Countess Perverse (1975) & Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity (1987)

Most Dangerous Game, but naked

This month Fight Pizza is tackling “The Most Dangerous Game,” a 1924 short story by Richard Connell that has been adapted into film dozens of times. This week is a T&A-heavy double-feature.

Countess Perverse (1975)

Fight Pizza favorite sleaze auteur Jesús Franco steps up for his debauched and demented take on “The Most Dangerous Game.”

In Countess Perverse, Franco’s muse and favorite sex kitten Lina Romay is on vacation at a Spanish beach when she meets up with a hip and sexy couple who trick her into a trip to a mysterious island to meet some “rich friends” - but not before a threesome of course. The music on the boat ride is the clue that things are about to get very bad for Lina.

In turns out the rich friends are the Count and Countess Zaroff and the hip couple are their reluctant source for hot young girls to kill and eat. Oh yeah, did I mention they’re cannibals? For sure. They also live in a very cool MC Escher-ish house and we get lots of shots of the blood red stairwell juxtaposed with the blood red meat. All in all, the locations of this film are excellent. Lina eventually walks in on her hosts cutting the head off some random naked chick in the drawing room and uncovers their dastardly plan.

She will be set loose (naked) on the island and hunted by the Countess (also naked) with her bow. The hunt scene has nice frenetic music and screaming monkeys but is not terribly dramatic otherwise - I felt much more tension in my recent game of PUBG*. The end result though is interesting and a bit of a surprise worth not spoiling. I’ll just say the Count manages an appropriately chilling final line. (That is until the ending after the ending on my version that was just dumb and I’ll forget about.)

I read this movie was shot in a few days and mostly improvised during the shooting of another movie - I have no idea if that is true. I do know there are multiple versions of Countess Perverse, one of which is called Sexy Beach and adds about 15 minutes of quasi-porn including a very weird flaccid blow job scene and a metric ton of pubic hair. This is the copy I have and honestly the porn bits kinda ruin the flow of the movie and the other version is probably the better watch. 🍕🍕🍕

*The Battle Royale video game - totally “Most Dangerous Game” material - PUBG is free-to-play now. I have a half decent gaming computer for once, so I’ve been putting in some hours and man, I totally suck.

Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity (1987)

Surprisingly faithful goofball sci-fi remake of “The Most Dangerous Game” with bikini babes and robots.

Two space bikini babes bust out of space prison and crash land on a mysterious jungle planet. They are “rescued” by Zaroff, uh, I mean Zed, and brought to his compound. That evening is a sinister dinner party, whispers of missing guests, and a mysterious locked trophy room. So begins the Most Dangerous Game (more the original film version than the short story - there are lines taken directly from the movie but given to the wrong characters).

The tone and dialogue are weirdly inconsistent with what is happening on the screen (i.e. boobs and Styrofoam robots). There’s lots of jargon about hypo-spanners and dilithium chambers that seems better suited to Star Trek TNG’s Geordie La Forge than some chick in negligee. There’s also oddly sincere and/or philosophical bits which seem out of place and forced while alluding to the thematically rich source material. I was almost tricked into thinking it was good, but not quite. 🍕1/2

IMDB tells me Republican U.S. Senator Jesse Helms called Slave Girl from Beyond Infinity “indecent” on the floor of Congress in 1992, but clearly he’d never seen Countess Perverse. Bizarrely though, with both of these movies you may even be able to find some interesting and complex themes if you looked hard enough.

Check out the newly minted Fight Pizza letterboxd for a full list of “The Most Dangerous Game” movies and the Fight Pizza youtube for trailers and/or full length films.

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