visuals on the boat just make this a rather surreal sequence. The film is actually rather light on the cannibalism subject, although this here was apparently why it couldn't find a release.
The film offers up a nice cast of familiar faces. Vernon is always fun to watch in these Franco movies as is Woods. Both men offer up good performances here. Arno is extremely good in the role of the perverted countess who likes to kill women and then eat them. Romay makes one of her earliest appearances here and she's obviously easy on the eyes. The cast are certainly a major plus and especially since Franco fans will be used to most of them.
I think where the film fails is that there's really no energy or drama throughout. There's never a risk that you feel for the woman and the final hunt is rather boring and the film just doesn't contain enough to keep you fully invested in what's going on.
