Customer Reviews

Le Flesh and Fire

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This is a French erotic mystery-thriller with the emphasis on erotic. Don't get your hopes up. The producers' idea of erotic is cheesy late-night semi-porn fare of the teasing tits-and-ass variety. Nothing much to see. Acting is mediocre and hammy - though Lydie Denier as the wheelchair-bound daughter is rather cute and has a hot body.

The story is actually not half-bad. It's based on a novel by Dominique Labarriere, "Le Diable au Soleil". A mysterious handsome young man befriends the dissolute son of a wealthy family. He gets invited to their country chateau and proceeds to seduce, defile and destroy all the members of the household. Why he does so is the mystery. It could have made for an excellent Chabrol film. Sadly the promising material is poorly handled and it ends up being simply tedious and sleazy, replete with loud saxophone music and tiresome gyrations every 10 minutes.

This is my first experience with New Star Video and my last. The transfer is taken from a video tape source. Picture quality is terrible. It is dark, extremely soft, blurry, dull. Electronic video artifacts are visible. Exactly like watching a video tape. It is in full-screen; whether it's pan-&-scan or not, I'm not sure, and frankly couldn't care less. The original French soundtrack has been replaced with an awful English dub, poorly synchronised and making everyone sound chirpily American. Not sure if listening to the original French track would have made it sound better but the English dub is truly horrible with over-the-top melodramatic voice acting. It's painful to listen to. It's painful to watch. No extras whatsoever. Not worth a purchase. Rent if you're really curious and just can't get enough of cheap late-night sleaze.

Around the early nineties, I remembered they showed this French film on late night cable on Argentina, on a weekly slate reserved to soft core flicks. While it has its share of steamy sex scenes, this movie is actually very interesting, disturbing, intelligent and aptly made. A young handsome man befriends the son of an upper middle class family, and soon seduces and involves every member of the family into humiliating, degrading sex: father, sex starved mother, rebellious teenage daughter, even the maid. As it is revealed towards the end of the movie - WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD - he had reasons for doing this: his mother was the former maid of this family, and she died in a car accident because of the negligence of one of the family members. So some fifteen years later, the little boy she left orphan, whose past is not known to the family, has become a stud out for revenge. Not for everyone, but surprisingly compelling and well made.