Blu-ray Review | "The Cinema of Jean Rollin Pt. 3"

One of the absolute cinematic pleasures I have had over the last year has been discovering the films of French horror auteur, Jean Rollin, thanks to Kino Lorber's excellent blu-ray treatments (10 of which have been released throughout 2012).

It's tempting to brand Rollin as a schlock-meister. But he's so much more than that. His often bizarre and surrealistic films, filled with producer imposed erotica and gratuitous nudity may appear, on the surface, to be little more than trashy European exploitation films. Yet when one digs a little deeper you find recurring themes, surprising intelligence of construction, and original form. Rollin toys with our expectations, subverting convention at every turn. Whether or not those experiments are successful or not is up for debate.

Sure there have been some duds among them, chiefly his first film, the utterly nonsensical The Rape of the Vampire (1968). But more often than not, even when they are buried beneath seemingly needless sex scenes and hampered by his lack of budgets, Rollin's films exude a kind of life and energy that is hard to ignore.

A scene from THE LIVING DEAD GIRL.
Image courtesy of Collections La Cinémathèque de Toulouse.

The first film in Kino's third wave of Rollin titles is his 1982 oddity, The Living Dead Girl. More violent and with a greater focus on gory makeup effects than his previous films, The Living Dead Girl offers a truncated  and compromised version of Rollin's vision, but its also one of his most straightfoward and accessible works. Made at a time when the slasher genre was at the height of its popularity (John Carpenter's Halloween had started the craze just five years prior, and the Friday the 13th franchise had already churned out three entries in the series by '82), the film was made to capitalize on a world where extreme violence was the new norm. What sets Rollin's films apart is that his "objectified" females are not the victims - they are the monsters. Yet he asks us to identify with them, to care for them. They are at once the bringers of death, and the picture of innocence; that dichotomy standing in stark contrast with the usual cliches of the genre.

The film centers around a young girl who is resurrected from the dead by a toxic spill, and is taken care of by a childhood friend in an old abandoned castle. The girl, Hélène (Marina Pierro), neither alive nor dead, must feed off the flesh of the living in order to endure, and her best friend, Catherine (Françoise Blanchard), must lure unsuspecting victims to the castle for Hélène to devour. While not twins, as is a recurring theme in Rollin's work (see Lips of Blood), the relationship between Hélène and Catherine provides the backbone for the film, something we see often throughout Rollin's filmography (Requiem for a Vampire, The Demoniacs, Two Orphan Vampires). In The Living Dead Girl, unlike in, say, a film like Friday the 13th, the killer is not just a symbol of faceless evil. Whereas Hélène remains symbolically innocent, almost pure, it is her friend Catherine, and her entrapment of unsuspecting victims, who is the true monster. Hélène cannot help the way she is, and is therefore relieved of any culpability in her own actions. She did not ask to be brought back to life. Catherine, on the other hand, absolutely knows what she is doing, yet does none of the killing herself. Rollin invites us to consider which is worse.

Two Orphan Vampires is, in some ways, an extension of the themes of The Living Dead Girl. Whereas Living Dead Girl is a more straightforward gore film (and is therefore more well known among horror fans), Two Orphan Vampires marked something of a return to Rollin's surrealistic form. It's strange, however, that a film released in 1997 is more dated than his work from the 1970s and 80s, but it feels like something of a relic. Even its transfer is subpar, surprising considering that the blu-ray of The Living Dead Girl is perhaps Kino's best work of the Redemption titles.

As one of Rollin's late period films, Two Orphan Vampires marked not only a return to form for the auteur, but a return to the vampire genre, which he had not worked in for over two decades since the release of Lips of Blood in 1974.

Rollin was in failing health when he made this "come back" film, often directing some scenes while laying down, and passing off the New York shoots to a second unit director. And indeed the film itself seems tired, more like an afterthought to an illustrious career.

Inspired by the classic French novel, "Les Deux Orphelines" by Adolphe Philippe d'Ennery and Eugène Cormon (which also served as the basis for D.W. Griffith's Orphans of the Storm in 1921), Two Orphan Vampires follows two orphan girls who pretend to be blind during the day, but at night steal away from the orphanage to prey on the blood of the living. It's a relatively unremarkable film, both in terms of the genre and in Rollin's personal canon. In fact it is the weakest of the 10 Rollin titles that Kino has released by far. While there is a certain dreamlike quality to it that recalls Rollin's earlier work, it seems faded and lacking in that certain joie de vivre that seemed to mark his earlier work. Rollin, it seems, had lost his touch.

A scene from TWO ORPHAN VAMPIRES.
Image courtesy of Collections La Cinémathèque de Toulouse.

However, in the film's final moments, Two Orphan Vampires suddenly becomes something remarkable. It is not enough to make up for the rather dull 90 minutes that preceded it (which is filled with bizarre references linking vampirism to Aztec mythology), but Rollin subtly subverts everything we have just seen with the suggestion that everything up until the end was just part of an elaborate fantasy constructed by two lost and troubled little girls, who built their own world where they have all the power as a way of dealing with the misery of reality. Or perhaps it wasn't. Who knows? It is an unexpected emotional sucker punch in a film that heretofore had shown no glimmer of humanity. It is, perhaps, one of the most mature and beautiful moments in the Rollin canon (rivaling the blistering coda of The Living Dead Girl), made even more poignant by the fact that this was one of the last films Rollin would ever make before his death in 2010. In fact it seems to sum up the full thematic spectrum of his filmography in one, wrenching moment, when fantasy and reality finally collide in a moment of haunting nostalgia for a reality that perhaps never existed.

That makes Two Orphan Vampires a fitting companion for The Living Dead Girl. Whereas The Living Dead Girl is perhaps the most un-Rollin like of his horror films (not counting 1981's Zombie Lake, which has yet to be released by Kino), it still finds a way of subverting our expectations even in the face of crippling studio demands. Two Orphan Vampires, on the other hand, is a much more pure Rollin experiment. One that perhaps does not work as well as some of his earlier triumphs such as The Iron Rose or Fascination, but even his failures contained something special. Rollin was a unique talent, an artist working at the behest of smut peddlers (not unlike Val Lewton, who often elevated low budget schlock like I Walked with a Zombie and Cat People into a higher form of art) whose work, at long last, is finally being appreciated thanks to the miracle of home video, and can now be seen in their most stunning quality ever thanks to the folks at Kino Lorber.

THE LIVING DEAD GIRL -  ★★★ (out of four)
TWO ORPHAN VAMPIRES - ★★

Now available on blu-ray and DVD from Kino Lorber.

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Blu-ray Review | "The Cinema of Jean Rollin Pt. 2"

Having released five of Jean Rollin's most notable films on blu-ray under its new Redemption label earlier this year, Kino Lorber has returned with three more, somewhat lesser known Rollin works.

Oddly enough, the first of these films, and the 10th in Kino's Redemption line, is Rollin's very first film, The Rape of the Vampire (1968). I thought it was odd that it wasn't included in the first round of Rollin releases, but after watching the film it's pretty clear why - it's honestly not very good.

It's no wonder - all copies of the script were lost in the first two days of shooting, and the rest of the film was shot on the fly, which explains its rambling, directionless style. Rather than mold the film on his own, Rollin instead chose to allow the film to plot its own direction as he filmed. With no plan and no script, the production of The Rape of the Vampire was a mess, and it shows on screen.

A scene from THE RAPE OF THE VAMPIRE.
Photo by Michel Maiofiss, courtesy of Cinémathèque de Toulouse.

Rollin's only black and white film, The Rape of the Vampire is a bizarre, nonsensical tale of a psychiatrist who tries to convince four vampires that they are actually just mentally ill, while they are convinced they are ageless creatures of the night who were once raped by the villagers. Split into two distinct parts that have little to nothing to do with each other (half of which is a pseudo-remake of the 1943 film, Dead Men Walk, starring Dwight Frye), the film is a mostly experimental work, presaging Rollin's penchant for surrealism in later films. There are some great shots to be found here, but the film itself is just a disorganized mishmash of seemingly disconnected scenes.

Rollin made two features, The Nude Vampire (which was released as part of Kino's first Rollin bundle) and Strange Things Happen at Night before, 1971's Requiem for a Vampire, which was his first film to receive a US theatrical release, where it was released as Caged Virgins. Rollin's films were always marred somewhat by producer mandated nudity in order to sell more tickets, but Requiem for a Vampire is perhaps the most overtly pornographic of his oeuvre.

Rollin considered Requiem for a Vampire to be his favorite of his films. Drawn almost completely from his subconscious, the film plays into his surrealist tendencies far better than Rape of the Vampire did just three years prior. Having clearly learned from the mistakes of his previous films, Requiem is a more pure, streamlined work that seems plucked from some sort of strange dream. It's a nearly wordless tale of two schoolgirls (dressed as clowns, no less) who run away from school and stumble upon the torture dungeon of the last vampire.

A scene from REQUIEM FOR A VAMPIRE.
Photo by Michel Maiofiss, courtesy of Cinémathèque de Toulouse.

A wild mix of dreamlike imagery and sadomasochistic fetishes, Requiem for a Vampire is often silly, but often beautifully surreal. When viewed in chronological order, Rollin's journey as a filmmaker becomes more clear, and is a significant step up from 1969's The Nude Vampire and a vast improvement over Rape of the Vampire. His very next film, The Iron Rose, would turn out to be his masterpiece, after he was freed from the imposed erotica of overbearing producers. In fact that's probably the most distracting element of Requiem - it feels more like a porno than a horror film, with extended sequences of nude lesbians whipping each other in BDSM dungeon fantasies (a scene Rollin intentionally made over the top in hopes the censors would cut it, which they did). Otherwise, it's an intriguing Rollin enigma that found the director on the precipice of something great.

Coming in between The Iron Rose and Lips of Blood (and two straight up pornos, Schoolgirl Hitchhikers and Fly Me the French Ways), 1974's The Demoniacs (aka Curse of the Living Dead) is the work of an artist on the rise. Hot off of the most artistically successful (yet most commercially disastrous) film of his career, Rollin stretched his wings a bit for a more straightforward narrative that, unlike many of his films, is actually quite unnerving.

"Straightfoward" is a word that must be taken with a grain of salt when discussing Rollin, because he always deals in such a dreamlike realm. But The Demoniacs is actually more of a ghost story, and a pretty good one at that.

The film centers around twin girls (as Rollin films often do, but these are different  twins from those in Requiem and Lips of Blood) who are raped and murdered when a band of "wreckers" lure a ship to its doom on a rocky coast. The girls then return from the grave with the help of the devil to take their revenge.

A scene from THE DEMONIACS.
Photo by Michel Maiofiss, courtesy of Cinémathèque de Toulouse.

I was reminded somewhat of the Twilight Zone episode, "The Howling Man," in which the Devil is trapped in an old castle, much like the ruins found in The Demoniacs, where he is found by the girls, who sleep with him in order to gain his powers. I'm not the first to make such a comparison, Video Watchdog's Tim Lucas also notes the similarities in his excellent liner notes included with all three films. While he dealt mostly with the horror genre, Rollin's films are usually more surreal than scary, products of the subconscious mind. But The Demoniacs is something of a different animal, an eerily gripping work that is hampered only by its frequent breaks for gratuitous sex scenes. It's interesting watching these films and imagining what they could have been had Rollin been forced to include such erotic elements that make so little sense. As such his films remain mostly curiosities, mildly diverting oddities for fans of horror and exploitation cinema.

Kino's loving presentations perhaps lend more importance to these films than they ultimately deserve, but it's hard to complain in the face of such comprehensive releases. The Rape of the Vampire features two Rollin short films made prior to his feature film career, and the transfers are mostly excellent considering the source of the films (Requiem, perhaps the most beautiful of the three, actually fares the worst transfer-wise). Fans of the first five Rollin releases from Kino won't want to miss these three new discs. While they aren't quite as good as the first round, Kino clearly remains devoted to Rollin and the rest of the Redemption catelogue, and continue to do right by these strangely fascinating films.

THE RAPE OF THE VAMPIRE - ★★ (out of four)
REQUIEM FOR A VAMPIRE - ★★½
THE DEMONIACS -  ★★★

Now available on blu-ray and DVD from Kino Lorber.

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Blu-ray Review | "The Cinema of Jean Rollin"

Jean Rollin is not exactly a household name, even among cinephiles. His unique brand of vampire erotica has long been unavailable in the United States outside of VHS bootlegs, which garnered Rollin the cult following he enjoys today. In fact, Rollin himself encouraged the bootlegs, contributing short introductions to each film that are included in Kino Lorber's new blu-ray releases of five of his titles. Having bought the rights to the Redemption Films catalogue, which includes much of Rollin's work.

The earliest of these films is 1970's The Nude Vampire. Rollin's second feature film, after his much maligned debut, The Rape of the Vampire (1968).

Rollin's unique directorial voice is less apparent in these early films, which were often subject to studio imposed sex scenes to increase marketability, which are often stilted, awkward, and out of place.

This is especially true in The Nude Vampire, in which a young vampire woman is held captive by group of scientists hoping to discover the secret of immortality. When one of the scientist's sons discovers the young lady, who has never before seen a human face, he falls in love with her and sets out to free her from her captors, even if it means betraying his own father. But a mysterious suicide cult is also interested in her, leading to a bizarre showdown that becomes less a horror film and more a wild sci-fi thriller.

Rollin's work always tends more toward the surreal, but more so than his later films, The Nude Vampire is just plain odd. Made on a miniscule budget with non-professional actors, the film appears to be just another B-movie exploitation film. But watching it in conjunction with his other films, the seeds of Rollin's talent become clear, even if it is not fully manifested until later. The opening scene, for instance, in which the young woman runs from hooded figures dressed as deer, chickens, and other various animals is a terrific set piece, hinting at some of the more evocative work in Rollin's later films.

He spread his wings a bit in 1971's The Shiver of the Vampires, an equally strange but more visually arresting film about a newlywed couple named Isla and Antoine who make a stop at a forbidding castle while on their honeymoon to visit the woman's beloved cousins. Upon their arrival, however, they are informed that the cousins have died the night before, but they choose to spend the night in the castle anyway.

It turns out that her cousins are not dead, at least not quite. Once successful vampire hunters, they have been turned into vampires themselves by a beautiful lesbian vampire who takes an immediate liking to Isla.

The film that follows features perhaps Rollin's most convoluted plotline, even more so than The Nude Vampire, but it does feature an interesting history of a war between paganism and Christianity that explains much of the modern vampire myth.

It is also more dreamlike than the often clunky Nude Vampire, and displays a marked growth in terms of visuals and storytelling prowess. What distinguishes Shiver of the Vampires, even from Rollin's other films, is its creative use of imagery and color, which looks especially bright in Kino's new HD transfer. Of course, it is somewhat marred by the almost goofy inclusion of soft-core erotica, and the thumping rock score by French prog band Acanthus puts the film squarely in the realm of campy 1970s exploitation. Once again though, something of Rollin's talent shone through the dated trappings. Rollin was not just another cheap peddler of erotic horror smut, but he wouldn't get his chance to truly prove it until 1973, with the release of The Iron Rose.

The Iron Rose is at once the ultimate Rollin film, and the one that stands out as the least like his other work. It's also his masterpiece, the one film in this collection that can legitimately be called a great film. It's clearly Rollin's most personal work, made without producer mandated erotica or any kind of obstructions, allowing the director to make the film he wanted to make.

And what a film it is. While Rollin's films were never really what one would consider scary, The Iron Rose absolutely is. It's the story of a young couple who go into a graveyard for a late night romantic tryst, but can't find their way out again. Hopelessly lost and increasingly frightened, the two slowly descend into paranoia and eventually madness.

There are no vampires or anything supernatural at all in The Iron Rose.  Instead, Rollin fully unleashes his surrealist tendencies to craft a film that is both beautiful and eerie, a haunting exploration of the human psyche and a superb cinematic study in slowly mounting dread.

The Iron Rose is arguably the best showcase of Rollin's talents. Not as bizarre or campy perhaps as some of his earlier work, but it displayed a poetic, lyrical quality that had skirted around the edges of his previous films before coming to fruition here. Distilling history, romance, and philosophy into a haunting melting pot of feelings, ideas, and fear, The Iron Rose is perhaps one of horror's most overlooked masterpieces, and Kino's blu-ray release is a treasure not just for horror fans but for fans of great cinema as well.  For those looking to see what is so special about Rollin's work, one need look no further than this trip down a macabre rabbit hole from which there is no escape, which represents the pinnacle of the director's unique brand of surreal horror.

1975's Lips of Blood was a bit of a return to form for Rollin after the more experimental Iron Rose (which became his greatest commercial failure). Vampires make a glorious reappearance here, but this time with the experience of The Iron Rose behind him, Rollin clearly exercised more directorial control this time around. Rollin considered this his most developed story, and while it seems a bit aimless at first, it packs a surprising emotional punch.

Lips of Blood introduces us to a young man whose trip to a party triggers repressed childhood memories of a meeting with a beautiful young girl at a Gothic mansion. His domineering mother dismisses the memory as fantasy, but he becomes determined to find this girl, who becomes an object of fascination and desire.

Soon he begins seeing her everywhere and becomes more and more obsessed (he even sees her while attending a screening of The Shiver of the Vampires). Along the way he discovers a dark family secret - the young girl is a vampire who has been held in captivity for years. The film culminates with a surprisingly tender and emotional note that somehow combines the thoughtful lyricism of The Iron Rose with the more lurid qualities of Rollin's earlier work. Rollin weaves themes of memory and repressed sexual desire in with the more erotic elements with much greater skill here than he had before, making Lips of Blood one of his strongest films and yet, sadly, yet another commercial failure.

He rebounded from the failure of Lips of Blood with one of his most popular films, 1975's Fascination. It seems that by the time he reached this point in his career, he was much more comfortable with the sexual elements present in his work, and as such, Fascination  is perhaps his most truly erotic film. At times it even plays like soft-core pornography, but unlike his previous films, the eroticism flows naturally from the story rather than feeling awkwardly shoe-horned in.

Fascination is also a kind of vampire film without vampires. It features blood drinkers, yes, but not the kind one would expect. It's the story of an unlucky thief who takes shelter in a castle while fleeing from an armed gang he tried to rip off, and discovers two beautiful young servants who are home alone, awaiting the arrival of the master and mistress of the house. At first it seems like some sort of dominant male fantasy, and armed man with two nubile young women at his service, but the tables are turned when their friends arrive, and they are nothing like what they seem.


It turns out that they are a "blood cult," a group of women addicted to drinking blood. What started out as drinking ox blood as an old fashioned cure for anemia turned into a desire for something more, and now he is at their mercy in a strange orgy of human depravity. But when one of the women falls in love with him everything changes, leaving her conflicted about whether to obey her heart, her friends, or her own ravenous thirst for blood.

Fascination is perhaps Rollin's most straightforward film. The plot makes sense, there is very little of Rollin's trademark surrealism, and for perhaps the first time, the sex actually feels natural, even essential, to the plot. It may not be as strong an auteurist piece as The Iron Rose or Lips of Blood, but it doesn't have the same lofty goals either. It's just a solid genre piece, and it was clear that by this point in his career, Rollin was completely comfortable with who he was a director.

Kino's presentation here is surprisingly first rate, even by their normally high standards. The films themselves still have occasional scratches and pops, but that is to be expected with films of this type. The extras are all top notch, with each disc containing a 20-page booklet with notes by Tim Lucas (although it's the exact same booklet with each film) and a short introduction by Rollin himself, as well as interviews with cast and crew and, in the case of Fascination, two deleted sex scenes for those so inclined.

The real special feature here, however, is the fact that these films are finally available to a wider audience. More than just exploitation curiosities, Rollin's films are both beautiful and fascinating works that deserve the attention and consideration they can now be afforded by a new generation. Not unlike Val Lewton, Rollin transcended the seemingly sleazy roots of his subject matter and emerged with vibrant, lively works of art.

THE NUDE VAMPIRE - ★★½
THE SHIVER OF THE VAMPIRES - ★★½
THE IRON ROSE - ★★★★
LIPS OF BLOOD - ★★★½
FASCINATION - ★★★

Now available on Blu-ray and DVD from Kino Lorber.

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