Seven Women for Satan

Essentially an offshoot from the fashion for sex and sadism that blanketed the nether reaches of the French cinema during the '70s, this spices its de Sadeian theme with tenuous horror connections (the excuse for the protagonist's strange sexual tastes being his descent from Count Zaroff). The trouble with the film is that Lemoine seems unwilling to relinquish either the bounds of bourgeois good taste or an undernourished, 'Vogue'-ish style of camera-work. The result, with sanitised sadism inserted among the blameless pleasures of the good life, is a dauntingly pretentious exercise.