Reviews
21%
Audience Score
100+ Ratings
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Bill Gibron
DVD Verdict
About the closest French Sex Murders comes to those yellow Italian pulp paperbacks is the ancillary 'giallo' moniker plastered on the production.
Rated: 65/100
Jul 29, 2005
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Audience Member
A total waste of time. Excruciatingly slow with not much sex or violence. Video Nasty fans will be disappointed. The only highlight comes when we realize who the killer is. The ending is actually quite clever and provocative. But it's far too painful to sit through - the dubbing alone is dreadfully cringe-worthy. The Bogart look-a-like is about as unexciting as the pedestrian murders.
Rated 1/5 Stars •
Rated 1 out of 5 stars
02/24/23
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Audience Member
Decent Giallo but nothing outstanding. Interesting experimental work done on the murder sequences. Love Robert Sacchi who did his best Bogart impression that he could.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
01/22/23
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Audience Member
With a name like "The French Sex Murders" you know the film is going to be brimming with class. Well what else can you expect from smarmy schlock producer Dick Randall who traveled all over the world to hop onto any bandwagon he could in order to make a quick buck. With "The French Sex Murders" he jumped on the Italian Giallo train of success going as far as giving the film a title that would capture more attention and even casting a professional Humphrey Bogart lookalike as the lead inspector. Well if he was shooting for making a trashy Giallo murder mystery with the most ridiculous plot twist imaginable then he succeeded.
Our film opens with a man jumping off the Eiffel Tower to his death then we jump into a plot of a young man that steals some precious jewels. His first stop is a bordello (headed by cult icon Anita Ekberg) to ask his favorite prostitute to marry him. She refuses and proceeds to beat the shit out of her calling her a whore (hmmm.... was he unaware of her profession). Well after his departure the prostitute is found dead so in comes inspector 'Bogart' who captures the goon while threatening to hurt his ex-wife and her new lover (this guy is so loveable!). He escapes after being convicted of murder the next day (the courts work fast in Europe apparently) only to behead himself in a motorcycle accident. Well apparently he wasn't the killer as the murders continue on as people connected to the bordello mysteriously start to die off.
Producer Dick Randall and director Ferdinando Merighi throw everything they can into this poor example of a Giallo in order to make it stand out when compared to other films in the over saturated genre. Not only to we get in in-your-face title and a Humphrey Bogart look-a-like but also mad scientists, a murderous eyeball collector, hooded figures, incestuous fathers and even supernatural elements when our thief threatens to rise from the dead and later his bodiless head blinks! Seriously what-the-fuck! They also throw in the most ridiculous plot twist in Giallo history at the end when it is revealed who the real killer is and his true motive behind his actions.
Ferdinando Merighi, a real nobody in Italian cinema, was a cheap Dario Argento wanna-be that desperately tries to make the film 'stylistic' but instead his approaches are just more annoying. When our thief is convicted and he threatens the whole court that he will rise from grave, Merighi has the picture go to negative colors. Really? The most annoying aspect is that every killing in the film is replayed at least four times simultaneously, each time the picture toned a different color (red, blue, yellow, etc). Seriously this was just a lame method in order to mimic much more successful directors in the genre.
The cast may be full of interesting Euro cult actors but this is an extremely poor example of the Giallo genre, even for a more trashy entry. The filmmakers throw everything in but the kitchen sink to make this stand out among other, much better examples but nothing sticks. It's worth a look for fans of bizarre cinema but there are much better, more entertaining examples of the genre available and fans wanting a truly interesting trashy entry are better off hunting down "The Case of the Bloody Iris."
Rated 2/5 Stars •
Rated 2 out of 5 stars
01/17/23
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Audience Member
The French Sex Murders has moments of stylish surrealism that might mark it as a classic of he giallo genre, but unfortunately it devolves into a forgettable, unstylish, and unoriginal piece of thriller trash.
Rated 1.5/5 Stars •
Rated 1.5 out of 5 stars
01/27/23
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Audience Member
terrible, unwatchable. Badly edited, horribly dubbed, and spliced together with "missing" or "cut" scenes. Sad, since it had such promise.
Rated 1/5 Stars •
Rated 1 out of 5 stars
02/16/23
Full Review
Audience Member
It's a cheap exploitation film from the early 1970s that borrows plot lines from other giallo movies, but it was watchable enough for what it is. The writing is terrible and so was the overdubbing. It does have a lot of things jammed into it like Howard Vernon as a mad scientist type and the lead inspector who looks like and seems to be playing Humphrey Bogart. I heard he actually was a Humphrey Bogart impersonator. It's ridiculous, but I've seen much worse.
Rated 2/5 Stars •
Rated 2 out of 5 stars
01/25/23
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