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.

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.