Fantômas contre Fantômas

Here's another example of an obscure work by a disregarded director turning out to have worn better than many of the official key movies of the day. Blithely transcending all concepts of period and genre, this deploys the hooded master criminal from the Belle Epoque alongside a berserk brain surgeon intent on creating an army of killer zombies (the backlog of Universal horrors must just have hit France), a gang of comic black marketeers, and an abandoned Gestapo torture centre with handy pool of sulphuric acid. It's hectic and ruthless, shot in self-conscious deep-focus (the Gregg Toland backlog...) and incorporates so much location film to render the director an accidental documentarist of Paris, summer of '48. It may not be Feuillade, it may not add up to anything very coherent, but it would certainly have been a waste had this uninhibited fever dream been left in the vaults.