The Devil’s Kiss (1976)

I first encountered The Devil’s Kiss in rather unorthodox circumstances, to put it mildly. In the late 1990s Satellite TV was for the first time granting UK audiences access to television from Germany, France, Holland, Poland and all over Europe. In doing so the UK also suddenly had access to European TV channels that were broadcasting hardcore porn, which was going out scrambled, meaning you had to buy these cards that would unscramble the picture, which could be picked up in most UK satellite TV shops. All of which created a big hoo-ha in the UK press at the time, since hardcore was still illegal in the UK back then. These channels couldn’t be censored as they were being broadcast outside of the UK, but could they ban the sale of the cards? I never got into the unscrambling card racket myself, but one of the foreign porn channels we were getting in the UK at the time was (I think) called Eros TV, who seemed to be broadcasting out of France. Anyway, I’m not sure what happened exactly with Eros TV, maybe they ran into legal trouble in their native country, but all of a sudden they stopped broadcasting hardcore, and the channel became unscrambled and began to show old softcore movies from the 1970s and early 80s. These films were predominately from the back catalogue of Eurocine, the French film company who made dozens of cheap B-movies of all different genres…horror, softcore, war, even kid’s films. Eurocine knocked out movies in an assembly line fashion, whilst keeping directors like Jean Rollin and Jess Franco in gainful, if not exactly artistically rewarding, employment.

Eros TV showed many of Eurocine’s most well known titles like The Invisible Dead, Elsa Fraulein SS, The Bogeyman and the French Murders and Helga She Wolf of Stilberg. They also delved deeper into the Eurocine vault, unearthing obscurities like ‘Unknown Paris: Twenty Years Later Already’ which was a Mondo style travelogue about the sexual side of Paris in the 1960s, using lots of recycled footage from earlier Eurocine productions, a familiar trait of the company. They also showed a real sicko Eurocine production called ‘Unpunished Crimes’, a rape/revenge portmanteau movie featuring lots of heavy, prolonged sexual assault scenes, including a vignette starring Brigitte Lahaie as a trainee vet who gets gang raped in the back of a truck but then later uses her veterinarian skills to surgically castrate her attackers.

Consistency wasn’t one of Eros TV’s strong points, sometimes the films would be shown in French, other times they’d be shown in dubbed English, sometimes films would be heavily edited for sex and nudity, other times they’d go out intacto, it was all very random. One of the downsides to Eros TV was that every 15 minutes or so they’d cut to adverts which would all be for phone sex chat-lines and seemed to go on forever, these commercial breaks being something like 20 minutes long. I think it is safe to assume that the channel’s real raison d'etre was to pimp phone sex 24-7 and that these old films were just a front to give the channel some legitimacy- well as much legitimacy as showing The Invisible Dead and Elsa Fraulein SS can give you.



Even when they were showing the films themselves Eros TV would run this scrolling text at the bottom of the screen, in the manner of a 24 hour news channel, advertising these phone sex lines with a different phone number for what seemed like every country in Europe. Another downside to Eros TV was that sometimes they’d only show parts of a film, in some instances they’d begin a film halfway through, other times they’d show a film from the start but not show the end. So Eros TV made for an eye opening, but frequently infuriating, introduction to the world of Eurocine.



The Devil’s Kiss was a constant replay on Eros TV, and was by far the most mysterious of all their Eurocine acquisitions. The first time I caught the film, I missed the first couple of minutes so had no idea what the film was called, who directed it, or who was in it, and in that instance they didn’t even show all of the film. Then another time Eros TV didn’t show the film from the beginning but did show the end. Eventually they did broadcast the film from the beginning, but what would you know, the Eros TV version was missing a title, but did at least have cast and crew credits. On the basis of this I managed to piece together the fact that the film’s director was called Jordi Gigo (slightly anglicized to Georges Gigo in the credits) but the only cast member whose face was familiar to me at the time was Jose Rifante who I recognized from playing the creepy photographer husband in The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue.

These days the name of a director and one of its stars would be enough for you to uncover much more about a film, but back in the pre-internet days it took allot of detective work. I remember having to leaf through an entire book of capsule reviews of horror and sci-fi movies, the name of this book eludes me at the moment but it had obviously originally been a French book that had been translated into English at some point, although not all of the films’ titles had been translated. So, I went through the entirety of this book looking for a film directed by ‘Georges Gigo’ and co-starring Jose Rifante, and from the pages of that book managed to snatch a title for the film, albeit a foreign one, ‘La Perversa Caricia de Satan’.



It was obvious though that the version of The Devil’s Kiss that Eros TV was screening had been heavily cut, and at the slightest hint of sex and nudity the screen would fade to black and cut to another scene. As tends to be the case with heavily censored versions of films, the question over what was missing only added to your overall curiosity about the film. Don’t even try to comprehend why a TV channel would remove all scenes of nudity from a film, but think nothing of regularly interrupting it with sexually explicit phone sex ads, there seemed to be no motive to Eros TV’s madness. I finally managed to see the uncut version of the film, which turned out to be twenty minutes longer than the Eros TV broadcast, when Something Weird put it out on VHS under the title ‘The Wicked Caresses of Satan’. It seems that Harry Novak must have released the film theatrically in the States at some point, and Something Weird had found a print of it in Novak’s film vault.




The Devil’s Kiss works hard to deliver everything you’d possibly want from a mid-1970s Euro-Horror film. There is a sexually frustrated dwarf, a hideous rampaging zombie, a Satanic mass, a vengeful femme fatale, and a literal parade of garish fashions, all taking place under the roof of a spooky chateau. The Devil’s Kiss opens with the party to end all parties at the chateau of the Duke De Haussemont (Jose Nieto) who sure knows how to throw a bash. For starters there is a double act of an African tribal dancer and a stripper lewdly gyrating on the floor, followed by a fashion show featuring some hot models strutting their stuff and showcasing some outrageous 1970s threads, and if that wasn’t enough the night’s entertainment is rounded off by a séance conducted by Madame Claire Grandier (Silvia Solar). Despite this looking like a fab and groovy gathering, the Duke’s guests –a horrible bunch of bourgeoisie snobs- stubbornly refuse to let their hair down. Cutaways to their disapproving, miserable faces and snide comments “the Duke has always been an extravagant fellow”, amidst the intended frivolity are hilarious. Claire Grandier is also on the receiving end of their put-downs “these tricks don’t fool me, all you are is a bunch of tricksters”. Aren’t the bourgeoisie a bunch of killjoys?



The real focus of The Devil’s Kiss is Claire Grandier herself, a widowed Countess who has taken to dabbling in the black arts following her husband’s suicide. Grandier now has revenge on her mind and the Duke in her sights, on account of the fact that the Duke’s now deceased brother bought her husband’s horse stables at a cheap price following her husband’s death….talk about bearing a grudge!! Grandier’s partner in crime is Professor Gruber (Olivier Mathot) a textbook, white haired, bespectacled, mad scientist. The moment you hear Grandier boast that Gruber’s area of expertise is “the regeneration of animal cells” you know that this pair spell trouble. Generous and cheerful as the Duke De Haussemont is, he is also a bit of a schmuck, not only being oblivious to the bitching and sniping the bourgeoisie does behind his back, but welcoming Grandier and Gruber into his home with open arms. Despite the barely concealed contempt Grandier holds him in over her husband’s death and subsequent loss of their horse stables (and boy, does this film love to flashback to her husband’s suicide). Making an ill-advised attempt to make amends, the Duke invites the duo to stay on at the chateau after the party, where they set up residence in his basement.

Soon Grandier is performing black masses there, while Gruber continues with his experiments on regenerating flesh. Their endgame is to dig up a corpse and using a combination of science and the occult, resurrect it as a zombie killing machine, with the Duke in mind as its main target. Along the way Grandier makes a new fan in the form of a randy Dwarf (Ronnie Harp) who she rescues from a lynch mob, and is soon doing her bidding. Reflecting the film’s joint Spanish/French nationality, the cast of The Devil’s Kiss includes Spanish names like Jose Lifante and Maria Silva, while Eurocine’s involvement in the production is in evidence, thanks to the presence of Eurocine regulars Silvia Solar, Olivier Mathot and Evelyne Scott.

The Devil’s Kiss is reminiscent of another Euro-Horror movie that Harry Novak distributed in the states, ‘Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks’. Both films are hindered by basic direction, with their locations doing most of the heavy lifting when it comes to evoking atmosphere. Their casts read like a Who’s Who of Eurosleaze, and both have extremely busy narratives that fail to satisfactorily resolve everything. A subplot about the ghost of the Duke’s brother peters out, and the Dwarf’s storylines ends rather abruptly too. Nudity is frequent, mainly courtesy of Evelyne Scott who plays the Duke’s French maid Loretta and reliably takes her clothes off and engages in softcore sex scenes whenever the narrative threatens to flag (Scott serves a similar purpose in another Eurocine co-production ‘Crimson’).



The Devil’s Kiss is distinguished and kept afloat by star turns from Silvia Solar and Olivier Mathot, who despite their ubiquity, especially in Eurocine productions, were often relegated to forgettable secondary roles. The white haired, middle aged Mathot had a reserved, gentlemanly air about him, akin to Peter Cushing in the UK or Hal Holbrook in the US, that is ideally suited to the dedicated, seemingly emotionless Gruber, who when asks why he rarely speaks claims “I seldom find it necessary to speak, I know what people are thinking and I act accordingly”. A quick aside, I do find it hilarious in 1980’s Cannibal Terror when Mathot breaks with both his and his character’s uptight, respectable persona in order to call another character “a cunt”. A moment that goes totally against type and seems as inappropriate as it would be hearing Cushing and Holbrook come out with that expletive in a movie.



Like Mathot, the French born Silvia Solar (real name: Genevieve Couzain) had rubbed shoulders with the era’s great and the good, appearing in giallos and acting alongside everyone from Paul Naschy to Linda Hayden, yet she isn’t someone who gets written about allot. Solar’s age often resulting in her being cast as housewives and mothers, or very minor roles. She is killed off within the first five minutes of the UK/Spanish Linda Hayden vehicle ‘The Barcelona Kill’ for instance. In The Devil’s Kiss though, Solar gets a rare chance to vamp it up and play the femme fatale role. In her all black attire and matching wig, Solar anticipates Elvira- Mistress of the Dark, while regularly displaying touches of Dyanne Thorne like malice. The scene where she brings some food to the dwarf she has been harboring, only to turn this seemingly generous act on its head by insisting on him eating the food on the floor, then undresses in front of him, feels like a very Ilsa/Dyanne Thorne moment.

Back when I first discovered The Devil’s Kiss I’d forged in my mind what I now have to except was a heavily romanticized idea of Jordi Gigo and what an adventure it must have been to be young (Gigo being 30 when he made this film) surrounded by beautiful women and directing all these character actors in a crazy horror film at a wonderfully atmospheric chateau. It was all rather disillusioning and disheartening then to discover that the reality bore little resemblance to what was in my head. It seems the production of The Devil’s Kiss was in fact fraught with troubles all of which seem to have driven the first time director close to a nervous breakdown. There are few film credits for Jordi Gigo after The Devil’s Kiss. He is created as the director of the hardcore film Porno Girls (1977) the co-director of the horror spoof ‘El Jovencito Dracula’ (1977) and in 1986 ‘L’Espectre De Justine’ a softcore De Sade adaptation that -echoing Gigo’s Devil’s Kiss experience- was beset by production problems, and went unreleased until a one off film festival screening in 2013. These were the only other films by Gigo before his death in 1991, at the age of only 46.

Gigo’s youth is in evidence throughout The Devil’s Kiss, it’s the product of a fish out of water filmmaker rather one of Eurocine’s usual dusty old hacks. The film has little time for the stuffy, snobbish attitudes of the Duke’s inner circle, instead throwing all its affection in the direction of Richard (Daniel Martin) the Duke’s carefree, jet setting nephew, belatedly introduced in The Devil’s Kiss’ third act. Richard might well be my favorite character in The Devil’s Kiss, he is a hyper-exaggeration of everything men aspired to be like back then. Youthful, trendy, rich, lacking any social responsibility, and with an endless wardrobe of polo neck jumpers and safari jackets. The Devil’s Kiss might well be the most fashion conscious Euro-horror film of the 1970s, you’ll lose count of the amount of costume changes Richard and Claire Grandier go through.



An unrepentant horndog, Richard spends his days taking snaps of his supermodel girlfriend Susan (Maria Silva) and flirts madly with every female he meets. During his priceless first encounter with the Duke’s maid Loretta he can barely break eye contact with her cleavage, then when Loretta asks which room he wants to sleep in, immediately quips “yours, my little angel, if I may”. As with Peter Wyngarde’s Jason King there is an underlining campiness to Richard though, something that his ‘trying too hard’ attempt to appear a masterful, heterosexual, lady-killer only exacerbates rather than masks.

The influence of Hammer on the Spanish horror boom of the 1970s can be seen throughout The Devil’s Kiss, the zombie recoils in horror at the sight of the cross in the manner of Christopher Lee’s Dracula, and Gruber uses hypnosis to control the zombie and send it out on killing sprees recalling Zoltan’s power over the monster in The Evil of Frankenstein. The Devil’s Kiss explores more perverse territory than Hammer ever did though, and after all the nudity she has been required to do in the movie, Evelyne Scott is finally rewarded with a subplot of her own when Loretta is murdered by the zombie. Fearing she’ll be missed (especially by the cleavage loving Richard) Grandier and Gruber resurrect Loretta as a zombie too. A plot twist that leads to a distasteful moment when Loretta’s boyfriend shows up looking for sex, and inadvertently ends up committing necrophilia when he begins humping away on top of the understandably confused female zombie. A subplot that was nearly obliterated in the cut to pieces Eros TV version. The Dwarf’s erotic dreams about Madame Grandier riding about on horseback in a state of undress were also rendered incomprehensible by Eros TV’s edits.



The Devil’s Kiss maybe far from a perfect film, but it is one I’ve always had great fondness for, ever since stumbling upon it in the satellite TV netherworld all those years ago. For my money it represents all that is weird and wonderful about 1970s Euro Horror, and shines a light on the unrealized talent of Jordi Gigo. Who knows what he would have gone on to achieve had he not been dealt such bad luck during his brief career. These days, as tends to be the case with once elusive and obscure films, The Devil’s Kiss is easily available, it has shown up on Netflix in the states and it is available cheaply on UK DVD, where you’re spared the intrusion of twenty minute long commercial breaks for phone sex.