in the height of the DVD era, 
Mondo Macabro startled quite a few viewers with a double feature showcasing the first two films by French provocateur Jean-Louis van Belle, Forbidden Paris and The Sadist with Red Teeth. It took a decade, but we've now been blessed with two more of his films that have gone unseen for far too long and show off very different sides of his cinematic approach. Using Belgian financing and wildly peculiar narratives, the double feature here consists of The Lady Kills, originally titled Perverse et docile, and Pervertissima, which were released within a year of another (and the second film even foreshadowed as a line of dialogue in the first). It's another deep dive into unclassifiable French cult insanity, served up with enough madcap energy to leave you wanting more. And remember, there are still eight more van Belle titles that haven't been seen by English-speaking viewers... hint, hint.
takes a long bubble bath to pounding rock music and we're led to presume this is Françoise (Lebel), a woman of few words who likes to dress in zebra colors. 
She quickly ingratiates herself with a clothing businessman, Andre Ficheux (Beauthéac), who takes a particularly keen interest in our mystery lady and flies her off to London. Her murder rampage seems to center around the international world of nude modeling including a nightclub where topless women pose in sunglasses to pounding rock music and a British stand and pose agency where she takes the name Carole and gets whipped against a wall for a kinky audio recording. 
cinema's first death by darkroom developing and a final stretch in the world of drug-addicted Roman fashion models and Berlin bowling 
alleys and Formula 1 racing. This one doesn't aim for the same maniacal fever pitch of Sadist, instead going for an off-kilter vibe accentuated by a great funky music score and a melancholy atmosphere with only a few brief sleazy touches (like the appearance of Lebel's very unconvincing body double). That hardly matters though considering how much it manages to pack into a fleet 81 minutes. 
"Laura Gemser," 
she's exploring the swinging haven called Love Club, a lesbian bath house, more nightclub performances with sunglasses, Pigalle prostitute hangouts, and other oddities before eventually crossing paths with the eccentric Altagor, a.k.a. real-life poet and avant garde fixture Vernier, who runs an underground cult involving animal masks and wild musical experimentation. Then things get even weirder thanks to a mad scientist, Dr. Villard (Sadist's Simono), who has a twisted plan for world domination through sexual mind control and robotics...
of color where necessary and go truly psychedelic on a 
few occasions. The LPCM French 2.0 mono tracks also sound very good, particularly when it comes to those great soundtracks, and feature optional English subtitles. Ported over from the Sadist disc is the Peter Van Lyris featurette "So Who Is Jean-Louis Van Belle?" (31m29s), upgraded a bit here with new HD graphics and footage where possible as various cinematheque figures discuss the filmmaker's work. Writer Chrisophe Bier provides two intros to the films (7m28s and 13m26s) chatting about the films and the neglected director, who was operating at a bit of a fever pitch around this time with his films (all of which seemed to open with main titles using negative footage). He also goes into the obvious influence of The Bride Wore Black, Lebel's "Bressonian diction," the state of genre cinema in France at the time during relaxing censorship, and his misgivings with the pre-credits sequence of The Lady Kills (which does indeed play better if you just skip to Chapter 2 when the film starts). Also included are "Les parapluies de France" (36s), a cute little 1983 van Belle TV commercial, and the usual Mondo Macabro promo.