The plot involves jazz musician Jimmy Logan, who becomes obsessed with a mysterious fur-clad Wanda, later finding her dead body washed up on the beach.

When the film was released in the United States as Venus in Furs, the version varied greatly from Paroxismus, being edited by distributors at American International Pictures.

Italian film prints credit Franco and Malvin Wald, Carloa Fadda and Milo G. Cuccia for the screenplay and Guido Leoni for dialogue.

These Italian prints also contain false credits, such as including German sex comedy specialist Hans Billian as an additional director.

At the time, names like Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and Marquis de Sade were in vogue more so for promoting shocking eroticism seen in various 1960s horror films.

Franco added scenes with Rohm walking nude down a flight of stairs with a fur coat behind her to describe the title.

[14] In October 1968, Robert S. Eisen, previously of Producers Film Services, became head of post-production at Commonwealth United Productions.

[15] La Stampa reported in 1971 that a court of Bologna condemned actors Kinski and Margaret Lee and producer Igor Bianchi to three months imprisonment and a fine of 40,000 Italian lire for "complicity in an obscene spectacle" and that the film was judged by Italian courts as "a work of little artistic content and only a pretext for the exhibition of nudity and relations against nature.

"[18] The review concluded that "If all Darren's narration and half of his dialogue with Miss McNair were cut, Venus in Furs might have been a fascinating film.

"[18] Roger Greenspun of The New York Times found that the film "features much inept fancy moviemaking (including echoes of La dolce vita and even Vertigo), some semi-nudity, and virtually endless confusion.