Jess Franco turn the camera on himself as THE SADIST OF NOTRE DAME on Blu-ray from Severin Films.

Having stowed away on a garbage truck, vagrant Mathis (director Franco) arrives in Paris where he starts taking the knife to loose women – from prostitutes (Nadine Pascal, ZOMBIE LAKE) to young women who just seem loose (Françoise Blanchard, THE LIVING DEAD GIRL) – with the intention of saving their souls. Thrown out of seminary school for his extreme beliefs and an incident involving an attack on a nun, Mathis has become obsessed with punishing sin and approaches Pierre Franval (Pierre Taylou, THE HOT NIGHTS OF LINDA) about his story "The Return of the Grand Inquisitor" he has written for the magazine "The Dagger and the Garter" where he also meets and becomes obsessed with Pierre's secretary Anne (Lina Romay, TENDER FLESH). Following her back to her apartment and taking a room across from it, he discovers that Anne is a lesbian sleeping with her roommate Rose (Lynn Monteil, ELSA FRAULEIN S.S.). At a club, Mathis is propositioned by go-go dancer Nina (Franco’s stepdaughter Caroline Riviere, COUNTESS PERVERSE) who reveals to him under torture that Anne and Rose acquire virgins for Black Masses at a castle in the countryside and that she has participated in them. After killing the girl to save her soul, he follows Anne to the castle of a count (Claude Sendron, A VIRGIN FOR ST. TROPEZ) where he witnesses a Black Mass – assisted by Anne and Rose – in which the countess (France Nicolas) sacrifices a virgin (Caroline Rivière, CELESTINE) before the onlookers participate in an orgy. Mistaking the performance for the real thing – who had confessed his guilt over taking lives to a priest and former friend in the seminary (Antonio De Cabo, DEVIL HUNTER) – Mathis takes on the role of Grand Inquisitor to punish women and men alike for their iniquities. While Interpol agent Inspector Malou (Roger Germanes, FEMALE VAMPIRE) is on Mathis' trail, French inspector Rochet (Olivier Mathot, MIDNIGHT PARTY) persecutes Polish bum Bartholo (Claude Boisson, SHINING SEX) who may nevertheless lead the police to the killer.

THE SADIST OF NOTRE DAME began life as the Eurocine French/Belgian production EXORCISM in 1974 about in which Franco's Mathis Vogel was a defrocked priest who wrote sadoerotic stories for the magazine – in SADIST, the same first meeting scene finds him approaching them for the first time with an unsolicited manuscript – who mistakes the Black Mass performances for the real thing and took on the role of Grand Inquisitor to punish the women who participated in them. That version went undistributed theatrically in France until Franco reworked it as SEXORCISMES, adding hardcore sequences with some of the original actors (including himself). The hardcore version was unreleased outside of France while the softcore version found distribution in some territories including Canada, and an even softer "horror" cut titled DEMONIAC with some covered versions of scenes with nudity appeared on tape in Italy. The version known as THE SADIST OF NOTRE DAME was a French/Spanish co-production between Eurocine and Joaquin Dominguez's Triton with twenty-five minutes of new footage focusing on Mathis' religious conflict in scenes with De Cabo's priest, the murders of Pascal and Blanchard, and a more somber ending compared to the original's shootout. More focused than the meandering original, it paints Franco's Mathis in more complex terms, shown as a homeless vagrant at first but revealed to be own a villa left to him by his parents. He expresses guilt for his murders but refuses to repent since he believes he was guided by the hand of the lord. More so than EXORCISM, Franco's central characterization here draws parallels with the director as voyeur and the actor as director and audience surrogate (with more than one extreme eye close-up reminiscent of PEEPING TOM); which is bolstered by the revelation that the countess is a novelist for which the Black Mass performances and her writings are a way of working out her "frustrations, inhibitions, and fantasies." Footage from the original film does not appear until roughly twenty minutes into the film, and then it has been rearranged, rescored, and redubbed. While it is not necessarily a tighter picture, the new story built around it flows better, although poor Romay becomes a more incidental character in the final act than she was in the original. Franco's own photography of the new sequences shot in Paris, Barcelona, and Lisbon is superior with expressionistic lighting and angles in the stalking sequences and a striking shot of Franco against the backdrop of Notre-Dame. Daniel White's church organ score is more generic than André Bénichou's organ and guitar score for EXORCISM but better suited.

Released in France and Spain theatrically and on home video, while an English dub appeared on tape in Holland and a shortened, softer version (79 minutes versus the 99:10 of the Blu-ray) was released on VHS in the United States with the video-generated title DEMONIAC (Charles Band having appropriated the title from the soft version of EXORCISM that Eurocine also offered for licensing), SADIST was the most accessible version during the video era. In the DVD-era, it was the reverse with Eurocine's composite reconstruction of EXORCISM – both as a 92 minute PAL reconstruction and a PAL-converted 94 minute revision commissioned by Synapse Films – that was most accessible while SADIST was only available as a Spanish DVD from Manga Films that offered up a tape-sourced (with tape damage) non-anamorphic letterboxed transfer in Spanish only. It was the same case for the first half of the Blu-ray era with Kino Lorber's Redemption Films Blu-ray of EXORCISM which offered both the revised version of the reconstruction of the non-hardcore erotic version (98:08) and the covered cut (69:41). While Eurocine co-produced SADIST and licensed it for video in the eighties, the rights for this version apparently ended up with the Spanish owners, and Severin Films' 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.66:1 pillarboxed widescreen transfer was derived from a Spanish 35mm exhibition print. Although damage remains that Severin was not able to digitally-clean, including some splotches, large reel-change marks, and occasional splice lines above and below the frame, the image is brighter and cleaner than the Spanish DVD (which appears to have been a different print). While Kino Lorber's Blu-ray looked brighter overall in the scenes with which it shares with SADIST, the same scenes look a little darker but cleaner without the litany of light scratches apparent in the Blu-ray transfer of the EXORCISM version. It's always going to be an ugly film but it is presented here as best as the age and condition of the print allows. Audio options include Spanish, French, and English dubs in uncompressed LPCM 2.0 mono with English SDH subtitles for the English dub and an English subtitle translation of the Spanish dub. The Spanish dialogue – supervised by Franco and presumably recorded first since the French and English versions were also completely redubbed – at times varies greatly from the French and English dubs which are more similar to one another. The English and French track make more of Mathis' being an escaped mental patient whereas the Spanish version makes him seem like a vagrant, and a café conversation between Pierre and Rosa in the English track focuses on the Countess' literary activities with a throwaway reference to the killings while the Spanish version of the same scene focuses on Pierre's concern for Rosa and Ana in light of the murders and their growing suspicion of Mathis' involvement.

Extras start off with "The Gory Days of Le Brady" (30:58), an interview with former projectionist Jacques Thorens on one of the last Parisian cinemas to screen horror and grindhouse films from 1965 to 2005 (of which he has written a book sadly not available in English). He describes how the cinema was not the first or the only specialized in fantastique cinema, but it continued the tradition as bigger theaters competed for screenings of first run films, and other smaller theaters switched over to pornography throughout the seventies and eighties – most of which became glorified sex shots with only one to stick with 35mm screenings and be registered in the CNC as a theater finally closing its doors in 2017 – while Le Brady not only stuck with fantastique cinema but started a program of double bills of exploitation cinemas from all over the world. He describes the film's grindhouse ambience with hookups in the restrooms, bums sleeping in the aisle, and couples behaving badly in the back, as well as the screenings on a 1.33:1 screen in which scope films were either projected letterboxed, spread across the walls on the sides of the screen, or even cropped in with a projector matte while prints were sometimes cut by censors, damaged, or even snipped for the projectionist's private collection. He also describes the theater's special relationships with French genre filmmakers including Jean Rollin who he recalls brought in a damaged print of LIPS OF BLOOD and a better one of the hardcore variant SUCK ME VAMPIRE and had them create a composite print of LIPS OF BLOOD for him which was then screened for fans. He does not discuss Jess Franco specifically but does reveal in discussing the double features that SADIST OF NOTRE DAME figured into a couple double bills including CANNIBAL FEROX and THE SCORPION WITH TWO TAILS among others.