Hallucinations sadiques

This is the kind of movie the foreign viewers make a cult of whereas the French,by and large ,do not bother ;Jean Rollin belongs to that tradition and ,so to speak ,can be looked upon as the master of the genre .

A recurrent feature of these flicks is to take a classic and vaguely imitates it ;such was the case of "la rose écorchée" (the blood rose) which was a "les yeux sans visages" rip off

"Hallucinations sadiques " takes a vague screenplay which bears more than a distant resemblance to Boileau-Narcejac's " celle qui n'était plus" (which spawned Clouzot's "les diaboliques" and countless remakes and imitations ; note that "hallucinations" is closer ,so to speak,to the novel)

The direction is extremely couldn't care less, the cast subpar ,to put it mildly :one can wonder why a highly talented actor such as Daniel Gélin who worked with Becker,Pabst, Guitry ,Duvivier ,even Hitchcock -"the man who knew too much (1956) got involved in that business ; a man as clever as him knew from the start he was starring in a bomb and chose to act like a zombie .The same goes for Michel Subor (who,coincidence ,also worked with Hitchcock in "topaz" ) who limits his part of a cop to a pointless wandering in the house

There's the well-known tale of the wife who should be here but is not ,and like Ophelia , her body floats on the river .Soft eroticism with a shotgun.