The Demoniacs

Wreck N' Rollin

The Demoniacs
aka Les démoniaques
France 1974
Directed by Jean Rollin
Redemption Blu Ray Zone A

Warning: Some slight spoilerage here.

Jean Rollin’s The Demoniacs is a little different from his usual ‘personal movies’ in that, while it still has the ‘demoniaques’ of the title coming as a pair of girls (almost every set of protagonists or antagonists come in twos in a Rollin film), these two are in no way vampires. Exactly what they are is open to debate but... okay, I’ll run the plot by you first, such as it is.

Set sometime in the 19th century, Rollin uses voice over and shots of the heads of the four ‘wreckers’ in circles as he runs down the background of each one. This is pretty much like an extended and more thorough version of a similar technique used in the opening credits of those old 1930s serials where, for the first few episodes, footage of the actor would be used to introduce the characters and certainly Rollin was a big fan of various movie serials.

Then the credits roll and the film starts in the aftermath of the four wreckers, The Captain (John Rico), Le Bosco (Willy Braque), Paul (Paul Bisciglia) and bad gal Tina (Joëlle Coeur). They are looting their latest shipwreck and then find the two girls of the title survived... played by Lieva Lone and Patricia Hermenier. So they rape them both and kill them (kinda). Shortly after, in the local saloon bar, the captain is plagued with visions of the dead girls haunting him as ghosts and, frankly, even though these ghosts can still be raped and bashed about, I’m going to stick to the idea that they are actually dead at this point. Then the ladies return for more trouble from the increasingly paranoid crew of ‘wreckers’ but get away and visit the ‘cursed Abbey ruins’, where the two guardians, including a lady dressed as a clown (so, yeah, definitely a Rollin film for sure) allow the girls to liberate a demon who has been imprisoned in the Abbey for hundreds of years. There is rumour that it’s Lucifer himself. Certainly, if you can get away with wearing the black coat, white shirt and bear chested medallion look like this guy, you probably are Satan because, yeah, nobody is going to give you any hassle about it if you walk the walk, I guess.

Anyway, Satan (or his nearest equivalent) sexes the two ladies up and gives them special powers to take their revenge on their killers. They start to do this (using powers that make statues fly around the Abbey grounds, projected at their enemies) but the wreckers kill the two guardians and so the gals give the devil his powers back, so he can bring those two back to life. They then go and meet their own rapey, painful deaths (again) but not before all the wreckers have killed each other... or died unconvincingly by their own hand.

So yeah, okay, you never watch a Rollin film for the strength of the acting but this one particularly has some very melodramatic and over the top performances from the cast... as well as a propensity for various actors and actresses to look the audience directly in the eye on occasion, while delivering a monologue, as if they could be breaking the fourth wall. Well, I actually believe the acting in this one is deliberately unconvincing. At the top end of the movie Rollin inserts the on screen credit... “Un film expressionniste de Jean Rollin” and I can’t help but think he’s trying his best to get the cast to act as if they’ve just stepped out of a silent film here. The acting is quite unlike many of his other films I’ve seen, if memory serves. So there’s that.

Of course, what you do watch Rollin films for is the surrealistic imagery and beautiful cinematography and this one is no exception. There are some wonderful shot compositions in this, especially where architecture and the human form meet and, as I remarked to someone when I was looking at this one again, you can tell straight away from looking at any frame in the movie that Rollin directed this. It’s beautiful and it looks really good on the US Blu Ray for Redemption/Kino Lorber.

Also, about this wonderful transfer... this one is touted as an extended directors cut and I did feel that there was extra length to this version than the last time I watched it (in the wonderful Encore boxed edition DVD... which had more extras on it but, like I said, I think this version is longer). Also, again if memory serves, this is probably the one non-porn movie that Rollin made which has the most female nudity and sex in it... even more so in an extended masturbation sequence from Tina at the end of this one. So there’s that if you want it (I certainly do but, that’s just part of the Rollin experience for me).

A couple of things which stood out for me which kinda seemed wrong were...

Okay, so the score is credited to Pierre Raph but I reckon there are also some old library cues in their because, especially near the start, it seems to belong more in a 1930s-50s film, it seemed to me. It certainly didn’t seem to marry up so well with the style of the images in some scenes so, yeah, it’s probably a deliberate ploy to bring it back to the serials or silents (there are some solo piano cues in strange places too) so... well, it is what it is.

Another thing is that one of the patrons in the pub has a beautiful figurine of Bela Lugosi as Dracula (the only time a vampire, Rollin’s stock in trade, gets a look in here) but, yeah, you know, the setting of this film certainly pre-dates Bela’s time on stage and screen as Dracula (and probably pre-dates cinema too, for that matter). And there are apparently a fair few anachronistic objects scattered around the place that I didn’t notice but, yeah, I’m not going to quibble.

Once again, with The Demoniacs, Rollin delivers a heady cocktail of bad acting, nudity, surrealism and great compositional beauty to the table. In other words, he brings ‘true cinema’ and I will certainly be revisiting this film a few more times in my life, if all goes to plan. And this US Blu Ray edition is certainly a nice version of it for sure. Grab this one while it’s still in print.