This is Filippo Walter Ratti’s last movie, but man, just from the opening, where a couple hides and strange faces show up amongst flames while a woman screams a James Bond-like song? This makes me want to stay up even later than 3:14 AM, which I figure is probably the best time to watch Satan-themed Italian horror movies.

When this was released in France as Les Nuits Sexuelles, it had plenty more sex and skin. Just a warning, if you find that version.

Jean (Pierre Brice, who played Winnetou in a series of spaghetti westerns) and Danielle Duprey (Patrizia Viotti, Amuck) love solving mysteries. Well, they get one right away, as Jean get a letter from Guillaume de Saint Lambert that arrives in the form of a riddle that references the book Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire. This leads them to the prince’s castle, where Jean’s old friend is dying from a disease that impacts everyone in his family over the age of thirty-five. It’s lasted for three generations and the doctors can’t help him.

Then there’s a painting of a man dying at the stake and Danielle starts dreaming about it. And oh yeah — it turns out that the prince’s wife is a witch that his family had burned at the stake. It’s not worth falling in love in an Italian gothic horror romance.

I was wondering — how can a movie called Night Of The Sexual Demons be this slow? Then I saw a review that said to try and hang on past the first thirty minutes. And then I thought, well, this does have a pretty great poster, so I held on for a little more. Luckily, I was rewarded with exactly the kind of movie I was hoping for, complete with a killer that has razor-sharp claws that he or she uses to eviscerate nude victims, as well as an attempted sacrifice. Thank, well, whomever in the nine circles who made that finally happen.