Reviewing "The French Cousins" is a special moment for me. If you are - like me - an avid seeker of unknown cult/horror movies, the more obscure the better, and you happen to stumble upon an extremely rare flick with only a handful of votes and not a single user-comment submitted, you are overcome with a double-sided feeling. On the one hand, you are thrilled and sincerely hope to be the "first" to have dug up a genuine undiscovered gem. On the other hand, you realize it's the year 2020, and pretty much every hidden horror gem is worthy of discovering has already been discovered. With this wisdom in mind, I'm actually glad to announce that "The French Cousins" is a worthwhile little treasure. Far from great, but definitely curious oddity, with a demented plot, perverted story twists and copious amounts of euro-sleaze.
The titular "French Cousins" refer to the ravishing 20-something brunette Elisa and the 18-year-old blond Giulia, who live with the latter's mother Béatrice in a big but ramshackle countryside mansion. The girls spend their days with seducing all men that enter their domain, with lesbian escapades and - oh yeah - with physically and emotionally tormenting Giulia's older sister Lucile. She's bound to a wheelchair and hasn't spoken a word since she suffered from a severe shock and a trauma as a teenager. What caused her shock is something we only find out during the climax, and I can guarantee that it's a psychotic twist that every true exploitation fanatic will adore! Meanwhile, mother Béatrice is fooling around with her married attorney and the two cousins throw a kinky birthday party for Giulia where they experiment with drugs and murder.
All this sounds truly delicious, doesn't it? And "The French Cousins" is a fascinating film with multiple highlights, but the pacing is really slow, and the script often blindly leaps from one unfinished scene to another. I suspect there exist several versions, because my VHS-rip ran 1h28m and it already looked as if many sequences were cut. The running time listed here on IMDb is only 1h21m. Admittedly the alternate title "From Ear to Ear" sounds appealing and juicy, and the poster image looks awesome, but they are quite misleading and irrelevant, to be honest.
