Henry And June

Where Hearts Were 
Entertained In June

Henry & June
Directed by Phillip Kaufman
USA/France 1990
Universal
Blu Ray Zone B

Wow, it says something when I have to import a big American movie on Blu Ray from Italy because there are no UK or US versions of the film made in that format. Hollywoodland needs to catch up with what people want, I think. 

A couple of years after one of his many masterpieces, The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, Phillip Kaufman co-wrote and directed another movie heavily tinged with the erotic experience, namely Henry & June. I remember going to the cinema to see this one at the time with my best friend. Sadly, neither the cinema or my friend still exist but this movie does bring back some memories of both for me. 

The film was somewhat star studded, for the time, with the titular writer Henry Miller being played by Fred Ward (Remo Williams aka The Destroyer himself, ladies and gentleman) and with his somewhat challenging wife June being played by the rising star Uma Thurman. Then, of course, there’s the central character of the film, who we see everything through the eyes of, the great female erotica writer Anaïs Nin, played by the always compelling Maria de Medeiros. And she is the real star of the show here, as the movie is based on her diaries, published posthumously after the last surviving person who appears in them, her husband Hugo, had died. Hugo here is played by a young Richard E. Grant and, yeah, his fake American accent in this movie does, it has to be said, take some getting used to. And Kevin Spacey looks so young in this one. 

The film takes place in Paris in the early 1930s, starting off with a flashback to 1931 as we find Anaïs coming across a stash of pornographic photos and illustrations she finds after her husband and she have rented an apartment there. The two seconds or less shot of one drawing depicting Japanese tentacle porn is apparently what ensured the film was the first ever to get an NC-17 release in America. Go figure!?!?!

And then, while concentrating on her writing, a struggling Henry Miller, working on his famous book Tropic Of Cancer, walks into her life and she gets sucked into the whirlpool of ‘the decadent artist life’ in Paris at the time... falling in love with both Henry and June while also continuing loving, sexual encounters with her husband. I won’t say much more about the story content because, it’s based on diaries and so in terms of a through line... well there is one but it’s more a series of episodic, impressions of the time. And perhaps better for it.

And when I say it’s impressionistic, I mean just that. As you would expect from a Kaufman film, the director makes best use of his cinematographer Philippe Rousselot to literally paint a picture of the times, often harking back to those famous photographic shots of Paris and its nightlife that you would remember, some of which are one display in the film. The muted colours in certain compositions setting off visual memories in the mind of the watcher (at least it did to me) which often mirror those scenes of the Parisian night life which oft times spark the imagination. Indeed, there’s one scene where it becomes more blatantly channelled, as Anaïs and Henry are hanging around Brassaï (played here by Artus de Penguern) as he takes various shots which, I’m pretty sure, are used in their original form at each flash of the camera. 

The film is deeply erotic but holds back in many scenes of graphic ostentation (apart from standard nudity and the beauty of the female form without too much close up detail) while actually managing to be erotic more in its enthusiasm for the voracious appetites of human sexuality with an emphasis on the positivity of the experience more than anything else. The film starts off almost subconsciously foreshadowing the maelstrom that Anaïs’ life is about to explode into by using the opening bars of The Adoration Of The Earth from Stravinsky’s The Rite Of Spring and, I guess if you are familiar with the piece (which I wouldn’t have been when I went to see this in 1990) then you might get an idea of the emotional turmoil that the main characters will soon be going through. A piece by Eric Satie is used later, which of course lends it own mood to the way the images are percieved. 

My favourite two scenes of the movie are as follows. One where Henry and Anaïs are in a cinema watching Dali and Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou (which I guess is a bit of artistic licence because the film was already a couple of years old when this film is set) and Anaïs is vocally defending it against the rowdy audience criticising it for being obscene. 

And the other one is a scene in a brothel where Anaïs and Hugo hire two women to make love to each other so they can watch. It’s a nicely rendered sex scene featuring a cameo role from the great Brigitte Lahaie (again, another actress who I wouldn’t have been familiar with when I first saw this film) and it’s a stand out moment when, half way through, Anaïs tells Brigitte to stop pretending to be a man (in order to properly see how one woman makes love to another). 

So, yeah, Henry & June is a wonderfully performed, well designed movie featuring an exploration and juxtaposition of fleshy textures and warm (and sometimes muted) colours which make for a beautiful and, sometimes, hypnagogic piece of cinematic art. I think it’s a film which has been largely forgotten in the US (and UK) and I think it deserves to be remembered and celebrated with a bells and whistles Blu Ray and UHD release at some point soon. Another triumph for Kaufman and the, probably, liberating poetic sexuality of Anaïs Nin.

The Night Of The Hunted

Forget-Me-Lots

The Night Of The Hunted
aka La nuit des traquées
France 1980 Directed by Jean Rollin
Redemption Blu Ray Zone A

Warning: It’s a very simple plot but, even so, this one has spoilers.

It’s a shame that, out of all of Rollin’s more personal films (aka, the ones which weren’t ‘hardcore porn director for hire’ stuff), The Night Of The Hunted isn’t a bit better known because, re-visiting it now on Blu Ray, I’m once again taken with just how good this one is. I mean, yes, it does have a few overly long sex scenes which sometimes seem a little out of place (if no less welcome) but this is actually a very impressive movie and, strangely enough for a director like Rollin, it’s the one of his films that actually feels a lot more like the early work of David Cronenberg (in films like Rabid, Shivers and the more experimental fare he made before those two).

Rollin himself really didn’t seem to like this one and it’s a shame that he didn’t appreciate himself how good this is, I feel. Partially this may be due to a tragedy before the shoot started, which may well have coloured his feelings about it. He was introduced to actress Martine Delva and had her very much in mind for the role of the main protagonist’s friend Veronique. He was so taken with her she became the figurehead for the project in his eyes but, when he invited her out to go on a location scout with him, she turned him down to do something else with one of her friends. That was the last he saw of her because she got into a car accident that night and her life support was turned off one week later.

So that role in the film now is played by Dominique Journet, who does have a striking presence as far as I’m concerned but, ultimately plays second fiddle to the main protagonist played by porn actress and regular Rollin collaborator, the stunning Brigitte Lahaie. Here she plays Elysabeth, who stumbles into the road in front of the car being driven by the lead male character, Robert (played by Alain Duclos). He takes her home to his apartment because she can’t remember where she lives but it’s clear she was running from something. After they make love, he realises she doesn’t even remember who he is or things she knew just a few moments before. She is a puzzle but, certainly, she has some kind of disease similar to advanced Alzheimers. When he leaves her there to go to work, she is removed/abducted and taken to The Black Tower, a kind of prison hospital for a load of ‘patients’ like herself.

Here she encounters another woman who shares the same ‘apartment’ called Catherine, played by Cathy Stewart. Neither of them remember each other and Catherine obviously has an advanced or differently presented version of the disease Elysabeth does because, she can’t even coordinate her movements properly to be able to eat soup and has to be helped. When Elysabeth re-encounters Veronique again, who was escaping with her the night before and who also barely remembers her, they hatch a plan to break out of their sterile prison. She calls Robert on a random telephone number she has kept which he gave her and he tries to rescue them. She goes to collect Catherine but the stress of her condition has already forced her to kill herself by poking her eyes out with a pair of scissors. It’s a moment made more poignant by the truly electric performances of Lahaie and Stewart. Some patients are going crazy and the tower block suddenly becomes a gory deathtrap, if you run into people who react differently to their disease than others and, soon, the guards are taking people away to a train yard for a lethal injection, before they are thrown into a furnace. All this to cover up a disease caused by an accidental government radiation leak that has only affected a certain amount of the population.

And it’s a truly moving film. Rollin uses warm oranges and browns when he can get away with it in the colour palette (such as in Robert’s apartment) but the many scenes shot in the tower are mostly neutral, sterile colours which serve to accentuate the isolation and loneliness of the desperate characters who wander, aimless and lost, in the corridors of the vast apartment building. Yeah, as I said earlier, this one really does feel a bit like an early Cronenberg, for sure.

The performances are much better in this one, in general, than in the majority of Rollin’s earlier work and the tragic sense of the characters slowly creeps up on the audience giving an emotional hit rare in the body of this director’s work (with one big exception if memory serves but, that’s for a future review). It seems quite obvious that the mental deterioration of the patients/prisoners in the film are a metaphor for Alzheimers but also he is obviously making an analogy of the condition to the shuffling zombies often found in films by the likes of George A. Romero. The difference here is that only a handful of the blighted people who inhabit this prison, itself a deliberate metaphor for the modern prison used for the Baader–Meinhof Gang, are in any way dangerous and are just tragic figures.

Despite Rollin’s own dissatisfaction with the end of the movie, it all ends quite eloquently and hauntingly in that Robert is also, for very different violent reasons I won’t go into here, a shambling zombie of a character and as he and Lahie’s character slowly walk towards an uncertain future, we see their hands link together... a sign that somewhere in the back of their forgotten minds they can still sense there was once a connection between them. It’s a beautful moment and one which lingers in the mind after the film has long finished.

The Night Of The Hunted is not one of Rollin’s typical films for sure but it truly is one of the best in his body of work, surely the best of his ‘non-vampire movies’ and I would certainly recommend this one to people who have not yet encountered the director or have been coloured by their expectations of what they’ve seen him do in other areas of his CV. A wonderful, shambling heartbreak of a movie... with added nudity for those who love that extra element.

Fascination

Fascinating
Rhythm

Fascination
France 1979
Directed by Jean Rollin
Redemption Blu Ray Zone A

Warning: Light spoilers.

I think Fascination, in a slightly edited print on television, was probably the first of Jean Rollin’s marvelous surreal vampire tales that I saw... followed in quick succession by a few of his other exquisite gems. I say vampires but the five girls who are the main ‘menace’ (shall we say) of the film are not pure vampires in the most commonly perceived, supernatural definition of the word but, they certainly fit other definitions of the term, which I shall come to in a little while.

Also, yes, there are five of them but, for the majority of the film, only two are present and are the main protagonist's way into the story. These two are chambermaids Elisabeth, played by future novelist Franca Maï... and Eva, played by Brigitte Lahaie, the French porn star who acted in a fair few of Rollin’s films and who acquits herself much more gracefully and naturalistically as an actress than many of her co-stars in a fair few of these productions, it seems to me. She’s quite often the best thing in a Rollin film in terms of acting ability but Fascination seems to me to be one of the films where the actors being used by Rollin are all much better than the usual suspects prior to this.

The film starts off strongly, with a slow pan down from an oil painting onto a locked book on a table. A pair of hands opens the book and starts leafing through and caressing the pages. It’s a shot which doesn’t have anything else to do with the rest of the film, from what I can make out but, it looks great. This is then followed by a wonderful title sequence of Elisabeth and Eva dancing on a very long, causeway-like, low bridge to a gramophone record... one of those old players with the big trumpet speaker. This is followed by an interlude where three of the ‘vampires’ visit a local slaughter house to drink animal blood from wine glasses, to help improve their ‘anemia’.

Then, the main story catches up as thief Marc, played by Jean-Marie Lemaire, escapes four other criminals he is conning with a small chest containing gold coins. He crosses the causeway I mentioned earlier and enters the big house, surrounded by a river (yeah, it’s more like a less traditional looking castle with a moat, in fact) and starts what is almost a small ‘home invasion’ with the two chambermaids. Sexual shenanigans ensue as Eva especially wants to keep him on the grounds until midnight, when their ‘friends’ will arrive for their special club meeting. To that end, she even gets rid of the other robbers for him... offering her body to them and then, in an iconic moment in French cinema (as far as I’m concerned), wielding a grim reaper’s scythe and slaughtering them all.

Of course, when the rest of the gals arrive and entertain the ‘guest’ until the proper time, Marc, who is not a sympathetic character and arrogant enough to think himself safe around five flimsy women, finds out that these ‘anemics’ have developed a thirst for human blood and they kill and eat the blood of a ‘guest’ at midnight when they meet up. More shenanigans ensue, which I won’t bother to detail here.

This is an absolutely stunning work from Rollin, it has to be said (I’m surprised Encore didn’t release this one as one of their fantastic Rollin boxed DVD editions when they were doing them). The film is more bound to interiors than most of them for about two thirds of the combined running time but, with a house as large as this, the director is still able to include the odd shot of small figures amongst architectural details (such as shots down long corridors) and his signature is all over this. Beautiful colours, naked and half naked women, a minimal plot and absolutely brilliant framing are the order of the day here.

Philippe D'Aram’s score is pretty good for this one too, using a very distinctive sound which makes good use of, I think, a musical saw for some of the themes (such as the record the girls are dancing to in the opening credits). Out of all of the Rollin film scores, I think this is the one which has had the most commercial releases on CD... such releases are a bit sparse when it comes to Rollin’s films and often they include the French dialogue where the elements have not been kept separate from the music tracks.

Every time I see Lips Of Blood (reviewed here) I think that it’s my favourite of his films but, every time I see Fascination, I think the same of this one. Certainly, this most recent Koch/Redemption Blu Ray release of the film looks absolutely stunning (it’s often had cheap and washed out looking prints in the past) and is certainly worth the money (I believe Indicator have their own version coming out very soon which may well be a good one to own too). If you’re not familiar with Rollin’s work then Fascination is a good place to start because the acting isn’t completely terrible, the dialogue is actually above average and it’s filled with all the usual, sumptuous imagery you’d expect form the director. Always a pleasure whenever I revisit this one and certainly one I’d recommend to most cineastes.

Orchestrator Of Storms

Rollin Alley

Orchestrator of Storms:
The Fantastique World
of Jean Rollin
USA 2022
Directed by Dima Ballin & Kat Ellinger
Arrow Films
FrightFest Screening 26/8/22

Orchestrator Of Storms: The Fantastique World Of Jean Rollin is a brand new documentary that I saw screening on its European premiere at this year’s FrightFest. And, truth be told, it was a really nice little movie. Although my first reaction to this heady concoction of talking heads, excerpts from Rollin’s cinema and behind the scenes stills was that it felt a little like “Rollin for Beginners” to a certain extent. Some of the presenters and guests for the screening seemed to be getting more out of it in terms of acquiring knowledge than I did and my first gut reaction straight after the screening was... really? You can pick most of this up from the extras on many DVDs and the few books written about the director. But then I realised that this documentary did do something new which I’m really grateful for... it did give me at least one thing I’d not known before and it also reminded me of something I’d long forgotten. And, actually, it also acts as a kind of summary for a lot of those old DVD and Blu Ray extras from times gone past so... yeah, after I got thinking about it for a bit, I figured I did get a lot out of it and, beyond me personally, this cinematic document is going to be a lot of help for people who don’t have the time or opportunity to piece together all this information like some of us were doing as teens in the 1980s, when there was no internet. So, yeah, good job.

The film talks to certain key people in the director’s life and various other experts, among them some very important ones such as the brilliant Virginie Sélavy (who I think I might have met at a seminar on Rollin’s work once and who was one of the guests here at FrightFest), the great Kier-La Janisse, Nigel Wingrove (who founded the Redemption label, instrumental in exposing a lot of people to Rollin’s work... albeit in sometimes cut form... in the UK back in the 80s and, indeed, Redemption’s recent definitive US Blu Ray editions are still the best documents of these films), the wonderful Françoise Pascal and frequent collaborator and legend Brigitte Lahaie... who was the main guest for this screening with much to say and who I was happy to meet, briefly, at a signing session after the film.

The movie takes us from Rollin’s early childhood, where I found out a little about his parents and was reminded that, when he was a very young boy, his mother was engaged in an amorous affair with the writer Georges Bataille, who was an early influence on Rollin. It goes through his early break into the film industry and talks about the riot that ensued at the screening of his first feature film The Rape Of The Vampire (which I reviewed here), putting it into context with what was going on at the time. It goes through, mostly, his personal films but it does touch on his career in the pornographic industry he used to finance his own work, perhaps a little more briefly than I would have liked since this is the stuff I genuinely don’t know much about and could do with learning a little more.

What I did find interesting was Rollin’s desire, in his final year, to try and make a movie version of Georges Bataille’s confrontational, pornographic work Story of the Eye (Histoire de l'oeil). Admittedly, it would be a tough movie to try and get past any censor in most countries but one thing which did spring to mind, when Wingrove describes the scene where a man’s eyeball is torn out and then inserted into a woman’s vagina... is that Bertrand Blier already filmed a version of that scene, pretty much, in his charming movie Merci La Vie so, yeah, maybe not necessarily that scene but it would have certainly made for a challenging movie, that’s for sure.

Kier-La Janisse once again tells the charming story about how she invited Jean Rollin to one of her first film festivals without realising the strings attached and it’s made apparent just how much that meant to Rollin and how much joy it brought him. The most moving and informative stuff in the film, though, I think comes from his technical collaborator Véronique Djaouti. There’s a point in the proceedings charting just how ill Rollin was in his final years and it gets to a point where she’s practically reliving his final night for the camera and just breaks down, unable to go on for a while. Now, I was in tears myself by this point so it’s admittedly a very powerful piece of film but I was thinking to myself... they could at least have turned the cameras off. I’m sure the footage is here by mutual consent though so, yeah, it’s strong and engaging stuff.

After the film finished there was a quite good Q&A with Sélavy, Lahaie and the man behind the new book about LeHai’s films and, I learned a lot from this too. I already had an inkling but it turns out that Lahaie has been successfully hosting a very popular two hour, daily radio show since early in the millennium and so she’s actually a very busy person these days. I’m not going to say too much about the Q&A because Arrow were filming it for inclusion on their Blu Ray of the movie, due to be released sometime next year. There were some interesting questions that came up though, including one about Rollin’s connections to the underground jazz music scene at the time.

And, yeah, I think that’s me done on Orchestrator of Storms: The Fantastique World of Jean Rollin. I got so much more out of it than I at first realised and fans of this director’s filmography should appreciate this one... especially the future fans who will certainly find this an invaluable insight into the director’s life and work. This is probably my favourite film of FrightFest this year, I think.

The Escapees

Rockin’ n’ Rollin

The Escapees (aka Les Paumées du Petit Matin aka The Runaways)
France 1981 Directed by Jean Rollin
US Redemption Blu Ray Region A

Warning: Some spoilers.

Okay... so I seem to be getting really unlucky when it comes to this review site and the films of Jean Rollin. Believe it or not, I am very much an admirer/supporter of this director and love the surreal beauty of his images coupled with the female nudity, twins/duos and vampirism which are some of his trademark themes when he was shooting his low budget personal projects (and not making porn for a fast buck). I own maybe 12 - 15 of his movies (in various editions including the latest uncut, US Region A Blu Rays and those gorgeous DVD Encore boxed editions from a number of years ago) and, I promise you, I love the majority of these.

Why is it then, whenever I come to acquire a Rollin film I’ve not seen before for the purposes of reviewing it here, that I always seem to find the not very good ones? Don’t worry, I’ve got some classics freshly upgraded to Blu Ray to rewatch and write up over the next year or two but, as it happens, this is another of the ‘not quite there’ Rollin films for me... although I’m sure lots of other people must like this one.

The Escapees starts off in an old, mansion type house (it could maybe have been a private boarding school in real life... it has that look) we are asked to believe that this is an insane asylum. The bizarre and not very realistic looking padding added to the walls like soft wallpaper tries to uphold that illusion but really isn’t all that convincing. As the credits roll we see two girls looking out of one of the windows before being ushered off by one of the staff. We then cut to a shot of a beautiful girl in a lone rocking chair in the field outside the house. After a shot looking at a window focusing on a conversation between the lead psychiatrist and one of the assistants, we see a reverse shot a little closer in and looking out, again, at the rocking chair girl. The rocking chair girl is called Marie, as played by Christiane Coppé and she is framed perfectly in one of the six panels of the window as the camera looks out at her. Which is the kind of perfect composition one half watches Rollin for anyway, to be fair.

We then meet the other of the two main protagonists of the film, Michelle, as played by Laurence Dubas. We first see her being hosed down by attendants before being straightjacketed and locked in her room with the aforementioned ‘padded walls’. Even though she is straightjacketed, it seems no problem for her to just nudge the window open because, not only is it unlocked, it’s already partially ajar. What the heck? There’s good security for you. She tries to attract the attention of rocking chair girl to help her escape but Marie is in her own headspace for a little while and we see Michelle from outside the window shouting out at her. She then goes off to get something in her teeth to throw out the window to get Marie’s attention. When she comes back we see she is only one floor up which, honestly, makes you wonder why she doesn’t jut make a jump for it. Also... it’s a different, much bigger window the outside shot of her is on this time... in a slightly different part of the house. The continuity on this film just leapt out of that window itself, hurtling both to oblivion and the great, anti-consistency resting ground in the sky.

After a little while the two hook up (and for some reason, Marie has absolutely no trouble just pushing open Michelle’s ‘locked’ door... what is going on here?) and escape together where they have interesting encounters - first meeting a lady playing a bongo drum in the forest for no apparent reason and then joining her ‘performance’ troupe before deserting on them with their new found friend, Sophie the pickpocket, played by Marianne Valiot.

There are quite a lot of familiar, Rollin haunts in the movie (and also quite a lot of handheld camera used to capture them in this one, for some reason) such as a junkyard, a disused train yard, a beach (possibly the same one he uses in most of his films but, if it is, it’s not the same stretch used here... or it’s taken from a completely different angle) and, later on, a dock. One place where I’ve not seen Rollin shoot before is at an ice rink. After getting in trouble and lashing out with a bottle, Marie runs off to hide in said ice rink for the night while Michelle is out looking for her. Of course, seeing as it’s a Rollin film and it quite naturally defies logic as part of its overall DNA, Marie ‘borrows’ a handy nearby costume and starts skating and dancing on the ice rink. However, even though the rink is completely abandoned at night, a spotlight still follows her around so we can see her ice dancing skills (which brought memories of when I used to have to dance on ice for people when I was 6 or 7 years old... not sure that’s a good memory though). Perhaps the spotlight is just supposed to be in her mind like the cheers of her imaginary audience... who can tell? Apparently, the actress’ ice skating talents here was one of the reasons Rolllin picked her for this role.

When Michelle finally catches up with Marie the two stay with Sophie in a sailor bar near the dock. Sophie’s plan is for them to all stowaway on a ship with her sailor-boy lover but things don’t go smoothly for any of our main characters (they never do in a Rollin film) and death or desperation await all three of these friends in some form or another. 

The film is not, as I said, at the upper end of my Jean Rollin experiences and, although production values have never been his strong point, probably because of the small budgets with which he works, he usually makes up for that with some incredibly beautiful, often erotic, often surreal imagery which make the films much more interesting propositions than those of a lot of directors, especially those who work within the same kind of genres. However, I found this one to be really distracting. I’m perfectly used to incredibly bad acting in some (although, actually, not all of his films) but there didn’t even seem to be a budget for retakes here. There are some scenes when it looks like one or another of the characters have been waiting for their cue and another one might repeat or stress a word to remind them it’s their turn to jump in, it seemed to me. Also, although the lack of story follow through is almost a necessity in this director’s work, the film did look like it was being reshaped in the editing room from whatever material the director managed to get. Certain reactions from characters to things they were already supposed to know, for example, made the film seem like it had been put together in a different order than originally intended.

Famous porn star and Jean Rollin regular Brigitte LaHaie, who I have a lot of time for as an actress, turns up towards the end in some sequences which spell doom for certain people and it’s almost like a sigh of relief when she appears and makes at least one of the characters seem a little more credible. Taking her clothes off and making love to another woman also helped, of course but I was just grateful to see LaHaie arriving like the 'acting cavalry' as almost a trademark of quality in a kind of ‘Rollin muse’ way at this point, although her role here is even less of one than her turn in Rollin’s Grapes Of Death (reviewed here).

And that really is all I’m going to say about The Escapees, I think. In some ways the movie seems like a partial, spiritual cousin to Rollin’s earlier The Demoniaques, with its depiction of stripey shirted sailors and the death of one of the characters in a raft floating in the dock but I didn’t find the film nearly as entertaining or as striking in its imagery as that earlier movie. If you are a die hard fan of the director and appreciate his fine eye for the juxtaposition of feminism, nudity and surrealism then The Escapees is always going to be a film you’ll want to take a look at, regardless of the end quality of the piece and, as I said earlier, I’m sure this one must have its fans. If you have never seen a Rollin film and want to get a taste for the director, I’d suggest you stay away from this one for a bit and start somewhere in the late 1960s or early 1970s with his work, which is much more poetic without seeming as pretentious and forced as certain moments in this film do. So, done with that one and I hope to bring you some much more positive reviews of this marvellous director’s work sometime soon.

The Grapes Of Death (Les Raisins De La Mort)

Raisin The Dead

The Grapes Of Death 
(Les Raisins De La Mort)
1978 France
Directed by Jean Rollin
Redemption Blu Ray Region A

Warning: Occasional spoilers washing over your palette.

Hmmmm. This is another Rollin film I’d not seen before and I can’t say it’s up there with my favourites by this extraordinary director. It’s often labelled as a zombie movie, one of Rollin’s rare forays into the genre which would also include a film I’ve not yet seen, his nazi zombie movie Zombie Lake. Personally, the zombie tag is about as broad as pegging that genre to a film like 28 Days Later, as far as I’m concerned. It’s a movie which makes use of the unofficial zombie rule book which has developed from the version started by George A. Romero’s Living Dead films and, in that way at least, it’s an homage to those movies.

While the mechanics of wine grapes poisoned with new pesticides is certainly similar to another famous zombie movie, Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (aka The Living Dead At The Manchester Morgue), the film is more a close cousin of the “almost a zombie” genre which has flourished in the 28 Days/Weeks Later movies and, arguably, the REC movies, but which bears much more resemblance to George A. Romero’s own “almost a zombie” movie, The Crazies (and presumably its recent remake, which I didn’t get to see since I didn’t like the original all that much). That is to say, the shambling, zombie-like humans in this movie are just that... they are not actually dead, they have been infected and this is making them kill, usually quite gorily, anybody who is free from infection. A caveat to that, or should that be cadaver, is that the infection does give some of the infected a kind of rotting, zombie-like similarity in the case of a few “lead crazy people” as it were.

The film follows a young girl, Elisabeth (played by Marie-Georges Pascal), whose companion is killed in their deserted train by a pseudo-zombie. She is trying to get to the vinyard where her fiance works but she pulls the emergency brake to stop the train while she is still on the way as she is being chased by a “zombie” who we know, from the opening sequence, must have got on at the vinyard in question. Since this film is somewhat akin to a road movie, at a certain level, it makes no sense geographically since the girl spends the entire film heading towards the vinyard, and finally arriving there, when directionally it makes more sense that she’s been heading away from it.

Now, I certainly know the folly of trying to apply actual narrative logic to a Jean Rollin movie as he clearly demonstrated, on a regular basis, that he just wasn’t interested in such stuff. It did kind of grate in this one, though, because I kept trying to get the logic of a guy that worked at the main protagonist's destination getting on the train a stop before the girl, who had not yet arrived there, get off and then continuing forward to arrive where the original guy got on, straight in my head as the film played out.

Mostly, I found this movie a little more pedestrian than I would expect from a great surrealist like Rollin and although the shots of the characters walking through the French country landscape were, indeed, perfectly composed and beautiful, there were a lot less of the startling shot set ups that I would normally expect from him and the film did feel a bit rough and ready in places.

There is gore and nudity (most memorably supplied by frequent Rollin collaborator Brigitte Lahaie) throughout the film but there seems to be less of this on offer here than I would expect from this director’s films. Although there is a sequence where a naked blind girl is crucified and then beheaded, followed by shots of her now murderous guardian kissing the lips of her decapitated noggin, the film has far less of the surrealistic flourishes that allow Rollins genius to shine through and this left me wanting in terms of what I would like to get from this man’s, often underrated, cinematic landscape.

The score was interesting in that it seems to succeed and fail during various scenes in about equal measure, at least as a support for the on screen images. It also sounds like it was banged out by just one person on an old Cassio synthesiser for a lot of it and, the score, I would have to conclude, doesn’t really do the film any favours. This is something I feel a lot of Jean Rollin’s fantastical cinema excursions have in common, I’m afraid.

Ultimately, fans of post-Romero modern zombie horror will probably find The Grapes Of Death severely lacking in the style of filmmaking they would want to see and, even Rollin fans like myself may find this a less flavoursome dish than many of his others. I wasn’t completely disappointed by it, however, and I found the last 20 minutes to be much more coherent (not necessarily a good thing with Rollin) and entertaining than the rest of the film. Certainly something horror enthusiasts should at least try once, I think. I’ve never been much of an appreciative audience for the aforementioned The Living Dead At The Manchester Morgue, either, if truth be told, but I know there’s a large number of supporters for that movie so maybe this one will appeal to people too. As far as I’m concerned, though, I’m much more a lover of his vampire films, so far, than his brief dabbling with the zombie and, in this case, pseudo-zombie film genres.

The Nude Vampire (La Vampire Nue)

Nude For Thought

The Nude Vampire (La Vampire Nue)
France 1970
Directed by Jean Rollin
Redemption Region 1

Given that he’s a director I have quite a lot of time for, I can’t quite believe I’ve been writing this blog almost two and a half years and not got around to reviewing any of Rollin’s films on here before. This probably stems from the fact that any UK editions of his movies are rarely worth buying because of censorship issues (at least that’s been the case in the past). Also because of the annoying issue that whenever a country releases any of his titles, and it’s usually Redemption Films releasing them in some incarnation or other, they usually always choose their releases from the same pot of about 10 or so of his movies, and leave most of the rest unseen.

Probably the best DVD treatments I’ve seen are the Dutch Region 2 boxed editions from Encore (which I think is Redemption again) which were mostly 2 or 3 disc editions with absolutely beautiful transfers and stunning packaging. If you’ve not seen any Rollin before then the seven titles they released are the ones to get. Saying that though, there were two new batches of DVD (and BluRay if that’s your kind o’ thing) releases from the US arm of Redemption just recently and, finally, there were two in this lot that I hadn’t seen before... this one, The Nude Vampire, and The Iron Rose (which I’ll be watching sometime soon.

How to describe the movies of Jean Rollin to anyone who hasn’t seen one before?

Well... he’s always seemed to have had trouble funding his more personal films, like these, which usually deal with vampires, blood and lesbianism with a little bit of sado-masochism thrown in for good measure every now and again. The rest of the time he was usually making porn movies or softcore erotica for other people. I believe Emmanuelle 6 is one of his and “erotic star” Brigitte Lahaie is often found playing in these, plus playing various unclothed vampires in his regular movies... as an aside here, I’d like to say her performance as the title character in Rollin’s The Living Dead Girl is absolutely brilliant at the end of the movie and raises the acting in a Rollin movie past anything else I’ve seen from his filmography.

He also writes books of his obsession with nymph vampires, often involving the characters of a pair of sexy twins, living or undead, who often turn up in some form or another in quite a few of his movies. They’re in this one and at least one of the twins is one of the two introduced in the outrageous shooting clowns car chase scene which opens one of Rollin’s more well known films, Requiem For A Vampire (Vierges et vampires).

It would be true, I think, to say that the acting in most of Rollin's films is quite poor, to be honest. Usually, even though I don’t understand the French, the delivery often seems lacking and the scripts, although languishing perhaps within the realm of something that Michael Moorcock might write when he’s feeling particularly inscrutable, are usually quite dull too... not that there’s usually much pretence of a story in Rollin’s films.

All this is of absolutely no consequence if you’re watching a Rollin film, however, because it’s all about the sheer beauty and surrealism of the shots. You may be put off by a bad special effect (the guns being fired in this one are less technically competent, and their victims less believable, than the average three year old, for example) but you will at many points be startled by the sheer visual poetry and purity of some of the imagery... whether it be two lady vampires dancing to a phonograph, a vampire woman emerging from a grandfather clock to stab you through the chest with her spiky, augmented nipples or two young ladies making use of the whips and chains in an old castle. The imagery in a Rollin film is everything and you will, if you are a lover of the way images are designed in film, find yourself regularly gobsmacked by the richness of his creative and sometimes provocative palette when watching his films. I think his first film, the black and white Rape Of The Vampire (Le Viol Du Vampire) even caused a bit of a riot on its preview, although I can’t now find any evidence of that when I looked for it. I can never quite figure out if the Jason Schwartsman character in CQ is modelled after Rollin or Polanski (or possibly a mixture of the two).

Now I’d read somewhere that The Nude Vampire is not one of Rollin’s best films and, after having seen the thing for myself... I’d have to say that, actually, it is another Rollin classic which I’m sure I will watch as often as I have his other works. If only because of the first twenty minutes which is absolutely loaded with devastatingly gorgeous imagery such as naked blood transfusions and people wearing either colourful hoods or animal masks and also, and this is kind of unusual for Rollin, a fairly accessible storyline in the making which is, yeah okay, quite simple, but which is a lot more than you might get in many of Rollin’s other movies... his films tend to have great portions of their running times without any dialogue in them as a rule.

Seriously, the colours and lighting in this film,especially at the start, looks like Mario Bava has been let loose with a box of crayons and then Rollin has copied them but filtered them through the eyes of Max Ernst... there’s a visual opulence that almost defies description filling the frames and, to be honest, the story is the last thing on your mind as you watch the mystery of a captive vampire, a curious son and a suicide cult unfold.

As the film progresses, some of the story, what there is of it, drags a little and we are faced with the dilemma of a fair amount of nudity on display (true to form) but not by the title character. In fact, as the clash between the main male protagonist’s father, who is seeking the secret of eternal life through study and experimentation on the female vampire he has captive, and the clan of vampires who seek to rescue her from his (and his scientist friends) clutches reaches its zenith, you are then hit with the concept that really, they are not vampires at all and only appear so because of the way the human characters have viewed them.

So, yeah, there’s no way of getting around this but... for a film called The Nude Vampire... there really aren't any nude vampires actually in it, if truth be told. It has to be said, I think. Although you could obviously stretch a point and say that fang bearing, blood drinking creatures are, by definition, automatically vampires and the nudity in question is their naked soul at odds with the primitive superstitions and prejudices of mankind. You could say that, yeah... but someone might punch you in the mouth so you’re probably best keeping quiet on the metaphorical front on this one maybe.

Nevertheless... vampires or no, The Nude Vampire is one heck of a good Jean Rollin art piece, as you might expect from him, and if Rollin is your thing then I really don’t think you’ll be disappointed by this one. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not the most accessible in tone (although certainly in the pretence of a linear storyline, it is) and there are other Rollin movies I’d point you in the direction of first if you’ve never seen one before.. but this movie doesn’t seem to deserve the reputation it’s been left with in recent decades, it seems to me. Also, for fans of this artists cinema, it bridges the gap contextually for you between his first feature length production, the aforementioned Rape Of The Vampire (Le Viol Du Vampire) and his next one after this, The Shiver Of The Vampires (Le Frisson Des Vampires), being as it’s his second feature and his first shot in colour.

If you’re not familiar with the work of this French auteur then go watch something else like Le Viol Du Vampire or Fascination first. If, however, you’re already a Jean Rollin devotee, you really can’t go wrong in picking this one up.