Three Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg on DVD
Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille
Furious Love: A Book Review
Kim Novak Stars in the 1957 Biopic Jeanne Eagels
Fantomas: The Complete Saga on DVD
Alexander Kluge's Part-Time Work of a Domestic Slave on DVD

THE SADIST WITH RED TEETH & FORBIDDEN PARIS - A DVD Double Feature from French Director Jean-Louis van Belle

The indefatigable film finders at the UK-based Mondo Macabro are like cherished uncles who return every so often from trips abroad bearing gifts hinting at the mystery of far off lands. Instead of pirate coins, moonstones and monkey paws, however, the Mondo men bring back obscure films from all corners of the world – some you've never heard of, some you once read about and thought you'd never get to see, and some that have been (however erroneously) considered lost. This time out the bounty is a double disc set of rare works by Belgian filmmaker Jean Louis van Belle. The Sadist with Red Teeth (Le sadique aux dents rouges, 1970) was van Belle's bid to make a horror movie in the Roger Corman mold – fast, cheap and out of control. Not seen in the United States and never released on video, the film got the tiniest plug in Barrie Pattison's 1975 genre study The Seal of Dracula, where its mention (three sentences) served as a sort of cultural Bondo between more thoughtful paragraphs on the oeuvres of France's Jean Rollin and Jesus Franco from Spain. An accompanying black-and-white illustration, roughly the size of a business card, reproduced a theatrical one sheet for this "film de sex-horreur," which depicted the protagonist with fingers curled into boogeyman claws and sporting a set of plastic hillbilly teeth. The amateurish quality of the poster was a triple-dog-dare for readers to trust Le sadique aux dents rouges was an actual movie. Well, it's official – this one's for real.

The Sadist with Red Teeth attends the tortured convalescence of graphic artist Daniel Bernard (Daniel Moosmann) following a tragic automobile accident that also claimed the life of a friend. Having tasted blood in the terrible moments before he was pulled from the twisted wreckage, Daniel leaves a Paris clinic seemingly cured of a subsequent nervous breakdown but secretly believing he is a vampire. With Daniel's senses playing hob with his perception of reality, The Sadist with Red Teeth straddles the alternate universes of Jean Rollin's psychedelic vampires and later films – George Romero's Martin (1976), Robert Bierman's Vampire's Kiss (1988) – in which the protagonist's delusion of immortality sends him into a calamitous downward spiral. When van Belle suggests that Daniel's own doctor (Albert Simono) might be encouraging the delusion and that the clinic itself fronts for a covert vampire cult, the film evokes the clinical horrors (and authorial distrust) of Georges Franju's Eyes without a Face (Les yeux sans visage, 1960). As a piece of meta cinema, The Sadist with Red Teeth successfully spoofs the then-current vogue for vampire films (House of Dark Shadows and Count Yorga, Vampire from the United States, Countess Dracula, The Vampire Lovers and Lust for a Vampire from Great Britain, Jess Franco's El Conde Dracula and Jean Rollin's Le vampire nue were all released in 1970, as were a couple of offerings from the porn industry) but isn't without its own frissons as Daniel stumbles about the City of Lights trying to make sense of this symphony of terrors. (The unsettling score is courtesy of Raymond Legrand, father of celebrated composer Michel Legrand.) The film ends with a masquerade ball à la Roman Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967) – or Hammer's The Kiss of the Vampire (1963), if you will – followed by a What's New, Pussycat? (1965) style foot chase across the rooftops of Paris and a fatal plunge into sunlight that anticipates the demise of Blacula (1972). Though devotees of Twilight (2008) or HBO's True Blood are advised to keep their distance, The Sadist with Red Teeth is recommended for those with a taste for the grotesque and arabesque.

As Jean Louis van Belle had experimented with Gothic horror in The Sadist with Red Teeth, he had put his hand to the so-called "mondo" movies with Forbidden Paris (Paris interdit, 1969). Van Belle's experience working as an assistant director to Edouard Logereau on Paris Secret (1964), a Mondo Cane (1962) style documentary of Parisian oddities van Belle alleges were staged for the camera, prompted him to make his own mondo movie. Shot without sound but narrated in piecemeal fashion by various participants, Forbidden Paris is a thoroughly compelling, often disturbing, and occasionally even nauseating travelogue of unorthodox lifestyles in Paris at the end of the 1960s. A young woman accepts a dare to drive naked to the nearest filling station for the prize of a Paco Rabanne fur, a nuclear family prepares for the Apocalypse with severe haircuts and homemade radiation suits, a prison recidivist presides over a community devoted to free love, "the greatest fakir alive" mentors a cadre of "fakirettes" (who throw darts into his chest), American photographer Gene Fenn practices "sadistic" photography, a queue of paralytics and cripples study ballet ("Drunk on champagne and oblivion, they left their false limbs in the lobby...") and a taxidermist stuffs a dead dog. Forbidden Paris is an intriguing counterpoint to the romantic depiction of Paris life and a beguiling psychological study of the conflicted communal French psyche post-World War II. Cremation cults, an Adolf Hitler admiration society, congregants at a "healing hands" church ceremony, a transvestite wedding ceremony, a man who teaches high-rise housewives to strip, and a profile of "the last vampire in Europe" (who turns up in The Sadist with Red Teeth, as do a few other familiar faces here) all stand in bizarre affirmation of the dark side of the City of Lights.

Both films in this collection look exceptionally fine, with a clean image (especially given the vintage) and vibrant chromatics. Both anamorphic widescreen transfers were derived from original materials betraying only fleeting evidence of their age. Jean Louis van Belle is on hand to introduce both films in separate video clips and appears in the accompanying featurette So Who Is Jean Louis van Belle? (30m 14s), directed by Peter Van Lyris. Incorporating scenes from his various films and relying on both on-camera testimonials from those who know him and from the cagey, somewhat unreliable van Belle himself (who appears photographed only from the neck down), the short subject attempts to put the filmmaker into a Dadaist perspective while friends and colleagues immortalize him as a movie obsessive, "an image thief" and "the Google of cinema." A self-described orphan who taught himself out of loneliness to tell stories, a failed seminarian and "a guy who barely went to school, a guy who knew nothing, with no diploma and not knowing anyone at all" who went on to make "a bunch of movies," van Belle agrees with the consensus that it was the making of his films and not the end result that was most rewarding. "I made films because I wanted to gather friends around me. Like at school or the orphanage and go off and have adventures in the world of cinema." Presented on separate discs, both The Sadist with Red Teeth and Forbidden Paris come with optional English subtitles and a French text bio of van Belle by Christophe Bier, translated into English by Pete Tombs.

For more information about The Sadist With Red Teeth/Forbidden Paris, visit Mondo Macabro. To order The Sadist With Red Teeth/Forbidden Paris, go to TCM Shopping.

by Richard Harlan Smith