Dracula's Fiancee (2002)

Dracula's Fiancee (La fiancée de Dracula) was one of Jean Rollin’s last films, made at a time when serious health problems meant that there were long gaps between his movies. These late movies don’t get as much attention as his earlier vampire and zombie movies and this is a pity. These late movies represent a distinctive phase in his career which in its own way is every bit as interesting as the earlier phases.

Two men, an elderly professor and his much younger assistant Eric, are trying to track down the Master. In a conventional vampire movie we would assume that these are the good guys and that the Professor is a Van Helsing analogue. In a Rollin vampire film we should be very careful about jumping to such conclusions. The Professor believes that the key to finding the Master is a woman named Isabelle. Isabelle (Cyrille Gaudin) is a madwoman confined in a convent. Her madness has infected the nuns and they’re all quite insane.

The Master is in fact Dracula.

The Professor is told that the Parallels have the answer. The Parallels represent a new element in Rollin’s ever-shifting vampire mythology. The Parallels are monsters. There’s the dwarf court jester Triboulet, the Vampire, the Ogress, the She-Wolf (played by the always wonderful Brigitte Lahaie) and others. The Parallels have their own reasons for seeking the Master.

Others are looking for the Master.

Isabelle is destined to be Dracula’s bride. Whether Dracula survives, whether he currently exists in our reality, whether he exists in another universe entirely or whether he exists only in an imaginary universe remains unclear. What will happen if the marriage between Dracula and Isabelle goes ahead? We eventually get the answer but it’s not the kind of straightforward answer most people would like.

Most vampire movies draw their inspiration, directly or indirectly, from Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 novel Carmilla or from Stoker’s Dracula but not Rollin. In his vampire movies he creates whole new vampire mythologies. And he created several totally distinct vampire mythologies. The vampire mythology of The Nude Vampire is radically different from the vampire mythology of Requiem for a Vampire or Fascination.

When he returned to the vampire film with his superb 1997 Two Orphan Vampires he did it again, with a mythology based on the pop culture of the past that he loved so much. The two blind orphan vampire girls inhabit a world created out of adventure fiction, 19th century French serial fiction, comics, children’s books and old movie serials. Whether they simply inhabit this world or whether they themselves have created it is an open question. The two girls understand nothing of what the rest of us think of as reality.

Amazingly with Dracula's Fiancee, so late in his career, he does it yet again. Even though there’s a Dracula in the story the movie has no connection with Stoker’s Dracula (in fact the the use of the name Dracula may have been forced on Rollin by distributors for commercial reasons). This is the strange world of the Parallels. As with all of Rollin’s mythologies you will have to decide just how imaginary this world might be and whether it has any connection with reality.

We might be dealing with a parallel universe or with the world of the imagination, or perhaps the world of madness. Or is it the world of art and literature? Is this universe more real or less real than the reality most of us take for granted.

Two Orphan Vampires deals with similar themes but in a different way, as does Rollin’s very underrated and very neglected Lost in New York. Rollin had played with such themes many times but always with interesting variations. If a theme interested him he would look for different ways to approach it.

Like Two Orphan Vampires this movie showcases Rollin’s fascination with fairy tales and the gothic.

Rollin is often misunderstood by those who expect vampire movies to be horror movies. Rollin only ever made two movies that can truly be described as horror movies (The Grapes of Death and The Living Dead Girl) and even those two films are hardly conventional horror films. Rollin’s movies belong to the genre the French call the fantastique which combines science fiction, fantasy, horror, gothic and thriller elements with healthy doses of the surreal and the world of fairy tales in an intoxicating and playful (and very French) way and also combines artiness with pop culture.

There are no twinned girls in this movie but there are plenty of other classic Rollin elements. There is a clown (a jester being a species of clown). There are girls in filmy see-through nightdresses, almost naked and yet not naked. There is an obsession with clocks. There is his famous beach at Dieppe. There are ruins. There are vampires, but each Rollin vampire movies offers a different type of vampire. Some really are vampires. Some might be actual vampires. As always Rollin provides us with more questions than answers.

I’m learning to like Rollin’s late movies very much indeed. In some ways he was returning to his surrealist roots but it’s not quite the surrealism of his early movies. These late movies have a kind of magical vibe. At times they resemble the Latin American literary genre magic realism. There’s no attempt to explain the magical elements. And the line between dream and reality becomes steadily more blurred. Dracula's Fiancee is highly recommended.

Redemption have released this movie on Blu-Ray. The transfer is excellent. And as an extra they have included the absolutely wonderful Lost in New York making this Blu-Ray a must-buy.

Night of the Hunted (1980) Blu-Ray review

By the late 70s Jean Rollin was starting to feel that perhaps he had exhausted the vampire genre. He had made a series of wildly unconventional surrealist vampire vampires and that cycle of films would come to an end in 1979 with the superb Fascination. He was also disillusioned by the commercial failure of Lips of Blood. Between 1978 and 1982 he made three extraordinarily interesting and unusual movies, The Grapes of Death (1978), Night of the Hunted (1980) and The Living Dead Girl (1982). The Grapes of Death and The Living Dead Girl are horror movies and they’re zombie movies, although they’re not like anyone else’s zombie movies. He also made The Escapees about this time, a movie that has thematic similarities to Night of the Hunted.

Night of the Hunted (the original French title was La Nuit des Traquées) is not quite a horror movie. It’s not quite a zombie movie, but it has close thematic links to The Living Dead Girl. It’s a science fiction film, of sorts. And, being a Jean Rollin movie, it’s an exercise in subtle surrealism.

In 1978 Rollin had begin his filmic association with Brigitte Lahaie. Miss Lahaie was a very successful nude model and porn star (making both softcore and hardcore movies). Rollin thought she had potential. He thought she had an intriguing screen presence and plenty of charisma. And he was right. She went on to make quite a few non-porn movies but her superb performance as Elisabeth in Night of the Hunted is the highlight of her acting career.

This movie’s origins are intriguing. A producer asked Rollin to do a hardcore film. Rollin told him that for the same minuscule budget he could make a proper movie. The producer agreed. With $40,000 Rollin shot Night of the Hunted in ten days.

The movie begins with a girl running along the road, dressed in a nightgown. We will find out that her name is Elisabeth. Robert (Alain Duclos) picks her up and takes her back to his apartment. She is clearly frightened and confused. She is running away from something but she cannot tell Robert what she is running away from. She cannot tell him where she lives.

Robert is a good-natured guy. He wants to help her but he doesn’t know where to start. Elisabeth knows where to start. She wants to make love. She needs to make love. That’s the only thing she is sure about.

Robert leaves for work the next morning and a man and a woman show up. She is told that the man is her doctor. They are going to take her home. They take her to a huge modernist building. Elisabeth is told that she shares an apartment with Catherine (Cathy Stewart). She doesn’t recognise Catherine and Catherine doesn’t recognise her.

Catherine also has no memories. They live in a tower building referred to as the Black Tower. All the people there have the same problem. They are losing their memory. They are becoming mindless zombies.

Elisabeth has not lost her humanity completely (unlike some of the inhabitants of the Black Tower). She still has emotions. She cares about Catherine. She also cares about Véronique (Dominique Journet). She doesn’t remember her but she thinks they had been friends. Elisabeth makes plans to escape. Véronique had accompanied her the last time she escaped. Elisabeth intends that the three of them - Véronique, Catherine and herself - will escape together.

But escape is not easy, and the attempt will have unexpected consequences.

At times this movie is just slightly reminiscent of Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville in its use of stark modernist architecture as a science fiction setting, and its use of modernism as something remote and alienating.

The Black Tower is neither a prison nor an apartment block nor a hospital, or perhaps it’s all three. It’s an incredibly stark setting and the visuals in this movie are bleak and colourless, and deliberately so.

The performances are generally effective. Lahaie is the standout. She really is superb. It’s sad and very moving performance.

The sex scene between Elisabeth and Robert is fairly explicit but it’s absolutely necessary. Indeed it’s a crucial scene. Elisabeth is losing touch with her own humanity. She is becoming something less than human. She desperately wants something human to cling to, some intense human experience. And human experiences don’t come much more intense than sex. It’s one of the most touching sex scenes you’ll ever see. And it’s desperately sad. Elisabeth’s pleasure is intense. For that moment she is human again. She is a woman again. But her joy is fleeting. She had hoped that the sex would be something so intense that she would not forget it. But she forgets everything that happens to her within a few minutes.

Rollin does not make the mistake of explaining what is happening at the beginning. He lets us piece things together. Elisabeth has no memories. None at all. Five minutes after Robert introduces himself to her she has forgotten his name or how she came to be in his apartment. We gradually figure out some of what is happening. The eventual explanation is perhaps the only disappointing thing about the movie.

There’s a lot of nudity and a lot of sex. Additional much more graphic sex scenes were also shot by Rollin. He was keeping his options open. There was always the possibility the film would be recut as a softcore sex film (although it would have mystified the audience for such movies). A version with hardcore insets was later released although Rollin wanted no connection with that version.

Night of the Hunted was savaged by critics (who entirely failed to understand it) and flopped at the box office. That was perhaps inevitable. This is a very bleak movie. It’s also a weird kind of love story, but in a way that would hardly draw mass audiences in.

Night of the Hunted remains one of Rollin’s most fascinating movies, with an extraordinary and powerful ending. Very highly recommended.

Lips of Blood (1975)

Lips of Blood (Lèvres de sang), released in 1975, marks the end of the first phase of Jean Rollin’s career as a director. This was the period in which Rollin tried to combine unconventional erotic horror with full-blooded surrealism. It’s the most interesting phase of his career.

For a while it seemed as though the financial failure of Lips of Blood would more or less end his career and this his only future would be churning out adult movies. He had a rethink and then bounced back in 1978 with Grapes of Death, which began a much more overtly commercial period.

There were various reasons for Lips of Blood box-office failure. It appeared at a time when X-rated movies were all the rage in France and the softcore erotic horror of Rollin and similar film-makers was of little interest to distributors. The movie also had a very troubled production history, with Rollin forced to work with an unenthusiastic and unco-operative crew.

Rollin co-wrote the script with the film’s star Jean-Loup Philippe. Rollin considered it to be the best script he ever filmed. In retrospect Lips of Blood is one of his best movies, a dream-like poetic vision.

The movie starts with a prologue, with a body being put into a coffin which is sealed in a room. The body is shrouded but does not appear to be dead. The significance of this prologue will not become clear until late in the movie.

A young man, Frederick (Jean-Loup Philippe), sees a photograph of an old ruin. It triggers an odd disturbing poignant childhood memory. Or does it? Frederick is sure he has never seen this ruined chateau before, but the memory is so vivid. The truth is that there are gaps in Frederick’s memories of his childhood.

Perhaps if he can find the photographer he will be able to find the chateau. The photographer tells him that she has been paid a lot of money to keep that information from him. But, if he meets her at the Aquarium at midnight, she might tell him.

The meeting at the Aquarium is a beautifully shot scene and it begins the movie’s plunge into an increasingly dream-like mood. Frederick finds it difficult to distinguish between reality, illusion, dream and memory. The memories might be true, or they might be false.

He remembers a young girl at the chateau. He was wandering lost. He was twelve at the time. She was a teenager. He developed a crush on her, as 12-year-old boys are wont to do. But his mother is evasive when he asks her about the incident now.

After the meeting at the Aquarium Frederick is pursued by a man with a gun, the pursuit being a series of strange transitions of settings.

And then the vampire girls appear. Four vampire girls. Including the Castel twins, always a bonus in a Rollin vampire movie.

Rollin was always obsessed with the past and in this movie the hero has to unravel a mystery from his own past. He does eventually do so. We do get an explanation towards the end. And then the movie takes another turn into the fantastic and the surreal with a typically poetic Rollin ending.

Rollin was definitely a surrealist but you can’t appreciate his movies unless you know something about his other obsessions. One of these obsessions could be called vintage pop fiction. Rollin loved the feuilleton, the cheap sometimes trashy always breathlessly exciting serial stories that were so hugely popular in 19th century France. Rollin was no arid intellectual. He was an intellectual, but one with a taste for the pleasures of pop culture.

His vampire movies are horror movies, but don’t expect to be terrified or confronted by buckets of blood. Rollin liked vampires because he liked the idea of the past and the present being hopelessly intertwined and vampires by their nature exist outside of time. Time has no meaning to a vampire. And Rollin also liked vampires because they were mysterious and romantic and poetic. If you compare this movie to vampire movies made by other European directors at the time, such as Jess Franco’s Female Vampire and Jose Larraz’s Vampyres (both great movies) it’s obvious that Rollin approached vampires in a very different way.

This is a movie about searching. Searching for the past, for memories, for identity, for meaning, for love. It’s both melancholy and strangely romantic.

This certainly qualifies as erotic horror. There’s an amount of female frontal nudity. But it’s part of the texture of the movie - Frederick’s memories are amalgams of lost love and eroticism. The vampires in this film are not particularly scary or evil but they are very erotic. From the time that the vampire first appeared in European literature (in Coleridge’s poem Christabel in 1797) eroticism was implicit in vampirism. Vampires symbolise both life and death and eroticism is the key to life.

The Redemption Blu-Ray offers a lovely transfer. Extras include a very brief introduction by Rollin, an informative interview with his frequent collaborator Natalie Perrey and excellent liner notes by Tim Lucas.

Lips of Blood is Rollin at his best. Very highly reommended.

Jeunes filles impudiques (AKA Schoolgirl Hitchhikers, 1973)

Jeunes filles impudiques is one of the softcore movies Jean Rollin made in the early 70s, because even film-makers have to eat. In English-speaking markets it was given the title Schoolgirl Hitchhikers although there are no schoolgirls in it and properly speaking no hitchhikers either. But it is the kind of title that distributors of exploitation movies tend to like.

These movies are often contemptuously dismissed even by keen Rollin fans. In the case of Bacchanales Sexuelles, made a year later, that’s rather unfair. Bacchanales Sexuelles is quite an interesting movie and it has plenty of Rollinesque touches and the sort of surrealist vibe that Rollin fans love so much. Jeunes filles impudiques is perhaps not quite so ambitious.

Monique (Joëlle Coeur) and Jackie (Gilda Arancio) are on a hiking trip in the woods. They come across an abandoned villa which seems like the ideal place to spend the night. Much more comfortable than sleeping in a tent. It might have been wise to check first, to make sure the villa really was abandoned, but the girls were too anxious to engage in some hot bedroom action with each other to waste time on such precautions.

In fact the villa is occupied, by gangster Fred (Willy Braque).

The girls are not too worried when they discover they’re not alone in the house. They introduce themselves to Fred, by immediately having sex with him. That’s always a good way to break the ice in awkward social situations.

The three of them have a lot of fun and the following morning the girls leave, to resume their camping trip.

There is however a complication. Fred’s boss Béatrice (Marie Hélène Règne) shows up. She’s come to collect the stolen jewels stashed in the safe. But when the safe is opened the jewels are gone. The gangsters jump to the obvious conclusion that the two girls stole the jewels. Fred sets off in pursuit.

Catching the girls is easy. Béatrice tortures Jackie but can’t get any information out of her. Jackie denies any knowledge of the whereabouts of the jewels.

Béatrice is the sort of woman who likes torturing girls. She never goes anywhere without her trusty cane. Meanwhile Monique makes her escape and sets off to fetch help. For some inexplicable reason she doesn’t go to the police, she goes to a private detective named Harry (Pierre Julien).

Harry regards her story with scepticism but he can’t afford to refuse a client, and Monique seems like a nice girl. He’d like to help her. He thinks the gangsters (assuming they exist) have probably left but they might come back. So he’ll stake out the villa. In fact three of them - Monique, Harry and Harry’s pretty young female secretary (played by Reine Thirion) - will be in on the stake-out. Harry has a gun, as does his secretary (she acts more as his partner than his secretary and she knows how to handle a gun).

The gangsters do return and things get complicated. Just about everybody (good guys and bad guys alike) ends up being taken hostage at some point.

It’s played strictly for fun. It’s more like a classical farce than a hardboiled crime thriller. And it is fun.

Marie Hélène Règne’s performance as Béatrice is spot on - she plays her as a sinister sexy kinky melodrama villainess which is exactly the way she needed to be played.

Joëlle Coeur made several movies for Rollin and she’s very good. The acting overall is effective, once you understand that the whole thing is not meant to be taken seriously.

Rollin himself plays a minor rôle.

There’s a lot of gunplay including a full-scale shootout that wouldn’t be out of place in a western. But nobody gets hurt. This is a good-natured movie.

Jeunes filles impudiques achieved its objective. It made a lot of money and got Rollin back on his feet financially.

It’s a movie that offers some action, a lot of light comedy, lots of nudity and lots of simulated sex. The fact that the three actresses who disrobe - Joëlle Coeur, Gilda Arancio and Reine Thirion - are very hot doesn’t hurt. And Rollin makes the sex scenes genuinely erotic - these people really do convince us that their characters are having a good time.

The Maison Rouge Blu-Ray offers an acceptable transfer although there is some very slight print damage.

If you want to check out Rollin’s softcore films then Bacchanales Sexuelles is a better place to start since it feels more like a real Rollin movie (and it really is worth seeing). But Jeunes filles impudiques is enjoyable as silly sexy fun. Recommended.

Lost in New York (1989)

Jean Rollin’s Lost in New York (Perdues dans New York) can be seen as a precursor to his excellent movie Two Orphan Vampires (1997).

With his health failing Rollin turned to novel-writing in the 90s, with some success. In 1993 he published Little Orphan Vampires, a kind of surreal fantasy/horror fairy tale about two blind vampire girls. He went on to write a series of further novels about the blind vampire girls. Rollin was a huge fan of the French movie serials of the early 20th century and also of the 19th century and early 20th century pulp fiction serial stories known as feullitons.

You can see him already exploring very similar themes in Lost in New York.

An old woman, Michelle, is remembering her past. She is remembering a time when was a young girl and she met another little girl, even younger, a girl named Marie. Yes, this is a Rollin film so we’re going to get two girls who are in some mystical way doubles. Marie has a magic talisman, an image of the moon goddess. She also has a collection of adventure books. Marie tells Michelle they can enter the world of these books.

The girls can enter the worlds of adventure and fantasy fiction and movies.

Rollin throws in references to movies which are presumably personal favourites. They’re certainly the sorts of movies one can imagine that Rollin would love, movies like Fritz Lang’s Moonfleet. Also, interestingly enough, he references Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock. It had never occurred to me before but Picnic at Hanging Rock really is a very Rollinesque movie - the obsession with time, a group of young girls, the subtle surrealism and the equally subtle eroticism, and the touches of horror and the hints of the supernatural or the paranormal or perhaps of other realities. And of course the notion of time as being less straightforward than most people suppose.

Rollin also gets self-referential, with lots of mentions of his earlier movies.

The talisman is sacred to the moon goddess.The girls decide that with the aid of the talisman the moon goddess can take them anywhere they want to go. It can also take them to other times. It could for example take them to New York. And it does. But is it the real New York? Whether it’s the real New York or a different New York the girls are there now but they cannot find each other.

We get introduced to the lady vampire who stalks the streets of New York.

Can the girls find each other? Is Michelle inside Marie’s dream or is Marie inside Michelle’s dream? Are they sharing the same dream? Is it a dream? Can we really say what is dream and what is not.

There is some doubt as to whether we’re dealing with an old woman dreaming of her childhood, or two children dreaming of old age. The past and the present may both exist at the same time.

And there’s Rollin’s famous beloved beach at Dieppe.

And there’s the nude black woman. The two little girls are magic girls. Maybe the black woman is magical as well.

Whether there is any real magic here or just imagination can be debated. And after all this is a movie and movies are not real, although maybe (like art and books) they’re more real than the real. And the two girls are just characters in a movie. Or maybe they’re characters in a story which takes place within a movie. This is to some extent a movie about movies and books, and about stories.

One might also suggest that this is a movie about the particular qualities of the female imagination. At the risk of sounding New Age-ish I might even suggest it’s about a particularly female kind of magic.

This is not a horror movie in any way, even with the inclusion of a vampire.

If you’ve seen Two Orphan Vampires or read Little Orphan Vampires (and if you haven't you should read it) the parallels with this movie will be striking. Rollin has created a mythology, a world in which reality and popular fiction and fantasy are equally real. Or equally unreal. The world of the imagination cannot be dismissed as unreal. Books and movies create their own reality which we can enter.

Apparently Lost in New York came about when Rollin accepted an assignment to shoot some footage in New York for a French TV movie. Being a good low-budget film-maker he wasn’t going to pass up such an opportunity so he shot some footage for himself. He had no idea at that stage what he was going to use the footage for but some some later he came up with the idea for Lost in New York.

Rollin never stood still as a film-maker. He returned to certain themes and images obsessively but he kept developing and refining those ideas. In his late work (from the mid-80s onwards) he’s not just rehashing his earlier films. He’s taking themes he’s used before but doing subtle different things with them. Late Rollin doesn’t get as much attention as early Rollin but it’s just as interesting.

Redemption have included this movie as an extra in their Blu-Ray release of Dracula's Fiancee (La fiancée de Dracula). The transfer is quite reasonable.

Lost in New York is an odd, haunting, poetic little movie. It’s very very Rollinesque and it’s highly recommended.

Killing Car (1993)

Killing Car (La femme dangereuse) is a late Jean Rollin film and it’s quite different in many respects from his earlier vampire and zombie movies.

In 1993 Jean Rollin had some money in his pocket. He had about enough to buy himself a cup of coffee and a couple of croissants but he decided to do without the coffee and croissants and use the money to make a movie instead. This is what being a film-maker is all about. If you have no money but you have talent and determination you just go ahead and make the movie. Jean-Luc Godard once said that to make a movie all you need is a girl and a gun. In this case Rollin had a girl, a gun and a car.

The girl is known only as the Car Woman. She’s played by Australian-born Tiki Tsang. Sadly it’s her only film credit.

The movie opens in a junk yard where a sleazy scrap dealer is trying to sell an American car. He thinks that an Asian woman (Tiki Tsang) might be interested in the car but she has other ideas. She strips off her top, he embraces her, she shoots him.

The scrap dealer’s girlfriend isn’t happy about this and she has a gun as well. A gun battle ensues. The girlfriend enlists the help of a group of whores. Thus being a Jean Rollin film the junk yard just happens to be next door to a fun fair so there’s a running gun battle in the fun fair. I love this movie already.

The crazy beginning is vaguely reminiscent of the surreal opening sequence of Rollin’s Requiem for a Vampire (and I’m pretty certain that it was intended to remind us of his earlier movie). Logically it doesn’t make sense but we’re dealing with the logic of surrealism. And all of Rollin’s movies, even in the case of Killing Car where there’s a superficial feel of grittiness, are exercises in cinematic surrealism. In Killing Car the surrealism is subtle but it’s there.

The Car Woman kills some more people. At each murder scene she leaves behind a toy car. That’s the only clue the cops have. It’s a vital clue, it’s the key to the whole mystery, but the police are baffled as to what it means. Eventually its significance will be revealed but the Car Woman’s motivations remain slightly mysterious.

She kills remorselessly. She’s like a machine.

What’s even more baffling is that there is no obvious connection between any of the victims. Perhaps she’s a serial killer, driven by some weird kink. But she isn’t. There’s a reason for her killing. It’s obviously revenge, but this is not a straightforward revenge killing movie.

Tiki Tsang’s performance works for me. She doesn’t do a great deal and she has very little dialogue but she has screen presence and she has the look - the look of a crazy chick who kills without mercy or emotion. The fact that she displays no emotion makes her effectively chilling. Rollin knew what he was doing when he cast her.

Rollin pulls off some very fine murder set-pieces in this movie.

This is Rollin moving slightly outside of his comfort zone. There are no mysterious ruined castles. It’s all stark urban landscapes. This is something Rollin did occasionally, The Night of the Hunted being an example. But in The Night of the Hunted he made the industrial landscape seem otherworldly. Here he makes it seem gritty and realistic. The movie is a real rarity in Rollin’s filmography in that it appears to take place in everyday reality. It’s the events that occur, and the performance of Tiki Tsang, that give us the uneasy feeling that maybe these characters are not quite inhabiting our world. Or at least not psychologically inhabiting our world.

Killing Car also has, in a subtle way, the feel of a classic revenge western. Tiki Tsang could be the mysterious stranger who rides into town, except that she arrives in a 1950s American car rather than on horseback. If Clint Eastwood played the Man With No Name then Tiki Tsang plays the Woman With No Name, and her performance is a bit Clint Eastwood-like.

If you’ve ever wondered what happened to the scythe used to such good effect by Brigitte Lahaie in Fascination then Killing Car will answer your question in a scene clearly intended to evoke his 1979 masterpiece.

The old Redemption DVD offers an OK transfer. It’s full-frame which is probably correct - the original negatives are lost but the framing in the 1.33:1 aspect ratio looks right. There are no extras to speak of. The movie was shot in 16mm (actually on Super 16 film) and it looks grimy and grainy and scuzzy but again this feels right and was probably how Rollin wanted the move to look.

Killing Car is an oddity but it’s a surprisingly effective change of pace for the director. It still has the characteristic Rollin moodiness. Killing Car is highly recommended.

The Grapes of Death (1978)

The Grapes of Death (Les raisins de la mort), released in 1978, was the first of Jean Rollin’s three zombie movies (the others being Night of the Hunted and The Living Dead Girl). OK, he also made Zombie Lake in 1981 but that one doesn’t count. He was just a director for hire on that film and he had zero interest in the project.

Rollin’s three zombie movies are probably the three most interesting zombie movies ever made. They’re not exactly conventional zombie movies and most crucially they’re zombie movies with an emotional element. We cannot see any of Rollin’s zombies as mere shambling flesh-eating monsters. We’re never allowed to forget that these were perfectly normal human beings with perfectly normal human hopes and fears and feelings. And Rollin’s zombies always retain a degree of humanity. His zombies suffer.

The Grapes of Death has a typical opening for a Rollin zombie movie. In a wine-growing district of France the vines are being sprayed with pesticide. It’s an experimental pesticide and it turns out to have disastrous effects. I don’t think Rollin was especially interested in giving us an environmentalist message. What he did like to do in his zombie films was to give us a totally rational plausible explanation for his zombies. In The Living Dead Girl it’s a chemical spill. For a man who made so many vampire movies Rollin had surprisingly little interest in the supernatural. In fact in The Nude Vampire he gives us a vampire movie with no supernatural elements at all, and most of his vampire films pretty much ignore the supernatural aspects of vampirism. They also ignore the religious and moral ramifications of vampirism. Rollin had other fish to fry.

Rollin’s zombie movies also had a genuinely tragic feel. His zombies are the result of human mistakes.

Élisabeth (Marie-Georges Pascal) and her friend Brigitte (Evelyne Thomas) have left Paris by train. Brigitte is heading for Spain while Élisabeth is heading for the tiny village of Roubles in wine-making country. The train journey becomes a journey of horror. The shaken Élisabeth makes it to Roubles where she finds that everyone is suffering from some kind of disfiguring disease which turns them into mindless killers. But not entirely mindless. You don’t get many zombie movies in which a zombie brutally kills someone and then starts sobbing from the horror and shame of what he’s done.

Élisabeth asks for help from a man and his daughter only to find more horror. And a suicidal zombie.

Élisabeth does encounter one person who seems normal, a blind girl named Lucie (Mirella Rancelot). They take refuge in an abandoned house.

More horrors follow before Élisabeth meets a rather odd very attractive blonde woman (Brigitte Lahaie) who seems a bit evasive when questioned. The woman’s story sounds a bit strange but she offers to help Élisabeth escape from the village.

Two men show up, oddly unaffected by the madness.They’re armed and they’re out to kill zombies. They may represent salvation, but in this movie you can’t be entirely sure of anything.

The performances are generally good. Rollin always got effectively odd and mysterious performances from actresses. The standout performance comes from Brigitte Lahaie, largely because the woman she plays is a very Jean Rollin character. We just don’t know what’s going on with this woman and Lahaie conveys her enigmatic nature perfectly.

This movie, like The Living Dead Girl a few years later, sees Rollin moving into more overtly commercial territory. He’d figured out that audiences wanted zombies and they wanted gore. The Grapes of Death offers both and it is a full-blown horror movie. But it’s still a Rollin movie, with touches of characteristic Rollin atmosphere and at least a few hints of Rollin surrealism.

While superficially it seems like a straightforward zombie flick there are two things that make it very unconventional. Firstly, we’re not sure whether we really should be sympathising with the two vigilantes who are slaughtering every zombie they come across. Élisabeth voices the suggestion that maybe these are just sick people who could be cured. There is also of course the possibility that the homicidal madness is merely temporary. And these zombies still have self-awareness. They know that they are in the grip of homicidal madness and they’re tortured by guilt and remorse. The madness forces them to kill, but they don’t want to.

The second unconventional touch is the very Rollinesque enigmatic ending.

Rollin seems to have had a more generous than usual budget to work with. The makeup and the special effects are quite impressive. Technically this film compares favourably to any of the other zombie movies of its era.

The UK Black House Blu-Ray is barebones but the transfer is nice.

For my tastes this movie is not quite as interesting as Night of the Hunted and The Living Dead Girl. Those two movies packed an immense emotional punch. The Grapes of Death does have an emotional impact but it’s more diffuse, less personal. This is still vastly more interesting than most zombie movies. The Grapes of Death is not quite top-tier Rollin but it’s still very much worth seeing. For horror fans who haven’t sampled Rollin’s work this movie and The Living Dead Girl are the best place to start. They have other things going for them but they also work as straight-out gore-drenched horror films. Recommended.

Bacchanales Sexuelles (1974)

Bacchanales Sexuelles (original title Tout le monde il en a deux, released in the US in a savagely cut version as Fly Me the French Way) is one of Jean Rollin’s mid-70s softcore sex films that is usually contemptuously dismissed even by his ardent fans. That’s perhaps just a bit unfair as we will see.

It was made not long after Rollin made another softcore feature, Schoolgirl Hitchhikers (a movie that apparently features no schoolgirls and no hitchhikers and was originally titled Jeunes filles impudiques).

Valérie (Joëlle Coeur) is housesitting a luxury apartment for her cousin. She’s bored and lonely so she rings up her friend Sophie (Marie-France Morel). They get drunk and have sex and then collapse into bed. During the night Sophie is kidnapped.

Before being grabbed Sophie managed to phone her boyfriend Paul. When he arrives at the apartment Valérie finally notices that Sophie is missing. She and Paul should start searching for her immediately but they decide to have sex first. You have to get your priorities right.

We find out that Sophie has been kidnapped by Malvina (Brigitte Borghese), the high priestess of a secret society. The trouble is that they meant to snatch Valérie. Malvina thinks Valérie can tell her the identity of a traitor in her secret society. After her underlings have given Sophie a good flogging Malvina figures out she’s got the wrong girl.

It seems that Valérie’s cousin is an investigative reporter digging up dirt on Malvina’s group and maybe indulging in a little blackmail. There’s certainly blackmail involved somewhere.

Malvina needs to get someone inside Valérie’s apartment so she sends one of her underlings, Jenny (Agnès Lemercier), posing as a maid. Jenny is a rather disconcerting maid. She is wearing the shortest skirt that could possibly be imagined and when she bends over to pick up the breakfast things it’s evident that she forgot to wear underwear today.

This is unapologetically a softcore porn movie but it was made during that brief window of time when softcore porn movies were well-made and often extremely interesting for other reasons than the abundant female flesh on display. The great thing about 70s sex movies is that usually the distributors didn’t give a damn what the director did as long as there was the required quantity of nudity and simulated sex. If the director happened to be Jean Rolin then what he was going to do was to throw in some of the surreal touches that he loved so much. He was going to make a softcore sex movie but it was going to be somewhat Rollinesque.

The kidnapping, carried out by two cute girls wearing catsuits and elaborate masks, is handled in a very surreal manner. Malvina’s secret society seems to be some kind of sex cult. There’s another very surreal scene involving Malvina, a gun and some store mannequins.

And to add an even more Rollinesque touch there’s his favourite trope - twinned or doubled girls. And they’re played by the Castel twins, yes the twins from Lips of Blood and The Nude Vampire.

The sex at times has a definite kinky edge to it. Malvina has a slave girl who likes sucking her mistresses’s toes. Valérie likes to smear jam all over her nipples, and other even more intimate parts of her anatomy, so that Paul can lick it off. There’s bondage and whipping.

This is a softcore feature but it pushes the edge of the envelope at times. The sex is as graphic as it is possible to be whilst still remaining technically softcore.

Overall this is a bit like a typical Jean Rollin movie but with lots and lots of sex.

It’s usually assumed that Rollin didn’t care about this movie and was just doing it for the pay cheque. I suspect that’s only partly true. He was in this case working as a director for hire but he’s gone to so much trouble to add so many of his personal touches that I can’t believe he was totally uninterested. The man loved making movies and I think he just made the best of the situation and tried to make it as much of a Rollin film as he could. And sex and surrealism can be a potent combination.

Synapse’s DVD release offers a reasonably good transfer. The important thing is that the film is uncut.

If you’ve never sampled Jean Rollin’s movies then you definitely do not want to start with this one as it will give you entirely the wrong idea about his movies. If however you’re a seasoned Rollin fan and you’ve avoided this movie and Schoolgirl Hitchhikers on the assumption that they’re trash then you might want to reconsider. If you don’t mind lots of sex and lots of extremely hot naked women then there is a genuine Jean Rollin film hidden in here trying to get out. With just a bit more screen time devoted to the surrealist elements and a bit less devoted to sex scenes it might even have been a pretty decent Rollin movie. It’s still quite interesting in its way. Bacchanales Sexuelles is a softcore surreal slightly occult thriller. For Rollin fans it’s worth a look.

Requiem for a Vampire (1971), Blu-Ray review

Requiem for a Vampire was Jean Rollin’s fourth completed feature film and of all his films this was his personal favourite. It’s been released at various times under ten different titles, including (in the US) Caged Virgins!

This was the first Rollin movie I ever saw, many years ago, and it made me an immediate Rollin fan. I’m now the proud owner of a copy of the Redemption Blu-Ray release so it’s time to take another look at this movie.

It opens with one of the many extraordinary iconic images that Rollin offered us over the years (other that come to mind are Brigitte Lahaie with the scythe in Fascination, the vampires coming out of the clock in Shiver of the Vampires and numerous images in The Iron Rose). Two girls dressed as clowns are making their getaway in a car after an armed robbery. Their driver doesn’t make it and the girls set off on foot.

Why are the girls dressed as clowns? That’s simple. This is a Jean Rollin film and Rollin was first and foremost a surrealist. If you explain a surrealist image it loses its magic.

The girls are Marie (Marie-Pierre Castel) and Michelle (Mireille Dargent). They are lesbians. So far we have clowns, doubles and lesbians, and vampires are about to make their appearance, so you know this is definitely a Jean Rollin film.

The girls steal a motorcycle and end up at the château. The château is inhabited by vampires, or at least by one vampire and his followers. He is the last vampire, but his followers hope to become vampires. Erika (Dominique) has already grown fangs.

The girls are not held prisoner, except that they are in reality prisoners. They can leave the château but no matter which road they take it will always lead them back to the château.

The vampires have a kind of larder in the dungeon - a number of young women chained up who serve as a food supply. They also provide sexual entertainment for the vampires’s male followers. Whether these young women are innocent victims or willing participants in the perversity is left rather ambiguous.

Marie and Michelle are not to serve as vampire food. They are to be initiated which will begin their transformation into vampires. There is one slight problem, the vital question of whether or not the girls are virgins. They are in fact virgins but turning a virgin into a non-virgin is not a difficult task. In fact Marie approaches it with enthusiasm.

Michelle seems to like the idea of becoming a vampire. Marie isn’t so sure. The girls are supposed to lure victims back to the château but Marie decides that the man she’s trying to ensnare is kind of cute and rather nice. This will lead to trouble.

If I’ve given you the impression that this movie has a straightforward linear narrative then I apologise. Early Rollin vampire movies such as this one do not bother overmuch with conventional narrative. Rollin simply serves us up a succession of striking images, and the images are enough to make the film worthwhile. Louise (one of the vampire’s acolytes) playing the piano in the graveyard is one such image (and it was apparently the image that Rollin came up with first and from which he built the entire film).

One thing that is sometimes overlooked is that Rollin had a great fondness for movie serials, both the French serials of the early 20th century and even more especially for American movie serials of the 30s and 40s. These movie serials had a major influence on the way Rollin structured his narratives. Some of the outrageous elements in the plot of Requiem for a Vampire are inspired more by the delirious fun of movie serials than by artiness.

This movie is a good example of Rollin’s attempts at this stage of his career to combine the surrealist artiness which he loved with commercial exploitation elements. And there are enough exploitation elements to keep any exploitation fan happy - there’s copious female frontal nudity, bondage and plenty of sadomasochism. The scene with the presumably vampiric bat apparently feeding between a naked girl’s thighs is one of the more outré images in the film.

Which also explains why Rollin, despite the fact that he was a genuine master of surrealism, had so much trouble getting taken seriously in France.

Rollin tended to cast his actresses as much as anything for their visual suitability. That meant that they had to be pretty but with the kind of prettiness that would fit the visual tone of a particular movie. They needed to be competent but not necessarily especially accomplished actresses. Marie-Pierre Castel and Mireille Dargent are perfect for his purposes, as is Dominique as the sexy but predatory Erika - she really looks like a glamorous lady vampire, seductive and beautiful but in a weird otherworldly way.

Redemption’s Blu-Ray release looks very impressive and includes plenty of extras.

Requiem for a Vampire is certainly a vampire movie and it contains plenty of the elements you’d expect to find in a gothic horror movie, but it’s not really a horror movie. It’s a poetic melancholy movie about love, sex and death, and dreams that pass away, and about loss. It’s a world away from conventional vampire movies, and it has little in common with the lesbian vampire movies of that era such as Hammer’s The Vampire Lovers or Jose Larraz’s Vampyres. It doesn’t even have much in common with Jess Franco’s lesbian vampire movies like Vampyros Lesbos and Female Vampire. Rollin’s vampire movies formed their own unique genre.

Requiem for a Vampire is a strange surreal and entrancing mood piece. Very highly recommended.

The Living Dead Girl (1982)

The Living Dead Girl (La morte vivante) is the third and final film in what could be described as Jean Rollin’s zombie trilogy. Yes I know that technically he made four zombie movies but I don’t count Zombie Lake. He was merely a hired gun on that picture, it was not one of his personal films and his interest in the project didn’t extend much further than a desire for a badly needed pay cheque. I think it’s therefore fair to speak of his zombie trilogy - The Grapes of Death (1978), The Night of the Hunted (1980) and The Living Dead Girl (1982).

What these three movies have in common is an unconventional approach to the zombie movie sub-genre. They’re unconventional both thematically, emotionally and stylistically. The most radical thing about them is that they add an emotional dimension to the zombie movie.

The opening of The Living Dead Girl makes it plain that Rollin is treating zombies as a science fictional phenomenon rather than a supernatural one. Chemical waste is what turns the zombies into zombies. Which is interesting because Rollin had also treated vampirism as a science fictional phenomenon in some of his vampire films (especially The Nude Vampire).

What’s also interesting is that in The Living Dead Girl he makes no attempt to convince us that his science fictional explanation is plausible. We’re not going to have a scientist offering us huge amounts of techno-babble about how zombies are created. Rollin doesn’t care. All we need to know is that these zombies are not supernatural. What really interests Rollin is the consequences, and where his zombie movies become very unconventional is is his interest in the emotional consequences for the zombies. Having the zombies played by beautiful young women was obviously a sound commercial move but it also makes us instinctively sympathetic. We want to sympathise with beautiful young women.

The Living Dead Girl is as close as Rollin ever got (among his personal films) to making an out-and-out horror movie. It’s the only Rollin movie to feature significant amounts of gore gore (and it is a bit of a gore-fest at times). Rollin’s vampire movies are horror movies of a sort but mostly they’re exercises in surrealism and dream imagery. The Living Dead Girl is unequivocally a horror movie, although it's also much more than that.

Despite this it’s still recognisably a Rollin movie. A young woman in a long flowing white dress wandering through an empty chateau is very Rollin.

A spill of chemical waste in a crypt has an unexpected effect. It brings the corpse of Catherine Valmont back to life. Well, back to life in a way. She is re-animated as a zombie. She seems to have no identity and no awareness. She begins to kill, but instinctively and without any thought or emotion.

Her childhood friend Hélène discovers Catherine. She realises that Catherine has been on a killing spree but as children they made a vow to each other. Whatever Catherine has done Hélène will stand by her.

An American photographer, Barbara, also discovers Catherine’s existence.

The tantalising and tragic thing is that Catherine is not a mere zombie. She remembers a few things. A very few things, but she does remember things from the time when she was alive. She kills everyone she encounters, but not Hélène. She remembers Hélène. She remembers their friendship. She remembers the music box Hélène gave her as a gift. And, tragically, she begins to remember more and more. It’s tragic because she begins to understand that she is dead, that she is a living dead girl. And she begins to understand that she must kill to survive.

While Elysabeth in The Night of the Hunted is slowly losing her human-ness and her identity Catherine is slowly regaining hers. But that’s just as bad because Catherine knows she can never be human again, she can never really be alive again.

The relationship between the two girls slowly changes, in an extremely interesting and emotionally compelling way, but I can’t say any more because this is really the heart and soul of the movie and I’m not going to spoil it.

Is she a zombie or a vampire? There are certainly hints of vampirism. The truth is that she’s both and neither. She’s a one-off, the result of the bizarre effects of the chemical wastes to which her corpse was exposed. In some of Rollin’s vampire movies (especially Two Orphan Vampires and The Nude Vampire and in his novel Little Orphan Vampires) there is also considerable ambiguity - are they actually vampires?

Rollin’s zombie movies are, paradoxically, his most emotionally engaged movies. The zombie idea is used to explore identity, and what it is that makes us human, and the terror of losing our human-ness. In The Night of the Hunted the heroine is slowly losing her humanity and her identity. In The Living Dead Girl the heroine has already lost these things, but not completely. There’s still a shred of the woman she once was. In both movies there’s an overwhelming sense of loss. In both cases there’s the horror of existence without identity.

Françoise Blanchard is extraordinary as Catherine. She has very little dialogue, and none at all for most of the film. She has to convey her strange emotional states mostly wordlessly, and she does so. Marina Pierro is equally good as Hélène.

Rollin was famously obsessed with female doubles. Most of his movies feature two girls. They may be twins, they may be lesbians (but not always). There is always a mysterious and intense bond between the two girls. In this movie the bond is one of simple friendship, but it’s the kind of intense friendship that develops between girls of a certain age. As children Catherine and Hélène made a vow of eternal friendship, a perfectly normal thing. What’s abnormal is that for Hélène that vow of friendship is still as real as it was all those years ago. Her horror at Catherine’s killings cannot shake that bond.

It’s odd that despite all the gore this is Rollin’s most psychologically complex film, with characters who are not only complicated but they change in interesting and convincing ways.

The Living Dead Girl is vintage Rollin. Very highly recommended.