The Living Dead Girl

 

Very Gone Girl

The Living Dead Girl
aka La morte vivante
France 1982 Directed by Jean Rollin
Redemption Blu Ray Zone A

Warning: Big story spoilers but, honestly, who watches a Jean Rollin film for the story?

I remember watching this one quite a while ago and being blown away by the emotional performance on this one... something I’m really not used to having to be dealing with on a Jean Rollin film. Revisiting it now on a gorgeous US Blu Ray from Redemption (some of Rollin’s films are still, bizarrely, cut in the UK... so really, don’t buy British)*, I’d have to say that the emotional performance at the heart of the film by the title character is maybe a little diminished in power but I’m mostly putting that down to knowing exactly where the movie is going. It’s actually a bit of a mixed bag though and I’d have to say now that, although I was remembering a lot more from this movie than I actually got, it’s still a resonant film but it pales a little in the wake of Rollin’s previous film, the truly emotional The Night Of The Hunted (reviewed by me here).

Although there are no actual vampires again in this movie (Rollin would return to his favourite night creatures later in life), it does still continue his idea of having a duo of protagonists in the film... who also double as a duo of antagonists, it has to be said, depending on your point of view. The two in question are two childhood friends and... it’s heavily implied... lovers. They are Catherine Valmont played, impressively, by Françoise Blanchard and Hélène, played by Marina Pierro (the actress/later muse of Walerian Borowczyk).

The film starts off with Catherine deceased for two years before she is accidentally resurrected by three gentleman dumping toxic waste drums into the family crypt... in the most improbably manner and in a coincidental and less than credible series of incidents when they are trying to steal whatever is on her, completely non-decomposed body. Don’t go there... it’s a fantasy movie, after all. Anyway, in her newfound, revived by fumes, zombie status, she kills one by gouging his eyes out, another by tearing his throat out... the third has already died by having his face accidentally melted in the chemical spill.

The film plays out like a series of bizarre coincidences, as Catherine returns to her house... more like a castle... and eventually kills the estate agent who is staying at the place while she is trying to sell it, as she is making love to her boyfriend. Then Hélène turns up and discovers Catherine has been resurrected from the dead and, their bond reunited, reminds Catherine how to speak, in a sequence not totally unlike, in Blanchard’s impressive performance, the famous blind man sequence in the 1931 version of Frankenstein (reviewed by me here). Shenanigans ensue as an actress/photographer is trying to find and take more pictures of the dead Catherine who she snapped in the field earlier in the film. Meanwhile, Hélène is starting to gather human victims for her dead friend in order to keep her alive, when it’s found that birds or animals are not good enough as a decent food stock.

But it’s not the story, which kind of hangs together in spite of how it sounds here, that’s the thing that keeps you watching. Nor is it all of the performances as, like Rollin’s early pictures, it’s all a bit hit and miss in that department, with some people doing good and others... best left uncommented on. But Blanchard and Pierro are spot on and the film explores the relationship and the way that Catherine’s zombie is increasingly, through her own growing self awareness (and attempted suicide by drowning... something which doesn’t really work when you’re already dead), seeming less of a bad person while Hélène is actually becoming the evil one of the two, attempting to procure living victims for her friend (indeed, Catherine actually cuts one of them free to help her escape before Hélène returns again).

The film ends with a moving moment where Catherine, driven by her own hunger, eats her willing friend and is left totally alone in the world with an uncertain future. It’s a bleak, nihilistic ending with Catherine screaming at the bloody demise of her friend by her own hand and, I guess it is quite powerful at that.

The film is somewhat atypical of Rollin in some ways. I mean, there’s some nice camerawork, for instance, when Hélène has left a body for Catherine she goes into a small tower filled with pigeons to get away from the screams and, looking up at the ceiling, the camera rotates on a POV from her viewpoint... which is cross cut with the camera rotating the other way at the same speed as we watch Cathrine eat her latest victim. However, there are also various things which I don’t remember seeing Rollin typically do that often, if at all, such as zoom shots, repeats of a shot in slow motion with a phased sound in the background to emphasise a moment early on in the film... and a section of the film shot in jerky, hand held camera and edited to give a kind of chaotic vibe. So, yeah, I guess he was trying something new here too... although there is some confusion about a simultaneous American version made on the same sets at the same time on a different camera in English and shot with a different, quite hostile and aggressive director by all accounts, which never got released... so I’m wondering if some of those shots maybe made their way into the French version.

Another thing is that the goriness of the violence is quite high for Rollin and one wonders if that was a natural progression to be more explicit in the graphic violence or whether that was a condition imposed on him by the producer? It’s kinda interesting but, shot by Rollin, it nevertheless looks incredible. The score however, by one of Rollin’s earlier musical collaborators, Philippe D'Aram, seems a trifle ‘against the grain’ in certain parts of the film. Also, there’s a musical group playing in the village square who have obviously been overdubbed with something completely different... the big giveaway being that they’re seemingly playing an instrumental track but this doesn’t stop the singer belting out whatever song she was singing, with absolutely no vocal on the audio. Um... yeah, okay.

Either way, The Living Dead Girl looks fantastic with Rollin’s usual penchant for the naked female form coming to the fore, mingled with buckets of blood (usually splashed all over said female forms) and some beautiful looking shots. It’s a nice enough movie and, still unusually for Rollin, has an emotional depth to it barely approached by the majority of his movies... but I wouldn’t say this is necessarily a jumping on point if you’ve not seen any of his other masterpieces, for sure. Great if you’re a Rollin fan but maybe best to seek out some of his other movies first, if you are not in the vicinity of that particular fanbase.

*Actually, the recent Indicator editions, which are also quite beautiful in their limited edition versions, seem to be free from cuts in the UK... although it’s very telling as to which of the more famous Rollin titles have not been released by them over here yet. So far they’re safe releases so far but, you know, do your research.

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.

Lips Of Blood

Crypt, Oh!
Through The Two Lips.

Lips Of Blood
aka Lèvres de sang
France 1975
Directed by Jean Rollin
Redemption Blu Ray Zone A

Warning: Slight spoilers I guess.

After The Demoniacs (reviewed by me here), Jean Rollin returned to the realm of vampires and, although there are five, sexy vampire ladies in this one, he does also manage to include the dual theme among them as two inseparable agents of the undead in this are played by the twins, Catherine and Marie-Pierre Castel. It’s also one of my favourite Rollin films (I even have a nice t-shirt with some bosomy poster art on it) because there are not that many plot points to take on board and it’s mostly focused on the main male lead running about the streets of France in the dark. That being said, I really don’t like the main character... for no other reasons than that a) he loses his temper too easily with people and b) his head seems too overly large to properly carry on top of his body. However, my lack of fondness for the man in question, Jean-Loup Philippe as Frédéric, doesn’t detract from my enjoyment of the film which is a tribute, I think, to the power of the director’s beautiful imagery.

Okay, so the basic plot of Lips Of Blood... Frédéric sees a photo of a château at a party. It sparks a long repressed childhood memory of spending the night there as a young boy of 12 with a vampire lady dressed in white (Jenniffer, played by the totally cute and gorgeous Annie Belle... my favourite of the ‘Rollin Vampire Gals’ for sure). His mother denies all knowledge but when he starts to try and find out from the sexy photographer who took the shot (and also to try and find out why she’s being paid not to tell him), he unleashes various misadventures where he is locked in a room then, when he gets out, the photographer is killed, a gunman played by Willie Braque tries to kill him and he is temporarily locked up in an insane asylum. He is rescued by the twins dressed as sexy nurses because he earlier accidentally freed four vampires when they were in their ‘bat state’, when he stumbled upon their coffin in one of the bizarre series of coincidences which dreamily crop up on a regular basis, it seems to me, in the cinema of Jean Rollin (not knocking it, by the way, but can see that the internal logic, such as it is, of these films wouldn’t be for everyone).

Anyway, he keeps seeing the ghostly apparition of Jennifer watching over him and giving him clues and, at last, he finds the château and, despite the warnings of his vampire hunting mother, helps fake her death and releases her ageless vampire self from her coffin prison so they can become lovers once more. She bites him up to seal the deal so that they can be eternally together and then, suddenly, they turn up at that beach that Rollin often features in many of his movies and get in a coffin together, so they can be washed out to sea with the tide. So, yeah, it’s a romantic one.

The film is certainly simplistic in the storyline but, with the exception of Rollin’s early works such as Le Viol Du Vampire (reviewed here), that’s not unusual for this writer/director. What’s also not unusual is the sumptuous and surreal visual images and beautiful compositions which are in abundance throughout the film. Great swathes of the movie are shot at night and mostly without any dialogue... which gives contrast when a character or two do decide to open their mouths and get into an exchange of ideas. During these night sequences, I noticed Rollin does what I’d seen him do on at least one other film, which is to light only the buildings and characters which are points of interest, leaving the rest of the frame in inky blackness and using the negative space to focus the audiences eyes on the highlights he wants you to see. This also gives these scenes a kind of built in ‘unnatural theatricality’ (which obviously doesn’t hurt a Rollin film any) and it’s an unusual way of doing things. I’m not saying it’s a unique characteristic of Rollin’s film-making... I’m sure I’ve seen directors like Bertrand Blier do a similar thing on movies like Merci La Vie... but it’s also not that common either.

Also, much as I dislike the main male lead, I think the acting in this one by all concerned is a heck of a lot better than the majority of the director’s previous films and this all helps... especially in those dialogue scenes. This one never really feels stilted or jarring in the delivery, unlike in The Demoniacs, for example (although I made a special case in my review on why that one perhaps shouldn’t be judged too harshly in terms of where it goes with the style of the acting).

And I really don’t have a lot more to say about Lips Of Blood other than, it’s the usual Rollin affair with naked vampire girls pitched against richly lit architecture and dreamy ideas with a soundtrack which is appropriate to the various sequences. It’s still one of my favourites by this director and this was a good period in Rollin’s career, I think.

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.

Requiem For A Vampire

Unturned We Stand

Requiem For A Vampire
aka Requiem Pour Un Vampire
aka Caged Virgins
France 1972
Directed by Jean Rollin  
Redemption Blu Ray Zone A

Warning: Vampiric spoilers being
whipped up in the dungeons of this review.

Requiem For A Vampire is the fourth of Jean Rollin’s personal feature length films (aka non-porno and mostly vampire themed) following on from The Rape Of The Vampire (reviewed here), The Nude Vampire (reviewed here) and Shiver Of The Vampires (reviewed here). Although it’s not my favourite of his movies, it’s probably the one with my favourite opening sequence because it’s like a bizarre, non-sequitur of a back story fill in and, I appreciate the strange juxtaposition of elements presented in this imagery. It’s also one of his more problematic films for the British Board Of Film Censors as it’s always cut to ribbons over here by at least six minutes, due to the sexual violence and dungeon molestation scenes so... yeah... if you’ve not seen this and want to watch it, make sure you definitely ‘don’t buy British’ in this case. Get a nice American or French version.

Okay... so that opening sequence. Shots are being fired as two cars speed down a country lane, one in pursuit of the other. The front car is being driven by a guy with two female companions who are dressed and made up as clowns. One of the two women... and of course it’s two women because two female companions is one of Rollin’s main obsessions in his movies... is firing out the back of the car window. They manage to give their aggressive pursuers the slip by turning down a back lane but it’s too late for the driver... he has taken too many bullets. So the girls drive the car to the middle of a field, cover it and the driver in gasoline and catch it alight. Once again, Rollin gives us a strong, slightly surreal, visual image of a car burning in a field. We cut to the opening credits which picture the girls walking through the countryside as Pierre Raph’s passable score kicks in.

Various small things happen which take up the first half an hour. The two girls, Marie (played by Marie-Pierre Castel, from Shiver Of The Vampires) and Michelle (played by Mireille Dargent, who would appear in a few of the director’s next films), find a barn and change out of their clown attire and make up. They then find a motorcycle in a tower which, I think, the driver pointed them to prior to his death (if I am joining the dots correctly), before using sexual allure to distract a hot dog stand vendor so they can steal his money but then, one of them gets accidentally buried alive by an inattentive grave digger (don’t ask). However, she is rescued before the two stumble onto a river, with some blood dripping in it and come face to face with some bats in a forest which compel them to find their way to a castle. The rest of the movie is pretty simple too and here’s a quick summary...

In the castle they find a vampire cult lead by the half vampire Erica (played by Dominique, the pointy breast stabbing woman from Shiver Of The Vampires) and Louise (played by Louise Dhour). They also have some barbaric male companions who do lots of raping and molestation of both Marie and Michelle, plus a load of chained, naked girls in the dungeon, in scenes which do go on a bit, it has to be said. These vampire guys also all manage to sound like Robert Newton playing Long John Silver as they make piratey ‘Arrrr’ noises as their only form of communication, it seems to me. Then there’s the one they all worship, the old vampire (played by Michel Delesalle) who has bitten them all... they are supposedly all turning into vampires and Erica even has fangs now.  

Then there’s lots of shenanigans where the two girls find that they can’t escape the grounds of the castle and the nearby cemetery (which looks familiar, it may be the one from The Iron Rose, reviewed here) as they always end back up at the castle. Their new job now is to entice nearby, local men into the castle for food. The double pigtailed Michelle takes her chores seriously... well, I say seriously. She finds a local, takes her clothes off and then the two of them chase each other laughing through the castle during many extended scenes as silly, comedy music plays. These scenes are nice to look at but, alas, they genuinely give a Carry On feel to the whole sequence, which is at odds with the rest of the movie.

These scenes are crosscut to Marie having sex with a guy but she hides him from the vampire cult. This gets her in trouble but the old vampire, in a candid moment with Marie, tells her that the others won’t properly turn into vampires and he really is the last of his breed. This makes no sense in some ways because, in the protracted dungeon rape scene, one of the barbaric males turns into a bat and hangs from a woman’s hair covered vulva in a nicely surreal, typical piece of Rollin image making. So, yeah, never sacrifice a good image for the details of the plot is probably the order of the day here (much like Argento, who admits to having the same disregard of the plot mechanics when it comes to being faced with a striking visual). But then, Michelle chains naked Marie up in a tower and whips her, in order to find out where her lover is. Marie won’t tell but Michelle then escapes with her because Erica was going to stab her eye out. Then the head vampire sacrifices his and Erica’s life by being sealed in a guarded tomb by his followers and the camera ‘irises in’ as the screen shrinks to a circle surrounded by orange.

So yeah, the story is simple and a lot of the acting is... questionable. But it’s Rollin so you come to expect that. As it’s Rollin, though, you also get a film filled with memorable and haunting images and a lot of beautifully composed frames. Once again, the director's use of colour is astonishing and, like in Shiver Of The Vampires, he sometimes pitches different colours like reds and blues together, colour coding different depths of the set to separate foreground and background in contrasting hues.

He’s also not shy of occasionally shocking the viewer with the juxtaposition of colours between transitions. For example, the shot of the vampire bat drinking the blood direct from a chained woman’s genitalia is all lit in red and held in the shot for a while. Then we get an edit to the old vampire in his coffin and... it’s a all lit in a bright, fluorescent green reminiscent of the greens that Mario Bava used to use in similar ways in his movies. It’s a shock to the senses, in the best way and looks fantastic, of course (well, Rollin’s cinema always looks fantastic).

Another thing he does a lot of here is take shots looking at different levels to add depth. So he’ll have an opening in a part of the screen with people framed in that opening to highlight the contrasting depths. Or he’ll take a shot from up on the ramparts looking down at several different landscape levels with the action going on in the bottom level. And, conversely, he’ll do a shot looking up from the bottom of a tower at a naked lady at the top, for instance. I notice he really makes use of the height and horizontal lengths of various locations here, probably more than he did in the previous film because this castle lends itself to that kind of frame design.

Also, in this film, some of the night scenes give a completely pitch black screen where nothing can be seen except the shapes or areas he chooses to highlight with his coloured lighting. So, for example, a tomb in the grave yard taking up about an eighth of the screen near the middle of a shot is the only thing the eye has to latch on to... and he does this several times throughout the movie with different objects such as grave yard markers or crypt entrances. The final shot of the movie where the camera becomes just a circle on the screen surrounded by orange further enhances the shot where that kind of dark and light visibility was already going on in the frame... which is a nice moment, even though it’s the end.

The film, like a few of Rollin’s movies, doesn’t end well for the vampires but, at least in this one, the two main female leads survive and escape their vampiric fate which, well, I don’t remember Rollin’s films always ending this optimistically... although, if your sympathies are for the vampire and his hopeful cult, then I guess it possibly doesn’t. Like all of Rollin’s films, Requiem For A Vampire is, if nothing else, an absolutely beautiful, rich visual compendium of surreal and sexy, gothic hued imagery which, frankly, should be of interest to any cinephile worth their salt. Not one of my favourites but still a key work and certainly brilliant enough that I could watch it fairly regularly (I must have seen this one at least five times by now). And, to date (although there’s a beautiful Encore DVD set of this film which is also worth having, for just the packaging alone if nothing else), the US Redemption Blu Ray version is the best transfer available... so maybe give that one a go if you have a multizone machine.

Schoolgirl Hitchhikers

Gang Bling

Schoolgirl Hitchhikers
aka Jeunes filles impudiques
France 1973
Directed by Jean Rollin (as Michel Gentil)
Jezebel Films Blu Ray Zone B

Okay so, every so often, between making his beautiful, erotic, surrealistic visions of movies utilising vampires, zombies or other supernatural elements (which weren’t always as successful although, many I’m sure recognise most of them as masterpieces now), Rollin would be forced to supplement his income by making both hardcore and, as is the case here, softcore pornography films under various pseudonyms in order to raise funds for his next personal project. I’d never seen one of his ‘purely for the money’ works before but I couldn’t resist this lovely Blu Ray edition of Schoolgirl Hitchhikers put out by Jezebel FIlms when I was at a film fair a few years ago.

First, a word about the English language title of the movie. There are two leading female protagonists in the movie, Joëlle Coeur as Monica and Gilda Arancio as Jackie. Although one of them is wearing a schoolgirl style skirt at the opening of the movie, I don’t think it’s once suggested in the film that they are, in fact, schoolgirls and they are certainly over age to be considered as such (thankfully). Similarly, although Monica, in her voice over narrative, sets the scene by saying they are on a camping holiday together... the girls are just hiking through the woods to pitch a tent. They don’t once hitchhike throughout the entire movie so... yeah... the English translated title seems a bit off to me.

This films goes under the guise of pornography and there are a fair few sex scenes and the requisite nudity (of the softcore variety) is ever present but, it has to be said, the film’s somewhat cobbled together plot machinations to bring about sexy variants in the film are often concentrated on more than the actual sex scenes themselves, after around the half way mark.

Okay, so the film starts off with the girls stumbling across a fully furnished, abandoned villa in the forest and they go and check it out. They find a bed in there, strip off and start having sex. Just before the sex there’s a bizarre moment where they both stop to put on new pillow cases on the pillows and, yeah, I couldn’t work out what that was all about. Anyway, the girls go at it in a seductive, slow manner and then Monica seems to have a quite astonishingly distressed sounding orgasm due to almost zero provocation from Jackie (her hands or tongue seem to be nowhere near anything sexual at the time)... which did seem a bit odd to me. The film then also gets a tad boring when the girls get their second wind and I can quite see why that, as Rollin has said in interviews, he didn’t always stick around on the set when the sex scenes were being shot and just left that stuff to the AD.

Anyway, a guy called Fred, played by Rollin regular Willy Braque, turns up downstairs during the night. He’s a small time thief who is somehow using this fully furnished villa as his hideout. Monique discovers him downstairs so, just as you would expect in real life, the two start having sex. Halfway through and for no reason I could fathom, the logs in the fireplace ignite. I couldn’t work out if it was the metaphorical fury of their lovemaking which caused this fiery outburst from the dry wood (which seems unlikely due to the less than frantic pace of the actors in this scene) or whether one or other of them had unexplained superhero mutant powers which caused these logs to accompany them with their fiery fervor. I never found out but the logs do turn up blazing away in other shots too.

Predictably, Jackie then discovers the two and so, of course, she joins in for a threesome. And then the rest of the film plays out as follows...

The girls go off and pitch a tent nearby, the next morning. Then Fred’s female boss and her male associate arrive. They think the girls made off with their jewels which are somehow absent from the safe in the house... so Fred and the other geezah go out to look for the girls, who obviously must have stolen them. They find their tent and drug them unconscious to take back to the villa. Jackie is chained up in a very tame BDSM scene where they beat her with the cane and cut a load of her hair off, among other tortures. Monica seduces the other guy and conks him on the head to escape. She brings back a private detective and his busty secretary to the villa. When the villains arrive back on the scene there is a pitched gun battle. They recover Jackie but Monica is kidnapped and taken to the nearby Chinese pavilion for torture. Except Monica and Fred just have sex again instead, while the boss lady looks on voyeuristically from outside. The next morning, there are more shenanigans at the villa and, after a few changes in who has the upper hand (the villains or the detective and co) and some more, short lived seductions involving Monica and the secretary with different people, a real estate guy drives up and it’s revealed that he took the jewels all along, but they are fake. The bad guys and gals are arrested, while Monica and Jackie traipse off into the forest to frolic their way into more sexy adventures... the end.

Okay... so there’s maybe a bit more plot than usual for a softcore porn film but, honestly, I just think Rollin probably got bored. There are lots of things about the movie that do point to a master at work however. Such as the symmetry of the shots at the start (and, of course, it’s a duet of young lady female protagonists again... just like in pretty much all his work) and the way he is almost more interested in filming the architecture of the villa and the placement of the girls within it, rather than focusing on the sexier aspects of their characters.

The sequence in the ‘Chinese pavilion’ consists of a small chamber which has all different coloured glass panes around it and when the boss lady watches Fred and Monique have sex, their reclining bodies are split between two glass panels by an upright vertical frame which renders them both red and yellow within the same shot. The hue of the glass is also strong enough to completely change the colour of the lady’s striking, purple dress.

I also noticed that there are a lot more master shots and long shots used in the majority of the sex scenes... barring the first one. So less interest to cutting in to close up details and longer takes than you might expect from some porn films.

However, Rollin also hasn’t lost that preoccupation on the broader strokes of his compositions at the risk of losing focus of the details of a shot. For instance, when Jackie is chained in the house and menaced by the villains of the piece, there’s one cut to a close up where both the background details of the room have changed somewhat (I think it’s an insert shot filmed somewhere completely different) and her chains have somehow, temporarily transformed themselves into sturdy rope instead. I wonder if this is the remnants of another scene planned but left mostly unshot, within the body of the film.

All in all, though, I have to say I rather enjoyed Schoolgirl Hitchhikers for what it was. It’s a bit of tongue in cheek fun, it has to be said and, as a bonus... and presumably because he possibly couldn’t find a spare actor on the day... in the brief scenes with the estate agent, Jean Rollin himself turns up as that character. I can’t remember if I’ve seen him turn up in one of his films before but I have to say that, the film is filled with a couple of good actors and actresses and also a load of terrible ones and, it has to be said, Rollin’s performance here definitely singles him out as a terrible actor, it would seem. And that’s all I’ve got for you on this one. There are a few friends who I think I might recommend this to but it’s definitely a film where the audience has to be in the right frame of mind nowadays to humour the intentions of the cast and crew, it seems to me. However, I could think of a lot worse ways of raising money for your next ‘proper’ film, for sure.

Shiver Of The Vampires

Pointy Breasts Of Doom

Shiver Of The Vampires
aka Le Frisson Des Vampires
France 1971
Directed by Jean Rollin  
Redemption Blu Ray Zone A

It’s about time I revisited some of my old Jean Rollin favourites for this blog and Le Frisson Des Vampires is the third of his famous vampire movies, following The Rape Of The Vampire (reviewed here) and The Nude Vampire (reviewed here). And like those and many others in his oeuvre, it has a lot of the Rollin obsessions and trademarks running throughout the film. So lesbian/bisexual vampires who walk around either in a state of total undress or wearing completely see-through, diaphanous robes is absolutely the order of the day here. Also, there are two girls who are helping the vampires with their work in this one, as there are two brothers who have recently become ‘vamped up’, so to speak... so Rollin’s obsession with ‘two’, although not quite yet ‘twins’, is already very much a thing.

The film starts off with a monochromatic pre-credits sequence when the lover of the film’s two brothers, Isabelle (played by Nicole Nancel), organises two coffins being taken into their castle. This is followed by a black and white opening credits sequence depicting a graveyard with fog billowing out, with blood red letters over the top on the credits and with the crude but haunting, brittle, small scale guitar and percussion score by Acanthus, coming in to belt out the music which, throughout the film, is sometimes spot on and sometimes less so but which, despite its unusual nature, never quite fulfils the function of a good movie score it seems to me. It’s kinda catchy though, in places.

Then, the rest of the film is shot in colour, beginning with some nice frames of the castle and surrounding grounds. One of the strong points of the great, surrealist vampire movie maker Jean Rollin is that, like Mario Bava, pretty much all of his shot set ups and frame designs would make perfectly composed, still images. Despite often having less than adequate acting skills demonstrated by the majority of the performers in his films and, frankly, stories which are either too simplistic or way too convoluted to convey what they are about, Rollin’s beautiful visions of his Gothic and sexually curvy domains are always absolute perfection. They haunt the mind and provide more than enough eye candy to maintain the interest of even the most casual viewer, the visual images of his works becoming the raison d’etre for seeking out this great auteur.

The plot is fairly simple in this one but it’s not revealed to us all at once, rather (and this is kinda subtle for Rollin, I guess) it’s released in little pieces of information scattered throughout, with each reveal building on the last one to give us a picture of the whole story and its background. In short, the plot and course of the movie are as follows but, I make no apologies for spoilers because, for most of Rollin's work, the plot isn’t actually the point of the movie (as you will probably know if you’ve seen one) so the concept of spoilerage is rendered redundant. In a nutshell it’s this...

Two nameless brothers, played by Michel Delahaye and Jacques Robiolles, have been lifelong vampire hunters and spent many years of their life dedicated to this, with the assistance of their lover Isabelle and their two young, pretty nameless maids (the main ‘two’ of this movie), played by Marie-Pierre Castel and Kuelan Herce. However, the two brothers have been bitten and so commit suicide by driving stakes through their own hearts. The next day, a young man called Antoine (played by Jean-Marie Durand) and his new bride Isle (Isa in some prints, apparently, played by Sandra Julien), still in her wedding dress, drive to the castle to visit her uncles for the first part of her honeymoon... who are, of course, the two brothers in question. They learn they are dead but, sure enough, the two brothers are back on their feet in no time (vampicide by stake through the heart seems bizarrely unsuccessful here) and the household is now all enslaved to the vampire Isolde (played by Dominique), who has them doing the normal fiendishly vampire things and who turns up after sundown from random places such as, in one famous case, popping out from inside a grandfather clock. She kills Isabelle by hugging her when she’s wearing her big, spikes on the ends of her nipples. She also seduces Isle and has her under her spell over the few days it takes Antoine to figure out what’s really going on and attempting to get out of there with his wife. The whole thing ends up on Rollin’s favourite beach (which turns up in quite a lot of his movies and is almost a character itself) and the two brothers and the, by now, fully vamped up Isle are exposed to sunlight while she’s cavorting naked on the beach. Due to a lack of special effects budget, they wink out of existence in a jump cut rather than with anything more subtler.

But. like I said, the story in this one, as it does with pretty much every one of this director’s personal works (he directed a lot of porn films to finance his own projects), takes a back seat to the astonishing mise en scène of the piece. In this one, the colours are absolutely smashing and what he does in a lot of the exterior shots, when people are lingering in cemeteries or standing outside the big open doors of a castle or some other location, is to use large washes of colour lighting and then, quite often, pitch them against each other. So a graveyard may be completely bathed in red light as the characters walk through it or, sometimes, he’ll split the lightning between levels of the shot. So the foreground objects like the castle walls or grave markers may be in red but, the space behind the open door of the castle or the ground where the actors are performing behind the gravestones, might be bathed in a wash of blue light. It’s astonishing looking stuff and it’s not quite the same as what a colour god like Mario Bava or the older Kurosawa might have done (or even Dario Argento in a few of his movies) but, well, it more than holds its own and is uniquely Rollin... who should be recognised as one of the great cinema forces of colour these days, I think.

There’s also the usual stuff which you can just tell the director wasn’t interested in enough to fix... such as one of the crew members being completely visible in a mirror in one shot. Or the moment when Antoine rushes into Isle’s room and the camera whips around to find it empty and he rushes out, only... it’s not empty, you can see the arm and leg of an actress sitting in a chair who thought she was out of shot on the far right of the frame. Or the fact that one of the two maids, who is holding a candelabra full of lit candles, has had one of the candles go out but it’s magically alight again in the next shot. So, yeah, sloppy too but, honestly, the whole thing looks so stunning that I don’t think most people will care about these little errors here and there... Rollin obviously didn’t.

There are also some interesting shots attempted here... not all of them are successful but they are at least interesting. For example, a camera spins around a room full of five people from the centre of them who are arranged in a circle. The camera does a ‘more than 360 degree’ anti-clockwise turn as it pans around to the left and then stops as each person in turn says their next line of the conversation. 

Another unusual way of visually punctuating a conversation is seen when the two brothers are explaining the more acceptable parts of their back story to Isle and Antoine... when each one speaks he leans dramatically from his place on either left or right of the frame to appear in the centre of the frame... and then back out again as the other brother swoops in for his next line, etc. It’s forced looking and unnatural but, hey, it’s certainly interesting. A similar scene where the two brothers are emphasising their lines by using their hands to clock their conversation to tip the trays of a scale in their direction (a bit like fast chess players hitting their clocks to usher in their opponent) is quite a bit less successful but moments like these still lift the sequence and add another dimension to the shots. 

 Sometimes these elabourate set ups make no sense, such as when the brothers are circling a tied up Antoin who has been dumped on the floor... the camera takes the point of view of the camera which spins way more than 360 degrees around the set as the brothers walk around in a circle talking at him. Which looks fine until you remember that this means the bound man on the floor would have to be spinning around somehow to be making that POV shot work.

So there’s all this and, of course, the usual Rollin inserts of startling, arresting imagery, such as a burning coffin or, in the scene where the vampires dispose of Isabelle’s naked body by dumping her on her back in a nearby river, there’s a striking shot which in no way imitates but, is somehow still reminiscent of, the Millais painting Ophelia.

So, yeah, what more is there for me to say about Le Frisson Des Vampires. It’s a classic Jean Rollin piece with the usual naked vampire women, vibrant colours and attention grabbing, surrealistic, Gothic laced imagery... any cinephile worth their salt should be exposing themselves to his work but he still remains, to this day, somewhat out of the limelight for such an important and, probably, influential director. Miss these marvellous pieces of art at your peril, is what I say.

Le Viol Du Vampire (aka The Rape Of The Vampire)

Lady And The Vamp

Le Viol Du Vampire
(aka The Rape Of The Vampire)
France 1968 Directed by Jean Rollin
Redemption Blu Ray Zone A

There were already riots happening in Paris when Le Viol Du Vampire, Jean Rollin’s first feature length film, was released in pretty much the only cinema left showing anything in town. Like the critical reception of Dali and Bunuel’s Un Chien Andelou, the film was met with taunts, jeers, death threats and a generally negative and incredibly violent reaction from the public. Rollin says that there was a riot in one of the screenings but whether this was due to the overall atmosphere in France at the time or because of the perceived incomprehensibility of this film is anyone’s guess. I suspect it’s a combination of the two, to be honest.

The film is the one I come back to the most, every decade or so, out of this amazing director’s oeuvre of astonishing, vampiric motion picture art and I suspect the audiences at the time, who were presumably being fed on an diet of imported British Hammer Horror films and their nearest equivalent, were just not ready for something as uncompromisingly surreal (to an extent) and, frankly, as badly acted as what they were shown.

It’s funny, no matter how many times I’ve watched this over the years on varying different prints on various different ‘this is the best one yet’ transfers of those prints, I’ve always thought the film as completely incomprehensible. However, I can’t think why now because, when I rewatched this recently for this review, the whole thing really made a lot of sense to me, to be honest.

The film is split into two parts comprising a short film about two guys and a girl wanting to cure four local women of the delusion that they are centuries old vampires. However, Rollin realised that this could be expanded into a feature and so he use the idea of a second chapter, like the various serials he adored, to shoot a another part with more or less the same cast later. When everyone in is dead in that first part, the second chapter (where most of these characters return from their dead status), which is much longer, picks up the story and introduces the striking features of Jacqueline Sieger as The Vampire Queen who is experimenting on bringing dead people back to life but, unbeknownst to her, her human surgeon who wants to marry one of her underlings is working on his own cure for vampirism.

The film is, I think, the only one of Rollin’s features (at least that I’ve seen) which was shot in black and white. He usually has some interesting colours in his movies but even in this, you can see how his eye for 'the perfect shot' is never lacking. This is a beautiful looking film full of sublime and surreal imagery (if not as surreal in plotting, as is often vocalised). Rollin employed no actual actors in this and, like it does in a lot of his other films... this really shows. Honestly, the acting in this is worse than you can possibly imagine but, the thing about Rollin is, it’s about the beauty of the imagery and the way those actors interact with each other and their environment that’s the reason for watching these. They really are like exquisitely composed paintings brought to life... the acting may be dire but, like some of the films of Dario Argento, it really can’t ruin the overall artistry on display here. This is one of my favourite Rollin films and for good reason.

Right from the start we encounter the rich and provocative imagery that Rollin is known for. A woman in a diaphanous white dress is standing against a tree while a bat sucks the blood from the top of her bosom. And Rollin starts as he means to go on with various interesting compositions showing, in this case, a heck of a lot of vertical shapes splitting off sections. So frames will be filled with an abundance of graveyard crosses, candlesticks and a load of skittles on the grass. Even the locations he films are full of uprights, like the groynes of the beach which was to feature in many of his future movies... or the poles and trees along the road which threaten to split up the perspective of the shot as cars and people roam from one rectangular section to another.

And, of course there’s the vampire queen herself and that wonderful shot of her licking the blood off the big curved knife she has just used on someone, like a cat with cream. For some reason, the ladies in these pictures never seem to wear many clothes and in this one, there’s always a breast or two popping loose from the thinly fastened or draped veils they wear. It seems impractical some of the time, such as when the vampire queen rides around the countryside with her breasts on show from the back of an open top car but it looks fantastic and so I think it’s fair to say that Rollin is always more than happy to abandon the practical elements of a tale in favour of the visual poetry of a shot.

Another thing he does... and I’ve seen this done in a few Japanese things too over the years, as a way of highlighting an important emotional beat of a story, is this. He will cut to the same kind of action in a different location or situation, sometimes three or four at once, to give weight to their place in the scheme of things. So when a vampire girl knocks over a skittle on some grass in long shot, we cut to a close up of the skittle being knocked over on the beach. Or when a vampire girl is flogged and subjected to sunlight (which seems to not make a jot of a difference to some of the vampires in the film), we see her undergoing things simultaneously as if they are happening all at once, which, to be fair given the timescale being explored, they probably are. These aren’t montages to shorthand a specific passing time shift like you see in most American movies... these are shifting in space and highlighting a less practical intertextuality, where moments of cinematic time are given more weight through the exploration of a different way of looking at things simultaneous to actual events. I’ve seen this happen in a few anime or anime inspired films over the last couple of decades.

One thing that I only twigged this time around, though, is that one of the actors in the first section... and I’ve no idea which as he’s just listed as one of the villagers... is played by Philippe Druillet. Druillet, of course, is a key French comic book and graphic novel artist and writer (and inker and colourer) whose work I used to occasionally catch in the Heavy Metal comic magazine in the late 1970s and early 1980s (which was the American edition of Métal Hurlant). So that’s new to me and I wonder, since Rollin would often take to writing novels and comic books when he couldn’t get his films produced, if they were good friends and colleagues in those kinds of professions too.

Not much else to say on this one for me, I think. Le Viol Du Vampire is an absolutely brilliant movie and it just gets better and, sadly, more comprehensible the more I watch it. The sometimes cool and sometimes grating jazz atonalism aesthetic of the soundtrack by  Yvon Géraud and François Tusques sometimes helps and sometimes almost hinders the atmosphere that Rollin is trying for but, like the acting, it doesn’t really manage to sabotage the general aesthetic too much. Despite this film not being in colour, this movie is an excellent jumping on point for the cinema of Jean Rollin as it demonstrates quite clearly the way he manages to mix some horrendously awful, performances from the actors with some truly breathtaking, gorgeously surreal and sometimes erotic imagery on screen. About the only key thing missing in this one is his obsession with having twin vampire girls as the main protagonists but... that would come fairly soon. If you’re looking for a typical Rollin film to see, if you are able to juggle the negative and tremendously positive factors of his creations, then this is the one to go for. I must return to it quicker next time.

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.

Fascination - The Celluloid Dreams of Jean Rollin

Rollin Thunder

Fascination - The Celluloid Dreams of Jean Rollin
by David Hinds Headpress
ISBN: 978-1-909394-23-0

In all honesty, I wasn’t expecting a great deal from David Hinds surprisingly excellent book Fascination - The Celluloid Dreams of Jean Rollin... especially after ordering what I thought must be a thick, coffee table book and finding out when it arrived that, for the quite hefty price tag, it was a little paperback with only black and white pictures peppered about out here and there. However, as soon as I started reading it I found myself immersed in a look at Rollin’s work that, while not exactly exhaustive (and that’s understandable given the lack of availability of certain areas of this director’s work), does offer up some real insight into the cinema output of this famous French auteur which I had not, in some cases, considered in my own evaluations of Rollin’s work.

If you are not familiar with the films of Jean Rollin, he’s responsible for a body of personal work (I’ll get on to the other stuff in a minute) which is, mostly, about naked vampire women who tend to exist in unclear narratives which, while sometimes amateur in comparison to the production values found in a lot of other arms of the cinema, tend to offer up truly amazing moments of startling and surreal imagery that will usually linger in the memory way after the film has been watched. Starting with Rollin’s first feature Le Viol Du Vampire: Un Mélodrame en Deux Parties (aka The Rape Of The Vampire: A Two Part Melodrama) in 1967, Rollin has been presenting somewhat iconoclastic productions which have left him an outsider of the critical malaise left in the wake of his screenings. Even with his great start (depending on how you look at it) in having riots in the cinema with chairs being smashed and even, in at least one case, personal attacks on the street as a reaction to Le Viol  Du Vampire... in much the same general reaction that audiences had to Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou back in 1929.

The author does a smart thing with such a large body of work as this director has produced, especially considering not much of his stuff, relatively, has been made easily available (some stuff is just completely impossible to get hold of... especially his later work). After a pretty cool introduction which includes his own entry point reminiscence into the world of Jean Rollin, he splits the book into three main sections (plus a few minor sections to cover things like Rollin’s short stories). The first, largest section is the one which will be of interest, I suspect, to most fans of his work. This deals with what he calls Rollin’s ‘personal films’... aka the ones the director actually wanted to make (with a determination in the face of continual hospital trips when he was trying to direct, in some cases) and which best express his intent. Films like his aforementioned debut and other Rollin classics such as La Vampire Nue (The Nude Vampire), Le Frisson Des Vampires (The Shiver Of The Vampires), Lèvres De Sang (Lips Of Blood), La Morte Vivant (The Living Dead Girl) and, of course, Fascination, are all included in here along with a host of others of this most important skein of his work and it’s mainly what this book is all about. Each film has the technical details, followed by a synopsis of the content and then an analysis of the key themes and critical reception of the film. Each little film subsection is also topped off with a quite useful round up by the author of the DVD or Blu Ray editions of the movie in question and which are the best ones to get, with details as to how censored they are in each version. Which is always helpful when you are reading books like this.

Hinds hits the nail on the head when speaking of the gothic element present in the director’s works. He compares Rollin to another cinematic auteur, Tim Burton, explaining that while Burton’s films are styled into the gothic by way of visually creating a spot on environment to do such a job, Rollin approaches a very strong gothic sensibility by another route. If Burton overplays the gothicism in the imagery, Rollin lets the gothic inhabit his world by a sense of the past creeping into these films until it dominates the tone of the rest of the movie. So he’ll start off in a modern world, for instance, like the two lady clowns involved in the car chase/shoot out opening at the start of Requiem Pour Un Vampire (Requiem For A Vampire) but the two girls (almost always two in those Rollin films, of course, being a somewhat recurring motif in his films and novels) soon stumble into a wordless narrative of ancient castle ruins and crumbling graveyards and it is within that environment that they (and we) spend the rest of the movie. It seems to be a common them in the majority (not quite all) of Rollin’s more personal cinematic delights and you will notice it as soon as you start thinking about the plots of many of his movies. La Rose De Fer (The Iron Rose), for example, where two lovers in a modern environment soon journey to an ‘olde worlde’ style gothic cemetery from which they can find no escape and are doomed to remain there for the rest of their lives.

The writer talks about this and other Rollin obsessions which make their way out into the world under the guise of his movies such as that stretch of beach at Dieppe which turns up in so many of his movies or the fact that the protagonists in pretty much all of his works, male and female alike, are ultimately doomed and bound to end the film in tragedy. However, since Hinds interviewed a fair few sources over the long gestation period from when he started writing this more than a decade ago, when Rollin was still alive (and interviewed by Hinds), and last year’s publication date, after the great director had shuffled off this mortal coil to join the endless parade of nubile vampires who we hope were waiting for him... he also gets a lot of interesting behind the scenes facts in here. So we get stories such as having to shoot scenes while held at gunpoint for the filming of Les Démoiaques (The Demoniacs), for example, or the awkward, less than agreeable actress who was tied to the burning boat for the end scenes of the same film and almost ended up drowning. All the good stuff is in this tome.

Another section of the book called Also Known As - The Pseudonymous Films tells of the movies he made for other people with not much interest or creative input from himself, often under an assumed name. So films such as Le Lac Des Morts Vivants (Zombie Lake) and Emmanuelle 6 are listed here, with much the same dedication to detail that the author followed in the prior section about the director’s unmistakably ‘auteur’ works. This is then followed by a less detailed section, mostly just quick technical details of each film only, of the director’s ‘other’ job as a sometimes hardcore pornography director. I actually do own one of these, an uncut La Comtesse Ixe but, alas, I haven’t had time to watch it yet since I picked it up from a Film Fair a couple of years ago. I will get around to reviewing it at some point, though. This is then followed by a small section detailing his short movies and, finally two interviews, one of a transcript of a conversation the writer conducted with Rollin himself and another with frequent Rollin collaborator/producer Lionel Wallmann.

All in all, I’m really quite pleased that I picked this one up because, despite my disappointment in finding that it was not a lavishly illustrated coffee table book filled with rare colour stills, it’s actually a treasure trove of information and it’s also rather good, I suspect, for people who are only just beginning to cotton onto this director’s work... because it tells you just which films you can ignore and which ones are not worth getting into (although, I confess, that two or three of this writer’s favourite Rollin films are actually my least favourite of this director’s truly startling output. I was a bit disappointed that the hardcore films were not treated with the same enthusiasm as the director’s more familiar works but I do appreciate, as I said before, that these can be extremely hard to get a hold of with little interest being given by 'home cinema' labels to find and restore these things. All in all, though, this proves to be an unexpected gem which should find its way into the consciousness of any admirer of the cinema of Jean Rollin and a worthy addition, as far as I’m concerned, to the NUTS4R2 library.

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.