Jessica (Blanca Marsillach) is head-over-heels in love with hot shot saxophone player Johnny (Stefano Madia). Johnny’s unquenchable erotic lust draws Jessica into more perverse and dangerous territory, culminating in Johnny’s involvement in a motorcycle accident. Johnny seems to be fine at first but later collapses in the recording studio, falling into a coma. Meanwhile Dr. Wendell Simpson (Brett Halsey), the doctor to be performing the brain surgery on Johnny, has been having troubles of his own with his wife demanding a divorce right before he heads into the operating theater to attempt to save Johnny’s life. Dr. Simpson is distracted to say the least and Johnny dies on the operating table. Jessica blames Johnny’s death on Dr. Simpson and enacts an obsessive and bizarre sado-masochistic plan to take revenge on him for allowing the love of her life to die.

Director Lucio Fulci isn’t the first name that comes to mind when one things of hyper-sexualized erotic thrillers, but in 1986, hot on the heels of 9 1/2 Weeks, that is just what Fulci delivers here. The scenes between Johnny and Jessica are pure sexual savagery. The film lets its intentions be known right out of the gate with the horniest saxophone scene (pun definitely intended) in film history. Jessica seems to spend more time naked than clothed in the first half of this film with the film emphasizing her vulnerability and subservience to Johnny. Johnny sexually subjugates her, pushing her to further and further erotic extremes. Interestingly the second half of the film then gives us an inversion of this arc, when Jessica kidnaps Dr. Simpson, chaining him up and forcing him to behave like a dog. She has now become the dominant personality so long repressed. This psychosexual drama may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it is certainly a fascinating outlier in Fulci’s filmography (although it isn’t totally different than his gialli like One on Top of the Other or Lizard in a Woman’s Skin). On the surface, this may feel like a far cry from the dream-like gorefests of The Beyond and City of the Living Dead, but one thing they share in common is Fulci’s tendency to push boundaries of taste and decency. To begin a film with a woman grinding her crotch into the bell of a saxophone is almost like a battle cry of a sort. Fulci is making his intentions clear, as if he’s saying “We’re going to get INTIMATE, folks. You can get either get on board or get the fuck out”. For the centerpiece of his film, Blanca Marsillach is radiant, conveying unbridled lust, insecurity and manic obsessiveness with equal aplomb.

Severin has given us a pretty nice new 4K transfer of the original negative that I think improves on what has come before even though it still has occasion scratches and blemishes. This era of Fulci is always a bit tricky to judge image quality on because he intentionally shoots in a kind of soft focus at times (see also Conquest for example). As a result, the softness of the image in places isn’t a problem with the transfer. It’s just a stylistic choice. Overall, it’s still quite a nice upgrade worth check out, particularly if you don’t have a previous release of the film. For audio, we have both English and Italian mono tracks, and they both sound relatively comparable, although the Italian track sounds a bit more crisp. This release includes quite a few nice extras including an audio interview with Fulci where he’s quite candid about the film’s origins and his writing credit on a similarly-themed film called La Gabbia a.k.a. The Trap. Also included are video interviews with actresses Blanca Marsillach and Corinne Clery, actor Brett Halsey, producer Vincenzo Salviani, and composer Claudio Natili. They are all nice interviews with some interesting info about the history of the cast and crew as well as what it was like working with Fulci. We also get an interview with author Stephen Thrower (Beyond Terror: The Films of Lucio Fulci) discusses his thoughts on The Devil’s Honey and its place in Fulci’s oeuvre. As a kind of alternate take/counterpoint, the disc also includes an audio essay by author Troy Howarth (Splintered Visions: Lucio Fulci and His Films). To top off the extras, we have an alternate opening and a trailer.

Those coming into The Devil’s Honey hoping for the phantasmagorical weirdness of Fulci’s horror films may find themselves left a little cold by this steamy psychodrama, but personally I found its unabashed tendency to treat sexual perversity as heightened bombast plays to Fulci’s strength in his ability to create iconic imagery that will stick with you long after the film ends.