Spanish tourist Silvia (Lina Romay, FEMALE VAMPIRE/LA COMTESSE NOIRE) falls for dashing Bob (Robert Woods, LADY LUCIFERA), but his wife Moira (Tania Busselier, ILSA THE WICKED WARDEN). Little does Silvia know, but Bob is a procurer of "meat" for gourmet cannibals Count and Countess Zaroff who live in a abstract art pagoda on a jungle island. Countess Ivanna (Alice Arno, JUSTINE DE SADE) hunts her victims for sport while Count Rador (Howard Vernon, THE AWFUL DR. ORLOFF) cooks them, but first they'll indulge in some more traditional libertine "pleasures of the flesh."

Director Jess Franco's (billed as Clifford Brown) LA COMTESSE PERVERSE was part of the director's collaborative period with Comptoir Francais du Film producer Robert de Nesle following his Harry Alan Towers period (99 WOMEN, COUNT DRACULA etc) and preceding his overlapping collaborations with Marius Laseoer's Eurocine (EXORCISM, FEMALE VAMPIRE, OASIS OF THE ZOMBIES, etc) and Erwin C. Dietrich (JACK THE RIPPER, DORIANA GREY, VOODOO PASSION, etc). The slight story is a kinky take on THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME, and could have functioned as a long-short film had it not been padded with an extended prologue featuring Kali Hansa (THE SINISTER EYES OF DR. ORLOFF) as a woman who travels to the Zaroffs' island in search of her missing twin sister. Related in flashback, it spends more time on sex scene padding than setting up the plot (not that extended displays of writhing bare flesh are unappreciated in a Franco film). TENDER FLESH - Franco's last shot-on-film production dating from the beginning of his nineties DTV period - a virtual remake of this film, is entertaining but not as impressively staged. Another noted influence on the film (noted in the disc's liner notes) is De Sade's PHILOSOPHY IN THE BOUDOIR. The extremely loose framework of an innocent girl initiated and victimized by libertines (although Sade's heroine was a much more willing and enthusiastic participant) had already adapted Franco as EUGENE/DE SADE 70 and later as EROTICISMO/EUGENIE 80 and COCKTAIL SPECIAL; and Franco would restage the denouement of LA COMTESSE PERVERSE in his even looser Sade adaptation THE SEXUAL STORY OF O.

The striking exterior of the Zaroffs' lair is Ricardo Bofill's Xanadu (which Franco first used in SHE KILLED IN ECTASY) while the interior is from Bofill's nearby La Muralla Roja (which he used again in EROTICISMO/EUGENIE 80). The photography was most likely the work of Franco himself (in another interview, he had admitted that he had met credited Gerard Brisseau - who would be credited as cinematographer on a number of Franco's de Nesle productions - only once in his life). Possibly in awe of the locations, Franco restrains his use of the zoom lens here, and favors wide angles to off-kilter effect (the scenes in the circular dining room have a fishbowl feel to them). The score is credited to Olivier Bernard and Jean-Bernard Raiteux. Presumably Bernard provided some original compositions, but Raiteux's tracks were pulled from a couple of his albums of the period (some of his tracks also appear in Franco's de Nesle productions SINNER/DIARY OF A NYMPHOMANIAC and LES DEMONS). The effect is disjointed (and not in the thrilling way of the Franco films scored by Bruno Nicolai, Jerry Van Rooyen, or the pair VAMPYROS LESBOS and SHE KILLED IN ECSTASY scored by Manfred Hubler and Siegfried Schwab), but some sequences are ideally accompanied (for instance, the lengthy and suspenseful climactic hunt). The dialogue is credited to de Nesle's wife Elisabeth Ledu de Nesle; and that may be true since Franco did not work on the film's post production (he sent silent workprints to Paris where they were dubbed and scored under the supervision of editor Gerard Kikoine).

Producer de Nesle objected to the dark nature of the film and asked Franco to shoot some additional scenes (with Lina Romay and Franco's stepdaughter Caroline Riviere) that frame the story as a nightmare resulting from the heroine's consumption of too many pulp horror novels. This is not unlike the framing device of Franco's THE BRUTAL NIGHTS OF LINDA, which was shot around the period of additional reshoots featuring hardcore inserts (with Romay, Arno, and Pierre Taylou, and Monica Swinn [the latter two were not part of the original cast but were collaborating regularly with Franco by the mid-seventies) for the adult version LES CROQUEUSES ("The Devourers"). The Italian version SEXY NATURE also featured hardcore inserts, but also positioned one of the Romay/Taylou/Swinn scene inserts in a different place from the French cut (which inserts it rather arbitrarily). Both of these versions ran roughly 95 minutes.