The French Sex Murders

Here’s the thing about The French Sex Murders: it shouldn’t work. But it does.

The plot? A black-gloved killer stalks victims connected to a Paris brothel. Standard giallo fare. But then Howard Vernon—looking like a sleazy Boris Karloff—shows up as a mad scientist. Not enough? How about Robert Sacchi—a professional Bogart impersonator—playing the detective, our ostensible protagonist.

Sacchi plays the role absolutely straight, never winking at the camera, never acknowledging the elephant in the room. Clad in a trenchcoat whenever possible, and even sporting Bogie’s facial tics, it’s like 1940s-era Bogart got dropped into a 1970s Paris-set giallo. Not Maltese Falcon Bogart. More like one of those forgettable Warner programmers he churned out before Casablanca made him a star.

The tonal whiplash should sink the picture. It doesn’t. Something about the heightened performances suggests the filmmakers might be in on the joke. Maybe.

Consider the evidence: Vernon’s desk sports a prop that’s part shrunken head, part zombie. Someone mentions its eyes move. Then nothing. It’s never mentioned again. Or how every Parisian in this movie keeps a tiny pistol in their desk drawer. Or the murder scenes, repeated four to six times in lurid comic-book colors—yellow, blue, green, purple.

Best of all: Sacchi’s detective finds a victim who’s scrawled a letter in blood. He assumes the dying woman wrote it upside down to make it easier for him to read when he walked in. I’m not making this up.

The motorcycle chase deserves its own paragraph. It starts in downtown Paris, detours through riverside woods, features genuinely dangerous-looking stunts—and then stops dead. It ping-pongs between stripped-down thrills and camp exploitation so fast I laughed aloud. That’s the movie in miniature.

Is this satire? Incompetence elevated to art? I honestly can’t tell, but I was compelled. Not good, exactly. But oddly compelling.