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.

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.

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.