Le Concerto De La Peur, also known as Night Of Lust, is an early directorial offering from Moroccan born Jose Benazeraf, who would go on to have a pretty lucrative career in the French adult film industry in the seventies and eighties until he wound things down in the late nineties.

The plot is marginal here as the film tells the tale of two rival Parisian gangsters - Eric Voltay (played by Hans Verner) and Sacha Markiff (played by Jean-Pierre Kalfoun). As they go to war against one another over a heroin related turf dispute, various people are murdered and beaten up and lots of women get naked and gyrate for the camera.

More important to the film than the nutty plot is a completely berserk free jazz score from none other than Chet Baker. Almost entirely horn dependant, the music plays a very important part in the film as it really adds to the mood and the atmosphere of the picture, particularly during the rougher and sexier moments contained in the film. In fact, the film works much better as a lengthy video accompaniment to Baker's music than as a legitimate narrative piece of filmmaking and one has to wonder if that wasn't really the intent of the director in the first place.

While the acting is hammy (this is not helped in the least by the corny English dubbing) the film does feature some interesting cinematography and some unique compositions. As a time capsule of the Paris of the mid-1960s, Night Of Lust is particularly interesting. Go into this one expecting a fairly trashy art film, a series of strange images set to music, rather than as a traditional gangster film.

The version of the film presented on this DVD is the version that Bob Cresse of Olympic International films re-edited and added/removed footage to at the behest of Lee Frost. It's also been dubbed into English and a video generated title card credits Independent International Films before the actual film credits referenced Olympic and Aurora Films. The English dubbing is attributed to R. L. Frost (better known as Cresse's one time partner, Lee Frost). Jose Benazeraf retains his director-producer credit here. This cut runs just under fifty-seven minutes whereas the original French version supposedly runs seventy-five minutes. As such, the film moves incredibly quickly and you have to wonder if Cresse chopped out some of the more character driven moments in place of the exploitative content he was known for introducing into his foreign acquisitions.

Video:

Night Of Lust is presented in a reasonably clean 1.33.1 fullframe transfer that looks to be the films intended aspect ratio. Although the image has not been properly flagged for progressive scan, the image is watchable even if for much of its running time it is quite soft. Mild print damage is present from start to finish and there are a few noticeable scratches that run vertically down the image. Contrast varies from scene to scene and there appear to be some minor tracking lines on the bottom of the picture indicating that this was probably taken from a tape source. This is hardly a 'good' transfer but it is watchable, warts and all.