The Film (3.5/5)

    It's releases like Vinegar Syndrome's Lucifer's Women that I use as an example when describing the necessity of physical media, especially for film.  Lucifer's Women is a 1974 directed by Paul Aratow. It is a mix of creepy occult horror, and sexploitation epic. It apparently did not do too well in its original run, and was given by its producer to notorious trash director Al Adamson (Satan's Sadists) to soften up, and fix. He added scenes with John Carradine, and a vampire subplot, and turned Lucifer's Women into DOCTOR DRACULA! 

    Prior to Vinegar Syndrome getting involved with the film, there was no way to see the Lucifer's Women cut of the film, and with this outstanding Blu-ray release it is now possibly to see Lucifer's Women and Doctor Dracula in a double feature, and see how the film evolved between the two cuts. This shows how much the film was affected by Adamson’s changes much like the Leone imposed House of Exorcism changes on Bava’s Lisa and the Devil or Corman’s four times changed Blood Bath, starting as an Eastern European crime film, and ending as a Vampire film with involvement by Stephanie Rothman and Jack Hill.

    Lucifer's Women stars Larry Hankin as John Wainwright an author who finds himself suddenly obsessed with Satanism and black magic. His publisher sees this as an exploitable quirk, and encourages Wainwright to go deeper into the practice, to the point of human sacrifice. Of course, he begins to pull back on his plans, but his publisher doubles down on the sacrificial obsession. Things come to a head at the end in a truly bizarre fashion.

   Lucifer's Women was one of a few films in the 70's (like the Devil's Rain) to have Anton LaVey of The Church of Satan as a consultant. I'm not sure if made a difference in the end product. The film is a slow, bizarre little film that mixes sexploitation and erotic elements with some chills and an interesting and occult atmosphere. The Adamson version drops a lot of the sexploitation elements, and adds some odd vampiric elements. I didn't think it would work, but it strangely does, and ends up being quite a bit entertaining. I think in retrospect I prefer the original cut for the weird atmosphere, but I could see watching either more than the one time.

Audio/Video (3.5/5)

    Vinegar Syndrome presents Lucifer's Women in a quite solid 1:85:1 1080p AVC encoded transfer. Everything here looks quite nice, colors for the most part are stable, detail is excellent, there is some damage from the source, but it's not a distraction. Both Lucifer's Women and Doctor Dracula have their share of soft moments, probably from the production and not the transfer.

    Audio is handled by a DTS-HD MA 1.0 track that certainly does the trick dialogue and score come through nicely, and I detected no issues.

Extras (3/5)

    We get a 20 minute interview with actor Paul Thomas, the Doctor Dracula cut of the film, and a digital essay by Samm Deighan.

Overall

     Vinegar Syndrome provides an excellent release to an obscure slice of occult sexploitation horror. The Blu-ray looks and sounds excellent, and the two different cuts offer an interesting perspective on the film. There are also some minor, but interesting extras. RECOMMENDED. n