Italy’s Digitmovies CD label honors its thirtieth release with Eugenie De Sade ‘70, a lavish double CD issue of Bruno Nicolai’s score to Jess Franco’s Eugenie: The Story of Her Journey into Perversion (1969) though it actually represents the scores for three Franco films (to make matters confusing, these cues were reused in a very different film with a similar title, Eugenie De Sade, 1970, as well as Nightmares Come at Night, also ‘70). Nicolai’s score is an eclectic soundtrack experience: cues swing between breathy, female vocal-led mood music, weird Black Mass chanting, plaintive solo guitar pieces, and Herb Albert Tijuana Brass-sounding numbers.

Once one of Franco’s hardest-to-see films, Eugenie’s release on DVD in 2002 (by Blue Underground) showed it to be a masterpiece, and this deluxe release of the score is a fitting companion.  Out of the hundreds of films Franco has made, it may be his best, and Nicolai’s score compliments this honor by encompassing several different styles familiar from Euro exploitation into an extremely listenable package.

Fans of the original soundtrack LP, which originally appeared in a rare vinyl issue (as well as a CD bootleg in recent years), will be in for a surprise when they discover the album’s fourteen original tracks have been expanded to 36 (!), and are now presented in an exceptional-sounding stereo mix. Nicolai’s score is so varied that the multiple versions of the cues (there are as many as four versions of some tracks) never become repetitive in the way other completist packages do; I highly recommend listening to these discs on repeat play and letting the diverse moods take you away.  This is an excellent release of an outstanding soundtrack to one of the best European cult movies ever made.

—Nicholas McCarthy