The Sadist of Notre Dame (1979) User Reviews

Third time's not the charm.

[BA_Harrison · 5/10 · 8 June 2020]

In 1975, prolific Spanish film-maker Jess Franco directed sleazy horror L'éventreur de Notre-Dame (AKA Exorcism), also releasing a XXX version called Sexorcism which featured much more graphic sex scenes (several members of the original cast getting in on the fun, including Franco himself!). Four years later, Franco released a third version of the film, The Sadist of Notre Dame, re-edited with additional footage and a different storyline, but none of the explicit sex.

Franco plays ex-communicated priest Mathis Vogel, recently released from an asylum, who saves sinners by stabbing them to death with his switch-blade. First to go is a prostitute who makes the mistake of offering him her wares, followed soon after by a young girl walking home alone after an evening of bad disco dancing. Vogel writes a fictionalised account of his slayings, offering his story to a trashy sado-masochistic magazine published by Pierre de Franval (Pierre Taylou) and his assistant Anne (Franco muse Lina Romay), who participates in Satanic orgies at the chateau of a wealthy countess (France Nicolas). Following Anne to one of her depraved parties, Vogel sets about punishing the participants for their sins.

Franco can usually be relied upon for either graphic sex or graphic violence, and occasionally both; failing that, he tends to make his films plain weird or spectacularly bad. Barring some full frontal female nudity, The Sadist of Notre Dame is a relatively reserved film, the stabbings fairly free of gore and the sexy stuff strictly soft-core, and the film is neither bizarre enough or rubbish enough to appeal to fans of Z-grade cult cinema. To be fair, it's never boring, but when one invests time in a Franco film, one expects certain boxes to be ticked, and they aren't on this occasion.

I've not seen Exorcism yet, so I can't say how that film compares, but I have checked out an un-dubbed copy of Sexorcism and can confirm that Franco and company don't hold back when it comes to the naughty stuff.

Franco's purification crusade!

[Coventry · 5/10 · 1 September 2023]

If you manage to find the fully uncut version of "Exorcism", then you have "The Sadist of Notre Dame". This has always been one of my favorite Jess Franco achievements. It's obviously not on par with his true classics like "The Awful Dr. Orloff", "Faceless", or "Diabolical Dr. Z", but it's nevertheless a tense and brutal shock-tale. It also features Jess Franco's biggest (and best) acting performance, as the mentally unstable ex-priest Mathis Laforgue who recently escaped from a psychiatric clinic and now dwells the streets of Paris. He sees himself as a redeemer, sent by God to wipe out all that is impure. Laforgue kills prostitutes, horny teenagers, and random partygoers, all whilst claiming he's saving their souls. Always liked this one because it is a cruel exploitation story with nevertheless an uncannily realistic ambiance. Paris is perhaps considered the most beautiful city in the world, but here you only see eerie dark alleys, freaks & outcasts, vile acts of torture and mutilation, and pure perversion.

Demoniac - Franco is the star for a change

[Stevieboy666 · 6/10 · 21 May 2023]

Simulated Black Masses are being held for the entertainment of rich modern day Parisians, meanwhile defrocked priest and lunatic Mathis "I am the sword of the Lord" Vogel (Jess Franck) is murdering beautiful young women in the name of God. Within the first opening seconds we see Lina Romay (director Franco's favourite star and real life lover) stark naked, a mere taster of what is to follow. There is female (and some male) full frontal nudity and soft core sex throughout, this is obviously a skin flick first, a horror film second. Jess Franck is really Jess/Jesus Franco, no prize for figuring that one out! One thing I love about him is that he always appears in his movies, usually in a small cameo, but here he takes centre stage playing Vogel. And a fine performance he does deliver. The death scenes are brutal and very gory. We get his trademark zoom shots (including the infamous genital ones), I felt overall that the camera work was pretty good, as is the acting, sets etc. I think you either love Franco or loathe him as a film maker, I'm of the former camp. Demoniac/Exorcism etc etc is by no means a bad Franco movie, he has made better films, he has made far worse too.

The Re-Edited Exorcism

[Michael_Elliott · 24 April 2015]

The Sadist of Notre Dame (1979)

** (out of 4)

Going through the filmmography of Jess Franco is never an easy thing because not only do you have to go through more than 200 movies but you've also got to go through countless alternate versions. Sometimes films can have four or five alternate versions with newly shot scenes, alternate footage or footage thrown in from another director. In 1974 Franco made a film called EXORCISM, which was a very dark mix of sex, religion and violence. It was also released in a softer version under the title DEMONIAC and another version with XXX footage called SEXORCISMS. Then, in 1979, Franco took footage from EXORCISM and added a new plot around them and the end result is this film, THE SADIST OF NOTRE DAME.

This time out, our film starts off as we see what appears to be a homeless man (Jess Franco) and before long he kills a prostitute who comes onto him because she isn't "pure." This here kicks off the story as Franco then travels around killing women who he sees to be sinners.

I love the work of Jess Franco and if you are a fan of his then you know it's rather madness trying to watch his movies. As several experts say, you really haven't seen a Franco film until you've seen them all. Then, after you've seen them off, you've still got countless alternate versions to track down so it seems like being a Franco fan is a never-ending and up-hill battle.

THE SADIST OF NOTRE DAME is a film that I really hated the first time I watched it but having revisited the movie I can tell that I was being a bit harsh earlier. I still prefer the original director's cut of EXORCISM and for the most part I think SEXORCISMS is even better but there are a few interesting moments here. I do think that the visual look of this film is better and yes, I understand that only 25-minutes of its 99-minute running time is "new" footage. I do think that the new scenes are good, are rather dark and there's a certain rawness about them.

I do wish that Franco had just created a new film but that wasn't the case. The majority of the footage here is from EXORCISM, although it has been re-dubbed to fit this movie. It's interesting to learn that Franco considered this to be his favorite version but I certainly wouldn't agree with him.

Remade remixed Franco weirdness

[BandSAboutMovies · 4/10 · 24 February 2022]

How many times can you make one movie? Well, if you're Jess Franco, the answer is a bunch, because there's 1975's L'éventreur de Notre-Dame AKA Exorcism which was also remade as the adult Sexorcismes. There's also another cut called Demoniac, because Franco realized that some day weirdos would obsess over his movies online.

Four years later, Franco Xeroxed his own work and added new footage to make this movie, which starts with Mathis (Franco) arriving in Paris and taking his blade to prostitutes and women who enjoy sex to save souls. He was thrown out of priest school because he's insane and attacked a nun, so now he's trying to get his story "The Return of the Grand Inquisitor" published in The Dagger and the Garter magazine.

While meeting with the owner of that sleaze zine, Pierre Franval, Mathis becomes obsessed with a secretary named Anne (Lina Romay) who is a lesbian in love with her roommate Rose, a fact that he learns by being a voyeur and that she also arranges sex-filled fake Black Masses by tying up and torturing a dancer named Nina, who is played by Franco's real-life stepdaughter Caroline Riviere because, well, it's a Jess Franco movie.

Of course, the psychodrama of the Black Mass isn't real, but to Mathis it is, so he becomes the Inquisitor of his fiction, killing everyone and anyone involved. The tradeoff is that while we get some great shots of Franco with Notre Dame behind him, Lina's role is significantly reduced.

I love that Stephen Thrower broke down on the blu ray how this all came to be. The movie comes at a period of life when Franco had been through great change. He'd divorced his first wife Nicole Guettard and, as these things happen, Romay had also divorced her husband Ramon Ardid. After making multiple movies in Switzerland for Erwin C. Dietrich and the death of friend and producer Robert de Nesle, Franco was back in Spain and burned out. Eurocine decided that they could take Exorcism and get production company Triton to pitch in some money to make Las Chicas de Copacapana and Two Spies In Flowered Panties, as well as this movie.

Somehow a slasher movie with not much blood and a sleazy movie without as much sex - yet still full frontal nudity - this is a weird case of a movie that has enough versions that you can just about make your own cut.

Superior Franco.

[parry_na · 9/10 · 24 November 2018]

This film puts meat on the bones of Jess Franco's 'Demoniac' (1975) in that the notorious director, never happy with the restrictions placed on his earlier production, revisits his character of Vogel and shapes the story into something more to his liking. One of the inherent joys of being a fan of Uncle Jess is constantly rediscovering new/old things. What other director would have the freedom to re-edit a film from four years earlier? And yet, that is exactly what he did - combed through the scenes, re-dubbed them, re-named some characters, moved scenes around and added 25 minutes of new material.

We begin with such newly filmed sequences featuring Vogel, seemingly desolate and outcast, existing in the gutters and backstreets of Paris, a diminutive, ramshackle outsider shuffling through freezing streets unseen by respectable passers-by. After he is (improbably, perhaps) propositioned by a working girl, his latent rage and religious fervour gains hold and she is quickly done away with. This and subsequent killings are beautifully, unspectacularly shot, with Vogel emerging from night-time shadows that have long been his stomping ground. The city has rarely been a creepier, lonelier place (some of these scenes might have been shot in the same locations as Franco's earlier 'Death Avenger of Soho.' They certainly look similar, and locations included Paris and Portugal, so it is possible).

I have always felt that Franco is a pretty wooden actor. It is amusing and self-deprecating of him to cast himself usually as perverts and lunatics in what are little more than cameos most of the time. Here though, he is not only the main character (Vincent Price was originally envisaged), but he shines. His weariness, his looks of longing/revulsion at Lina Romay's Anne are striking, and his general beaten demeanour is terrifically conveyed. He is at one with the bleakness that surrounds him. And yet his rage - a shuddering, frantic, desperate violence - is expertly balanced. The performance was always there, but with this revisit, Jess has added much to it, and the result propels this onto the top tier of my favourite Franco productions.

It isn't all great of course: the elongated, passionless orgy scene is still present (although may have been trimmed). A whirl of pale limbs set to Daniel White's out-of-place budget jazz dirge - in fact, White's work here is patchy, reminiscent in some places of 'Zombie Lake's cheap keyboard plonkings. It is not surprising that the film meanders, also; this is, after all, the director indulging himself.

I am not familiar enough with the original material to identify where edits have taken place, what has been taken out and what has been added. But I do know that this is the definitive version of Franco's story. The characters are fleshed out, the beginning and the ending of the film have been massively improved, and Franco himself must take huge credit for a terrific central performance. An excellent film.

Jess Franco on the prowl in Paris

[Woodyanders · 8/10 · 4 June 2019]

Deranged and defrocked former priest Mathis Vogel (a creepy and convincing portrayal by Jess Franco, who also wrote and directed) gets released from an asylum and subsequently embarks on a grisly killing spree in which he brutally murders any women he perceives to be sinful harlots in the seedier areas of Paris, France.

Franco relates the engrossingly sordid story at a gradual pace, ably crafts and maintains an appropriately seamy tone, takes some pointed stabs at religious hypocrisy and fanaticism, makes nice use of various grimy locations, and delivers a satisfying smattering of tasty female nudity along with some hot lesbian lovemaking and a pleasingly protracted group orgy set piece. Moreover, Franco astutely nails the anguish of his tormented character. Franco regulars Lina Romay and Monica Swinn are both also on hand to bare their lovely bodies. Kudos are also in order for Raymond Heil's stark cinematography and Daniel White's funky-wonky avant-garde jazz score. Recommended viewing for Franco fans.