The Land Underground

It's been a while since I last wrote anything about Jean Rollin, one of my favorite horror-or-otherwise directors. This is something I used to make a habit of, in large part because Kino Lorber used to make a habit of releasing his films on Blu-ray. That dried up after while but today Kino, as always via their Redemption line, is back on it with their release of The Escapees, Rollin's 1981 feminist, er, crime film? Anyway that, paired with my recent viewing of his earlier horror film The Iron Rose, also available on Kino Blu-ray, has led me here today to offer a few brief words on each.

The Escapees (1981) - This film came out the same year as another Rollin film, Zombie Lake, which I wrote about here, and which may be the worst film Rollin ever made. I'd be inclined to give Schoolgirl Hitchhikers a pass over that one, because at least Schoolgirl Hitchhikers feels honest. In any event, the time had come for Rollin to re-energize himself and to do so he would return to a favorite theme, that of two women on the run -- sometimes they're just together, not so much on the run, but here they're on the run. He'd already done this in, for example, Fascination and Requiem for a Vampire, and would perhaps perfect it in one of his last films, Two Orphan Vampires, which The Escapees resembles more than any other Rollin film I've seen.

Unfortunately, The Escapees is no Two Orphan Vampires. It's about two women, Michelle (Laurence Dubas) and Marie (Christiane Coppe) who are inmates in an insane asylum. Marie won't speak and Michelle is full of anger -- we don't know much more about them than that. But Michelle wants to escape and she enlists Marie's help. Insisting that she'll leave Marie behind once they're in the clear, the two women nevertheless stay together, with Michelle's hard edge crumbling to softness any time she sees evidence of Marie's lonely despair. So the two of them go it alone, meeting lots of curious folks at, for example, what appears to be a traveling outdoor carny strip club, as well as various bars, which is a less colorful example. Along the way they fend off unwanted advances, possibly even rape, and come to see possible freedom from the restrictive, abusive "regular" world on a ship sailing to Brazil.

As already noted, The Escapees isn't a horror film and though I don't want to pigeonhole Rollin my reaction is to think "More's the pity." Since it's impossible for me to not compare this film with Two Orphan Vampires, it's also impossible for me to not see The Escapees as a dry run for that later surrealistic masterpiece. Leaving behind the Baroque possibilities of horror seems to have kept Rollin from indulging his genius for bizarre and eerie imagery, though at every turn the film is practically begging to be pushed over the stylistic brink. Rollin never does that, and the film, though not bad, ends up feeling like a curiosity exactly because it's not especially curious. God knows it's an improvement over Zombie Lake, though, and if The Escapees is what Rollin needed to push on to his next film, 1982's brilliant The Living Dead Girl, well then that's just fine by me.

The Iron Rose (1973) - Ah. This, however, this is something else again. With his fifth feature film, Rollin proved with The Iron Rose that he was a horror filmmaker unlike any other. At just 80 minutes and featuring, for all intents and purposes, only two characters, a young woman (Francoise Pascal) and a young man (Hugues Quester), this film is nothing less than a masterpiece, of tone, and chilling insinuation, and terrible mystery.

Being the kind of film it is, the plot is simplicity itself: this young couple decides one day to wander around in a cemetery, maybe have a picnic, maybe even make love in some secluded crypt. Eventually day turns to night and they realize that the cemetery's gates have been closed and locked. What's more, it's a big place, not very well kept up and overrun by old weeds and bushes, and they're kind of lost. Their nerves fray, they lash out at each other, the man's behavior becomes nearly abusive, while the young woman begins acting very strangely. She becomes very interested in the dead around them, and begins talk about them, and death itself, as a kind of real life. But not in religious, heavenly terms; rather, life that is lived in death, in the dirt, underground.

Where this is all going managed to both surprise me and to feel inevitable after the fact. And while The Iron Rose isn't short of strong images, for once it may be Rollin's writing, his prose, that lifts the film above most films in the genre (an absolutely terrific performance by Pascal doesn't hurt anything either). There's a speech late in the film that lays the whole terrible idea of it, the awful poetry of the young woman's strange new desire, which she finds beautiful, wonderful, something she takes delight in. She talks about "the land underneath" and exhorts her listener to "carry your birds of gold"; the language is obscure but the meaning is clear. There's a menace to The Iron Rose that isn't aggressive or even violent. It's not pursuing you. It's not waiting for you. It's not even menacing. It's natural. It just is.

Those Who Are Lost in the World of the Tower Apartments

Well, this is more like it, or it's near enough to being more like it that I'm not about to complain all that strenuously.  I'm referring to the films of Jean Rollin, which, when last I checked in with thoughts, had found my enthusiasm for the man and his work dampened somewhat by the not-at-all-interesting-in-fact-pretty-bad Zombie Lake and Schoolgirl Hitchhikers, those two having just been released to Blu-ray by Kino Lorber.  Kino Lorber is at it again, though, with the releases tomorrow of Rollin's The Grapes of Death and Night of the Hunted, two films he made while in the middle of his run as a director of porn films.  I'd have said something like "while lost in the wilderness of porn," or something equally evocative, which is to say "not very evocative," except that at least one of those films, Phantasmes from 1975, is a film Rollin took as seriously as any of the many other brilliant horror films we all know and love him for (so I learned from the essay by Tim Lucas included with both Blu-rays).  That's also the only porn film Rollin put his own name on, so maybe otherwise he did consider porn to be a wilderness -- the softcore Schoolgirl Hitchhikers certainly didn't indicate much interest in that form.  But what do I know.  Maybe Kino Lorber will get around to Phantasmes some day, too.  In any case, and speaking of "what do I know?", here we have these two films, from 1978 and 1980 respectively, and if neither one struck me as quite worthy of Rollin at his best -- a statement that implies far more negativity than I'd like --  it could be to tread on very thin ice to try and make much of anything out of that particular thought, in terms of how Rollin was earning most of his money at the time, because sandwiched in between The Grapes of Death and Night of the Hunted is another "pure" Rollin film, the one called Fascination, which might well be his masterpiece. So subjectivity, and all that stuff.

Night of the Hunted - But, you know…sorry, I’m taking these in reverse chronological order, plus I’m going to get hung up on something slightly irrelevant, but, you know, how good, as a movie, can Phantasmes really be?  I’ve seen a few of the somewhat current almost-trend of arthouse films that contain scenes of unsimulated sex, and it’s difficult for me to take, for instance, 9 Songs seriously as a real, like, movie-type movie.  And that one wasn’t even filmed as porn, stylistically speaking, which I can only assume Phantasmes was.  This is all perhaps my own hang up, though I assure you whatever hang up it is, if it is one, is not Puritanical in nature.  I just think the concept of 9 Songs is stupid, and, further, I think the whole idea of unsimulated sex in regular movies with actors in them is usually backed by a juvenile impulse masquerading as “Well why can’t we just be honest?” art-douche posturing.  Then again there’s Antichrist, a film I like a great deal, which comes very close to justifying its own compliment of brief hardcore sex scenes.  That doesn’t mean they’re not backed by the same juvenile impulse – this is Lars von Trier we’re talking about, after all – but they do provide certain events towards that film’s end with with a certain explicit causality. If you get me.

Anyway, I bring all this up in relation to Rollin’s non-hardcore Night of the Hunted, partly because certain questions along these lines are, I think, unavoidable when talking about his films, and European horror of a certain era in general, and partly because I wonder how similar this film, and other Rollin films like The Demoniacs, might be in terms of style, structure, and the employment of their sexual component, to Phantasmes, a film I might as well confess to really wanting to see.  What I’m getting at here, as far as Night of the Hunted goes, is that all of the sex and much of the ancillary nudity in the film is entirely gratuitous, to the point of being goofy, and it feels almost entirely removed from the action of the film.  The film stars Brigitte Lahaie as Elisabeth, who we first see running in a hospital gown down a highway at night, where she is picked up by Robert (Vincent Gardere), a good man who genuinely only wants to help this woman who, it turns out, is suffering from a terrible form of amnesia that allows her to remember scraps of what she was running from, but not why, or anything before that, or, just a bit later, back in Robert’s home, how she came to meet him.  It will turn out that she escaped a scientific/medical facility known as The Black Tower, along with a young nude woman named Veronique (Dominique Journet), in which are housed dozens of men and women suffering from the same affliction as Elisabeth.  When Elisabeth is inevitably dragged back to The Black Tower, she and Veronique, who has also been re-captured, almost immediately embark on another escape attempt.

The strange environment of The Black Tower, the escape attempt, and the aftermath are the whole film, which is of course plenty, though that escape attempt takes up the bulk of it.  As a result, that strange environment becomes the show, a not unusual approach from Rollin – it includes, most affectingly, stories of despairing patients who practically beg anyone nearby to tell them who they are.  The best of these involves a woman asking if anyone knows the name of her daughter – the fact that she has one is the only memory she retains.  It’s a wonderful scene, and it reminded me very strongly but also very vaguely of another scene in another movie, which I have thus far been entirely unable to pinpoint.  So this is either a false memory, or I’ve just lost the thread.  Either way, pretty fitting.  Also included are scenes of sexual violence, or sex that becomes violent, which adds a hint, as Tim Lucas notes, of Cronenberg’s Shivers from 1975.  The big difference there, though, is that in Shivers those scenes relate directly to what that film is.  In Night of the Hunted, all Rollin offers is the information that the severe memory loss is merely a step towards total mental disintegration, which itself can reasonably be said to lead to the sexual violence.  But that doesn’t make those scenes of the film.  To some degree, that element of the film exists because Rollin knew he might be forced to market the film as a softcore sex movie.

Despite how it might sound, I mean none of this as a judgment against the film, or not in any condescending or moralizing way.  But it’s a reality of Rollin’s career that I find interesting -- and which I would find a good deal less interesting if I didn’t think he was so brilliant – that I see no reason not to acknowledge as an occasional barrier to hurdle.  Night of the Hunted at its best is nowhere near Rollin at his best – and, again, as noted by Tim Lucas, Rollin would agree with me about that – but it does have a quiet, dreamy menace to it.  There’s something reminiscent of J. G. Ballard to all this, too, with this giant modern office building containing within it obscure and abstract dangers presented as, and possibly even literally existing as, a cure for something even more obscure and abstract.  There’s a heavy dose of politics in here, which Lucas lays out in his essay much better than I could, any in any case isn’t the kind of political element that would reveal itself to a viewer who didn’t seek out facts about Rollin and his beliefs, as well as his specific thinking while putting Night of the Hunted together, but without that we’re still left with a reveal that all of this has something to do with a minor nuclear disaster.  None of this comes across very strongly as a statement about anything, but the film’s ending, which brings two characters to the same level and leaves them there, might remind you, as it did me, of the act of living your life every day as though the world was not collapsing all around you.

The Grapes of Death - Which leaves The Grapes of Death to say what about, exactly?  It’s more successful, from top to bottom, than Night of the Hunted, but is also perhaps has less going on in it.  By which I mean both good and bad stuff, though it does also contain a hint that nuclear power can lead to horror, though in this case it functions in about the same way as “this happened because of a comet” would in its place.  A sort of zombie film, The Grapes of Death is about a young woman, another Elisabeth played by Marie-Georges Pascal, on a train trip with her friend, played by Evelyne Thomas.  They’re apparently the only people on the train, save one conductor, a man with some terrible and fast-spreading skin disease, who attacks them, killing Elisabeth’s friend, before she’s able to escape.  Stranded far from either her destination, a town called Roubelais, where her fiance’ owns a vineyard, and from her starting point, she now has to try to work her way to Roubelais on foot.  But everything on that route is death and madness, as she encounters one person after another with the same vile condition as the conductor, and possessed by the same bloodlust.

One of the things I found so effective about this film is how merciless it is towards its supporting characters.  Don’t get attached, is what I’m saying, but it goes a bit beyond that.  The Grapes of Death does achieve a level of shrieking horror in this way, if that’s not overstating the matter.  But it is merciless, and, for example, there’s a decapitation scene that is shocking because of who is decapitated, when they’re decapitated, who decapitates this person, and, most importantly, the clumsy, messy fury of it all.  Being able to see the strings, as it were, does nothing to dent the chilling, spurting frenzy of the moment.

Like a lot of zombie movies – which, again, this sort of is – the power of The Grapes of Death is in similarly visceral moments, and in its relentless march towards a not very happy ending.  Not as bracingly surreal as many of Rollin’s best films, it’s close to being as grimly haunted, with a final minute that’s close to brilliant.  I don’t believe Rollin ever fell back on any kind of typical horror ending – even if the climax is a flurry of violence, he closes it all out with a moment of chilling grace.  Hell, if I remember correctly, even Zombie Lake took a shot in that direction.  In The Grapes of Death, it’s rather uncertain what will happen after we cut to black, but any number of things could and we’d remain secure in the knowledge that the damage has been done.  Grace like this is not something that is often sought in horror – it’s not even respected, not now, anyway.  But if you have it, it’s immensely powerful.  Rollin had grace.

I Found Myself

Many years ago, I was talking to one of my brothers about bad movies, and writing about them, not in the overly profane, comparing-them-to-deviant-sex-acts-or-scatological-situations way that's all the rage now, but in a way that is genuinely clever and funny, for a thing some of us Ryans were doing at the time that is frankly none of your business, and I was having trouble taking part because I hadn't seen any movies that would lend themselves to such a thing. I had recently rewatched Predator, a film that I realize is regarded as a classic of sorts but which I've never thought a great deal of, but that one didn't apply really because, I said, and my brother agreed, "It is what it is." Now this was without question an extraordinarily insightful thing for me to have said, and I stand by it. Predator has no pretensions about it, and is efficient enough, whatever I think of it, about the job it sets out for itself, and on at least one real level I don't actually think it's bad. I just don't like it very much.

I thought of this today as I ground my way through four films recently released to Blu-ray by Kino Lorber. Each of the films is a type of, I guess, grindhouse, or exploitation, fair, and European in origin, and cheaply and indifferently made. Each one also left me thinking not quite that "it is what it is," but rather something that, when removed from its original, kind of dumb metaphysical context in Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter, and applied here renders an even more distanced, disinterested, aesthetically spiritual judgment: "This is this. This ain't something else. This is this." In The Deer Hunter, Robert De Niro's Mike is talking about a rifle bullet, and I've always agreed with John Cazale's Stan when he says in reply "'This is this!' What the hell is that supposed to mean!? 'This is this!'" and then he says some other stuff I'd get in trouble for repeating, but as far as gists go, I'm with Stan. But anyway, as it pertains to Oasis of the Zombies, Zombie Lake, Schoolgirl Hitchhikers, and Zeta One, "This is this" sums things up rather nicely, I think. Or maybe, I'm afraid.

Because what good is it to say "Well these movies are terrible"? Beyond it being a reasonable thing to say to someone who asks you "Are these movies good?", it offers nothing to anyone who hasn't seen them but might have reason to be fully aware of what they'd be getting into if they chose to take the plunge. They are far from the only films of their type, after all. But having to "say something" about these four films is exactly the position I now find myself in, and I have an uneasy feeling that I've offered up the preceding three paragraphs by way of an excuse.

Zombie Lake (d. Jean Rollin) - Oh, but look! This one was directed by Jean Rollin! I have gone on record on a few different occasions about my love and admiration for the frankly stunning horror films made by this great French director, and if come to from a vacuum there would seem to be no reason to believe Zombie Lake wasn't simply the next great Rollin film for me to enjoy. But this film was masterminded by Jess Franco (about whom more in a minute), and is one of two Rollin films recently released by Kino that he made under a pseudonym (the other one, well, about which more in a minute). Franco is not a filmmaker I know very well, but from what I've seen he's the anti-Rollin: unimaginative, crass, interested only in getting exploitation on film, not in filming exploitation, if you get my distinction, not even slick, just a cheap purveyor of garbage. Some people like him I guess. It's still Rollin behind the camera, you might argue, and surely this counts for something. So I'd hoped, but no. Zombie Lake's goofball story about star-crossed Nazi/French World War II love, that somehow or another results in zombies being in a lake, is just a frame on which to hang endless nudity and shots of actors wearing green greasepaint and -- is that tape? -- tape, I suppose, on their faces, smearing stage blood on the necks of actresses. There is no spark, no hint of Rollin's mad, emotionally tumultuous poetry. The finale of Zombie Lake does feature an absurd bit of melodrama that I can actually imagine Rollin, at his best, which this movie is nearly the furthest thing from, making work, or making something out of, but not here. I don't know the story behind the making of Zombie Lake, but it reeks strongly of the product of a great filmmaker needing to work, and who has been given his orders very clearly.

Oasis of the Zombies (d. Jess Franco) - I realize I said of Franco that there would be more in a minute, but I don't actually have anything to add about the man here. Curiously, though, Oasis of the Zombies is a good deal less exploitational than Rollin's cursed Nazi zombies film, and has one or two nice shots, which is one or two more than Rollin found room for. It's ending is even dumber, though, and the only thing I can find of any interest here actually applies to both. Zombie Lake was made in 1980 and Oasis of the Zombies was made in 1982, some years after the zombie genre, as George Romero unintentionally defined it, began. But while both films do feature zombies feasting on the flesh of the living, that's about all Franco -- I'm placing this all with him, as I really don't think Rollin had or cared to exercise any creative freedom on his film -- takes. In both films, the Nazi zombies are referred to as ghosts, and indeed they have an occasional tendency to vanish when defeated (sometimes they burn). And they're zombies because the Nazi soldiers in both films have been cursed, and they're guarding specific areas (a lake and an oasis, respectively), and they only appear when those areas are threatened by outsiders. They're old-fashioned campfire ghost story zombies, which is a thing that, to my knowledge, does not exist anywhere outside of these two films. I admit I kind of enjoyed that, even if I enjoyed nothing else. Outside of the nudity, which I mention favorably only because I want to be honest, and I don't want to be thought of as a prude or a scold.

Schoolgirl Hitchhikers (d. Jean Rollin) - Yeah, so, this one. Here, Jean Rollin very clearly saw no point in even trying. Or perhaps I'm desperate to swaddle him honor beyond a point he would've been comfortable with. He made lots of movies, and lots of sex movies, and I have no particular reason to believe that he came to those projects in a state of misery brought on by his stature as a serious artist being threatened by this gutter filth. It's just that, like Zombie Lake, Schoolgirl Hitchhikers was filmed with no style whatsoever. The only thing that can be said to set this apart as a Rollin film is the setting, which is an old estate in the French countryside that looks exactly like the kind of house that popped up in a number of his great horror films -- and this specific one might well have done so. "Where are the vampires?" I asked myself upon seeing it here. "There should be vampires there." But no vampires, I'm afraid. In fairness, and because I don't want to appear like a prude or a scold, I will note than there's another Rollin connection here, one that is better than any house and possibly any vampire: Joelle Coeur, a jaw-dropping woman who played a real pistol in Rollin's The Demoniacs, among other Rollin films. Here she's paired off with another Rollin regular, Gilda Arancio, and the two trespass into the abandoned French estate for a lesbian tryst, which leads them, of course, into a world of crime. Crime committed with cap guns, apparently.

Zeta One (d. Michael Cort) - If there's an outlier among these four, it's Zeta One, a bizarre James Bond send-up that doesn't even have the decency to in any way resemble any Bond film ever made, least of all the ones that had been made by 1969, when this film was released. The only halfway decent joke I could detect -- and the film is so wretched I'm not at all convinced this was intentional -- was the fact that Robin Hawdon's Bond stand-in never actually seems to do anything, and is intent instead to spend as much time as possible in bed with the various women who throw themselves at him throughout the film. The bad guys are defeated by several of those women, the ones who are aliens I think. There's another planet here I think. Space alien women who are almost always naked must defeat the Earthbound villains because, goddamnit, who gives a shit. There's a strip poker scene early on here that lasts about twenty minutes, at least. I refuse to go back and check, the fuckin' thing is twenty minutes long. Zeta One is a "comedy," of course, but it's a comedy in the same way that Schoolgirl Hitchhikers is a crime film. I'd say this is the one truly painful film out of these four to actually sit through, but also like the other four, you know, "This is this." See it if you want to.

Alive Forever

My obsession with the films of Jean Rollin continues, apparently. This time around, I've been facilitated by the pending Kino Lorber release of two latter-day Rollin films, The Living Dead Girl from 1982, and Two Orphan Vampires 1997. To begin...

The Living Dead Girl - Counting the two movies under discussion tonight, I have seen seven Jean Rollin films this year, and I keep expecting one of them to bore me, or to be something less than interesting. Well, I'm not there yet, and this one, along with Fascination, is one of the best yet. In fairness, I figured that if I ever were to be bored by Rollin, this wouldn't be the one to do it, largely because in his essay about these titles that is included with both discs, Tim Lucas says the climax of The Living Dead Girl is "...one of the most emotionally incendiary finales in horror film history." I have to admit that getting there is not necessarily a jaw-dropping experience, though it's not a bad one, either. The film begins with three grave robbers plundering the tombs beneath an old French castle where Catharine Valmont (Francoise Blanchard), dead two years as the film begins, is interred. Or she's supposed to be dead. She's not, though, obviously, or not dead dead, and she rises from her coffin and rather brutally takes them out (toxic waste plays a small part in these killings, for no particular reason -- if the implication is that Catharine is revived by this stuff, it's not made at all clear, but anyway I don't believe that's one Rollin was going for). Catharine's history and relationship with Helene (Marina Pierro) is revealed in flashbacks, and essentially the deal is when the two were young girls they made a blood pact, promising that when one of them died, the other would follow fast behind. This didn't happen, Helene is still alive and well, and Catharine is left wondering the castle and the fields that surround it, where she is seen, and photographed, by Barbara Simon (Carina Barone) who is travelling the countryside with her husband Greg (Mike Marshall).

So. Helene and Catharine meet back up, and Helene, with some degree of uncertain eagerness, takes it upon herself to feed Catharine. Catharine needs human blood, or human flesh, or both. The film's original title is La Morte Vivante, which means "living death," so even if you choose to go by that title rather than the Americanized The Living Dead Girl, you still get some Romero color to it all. And this film is quite gory, occasionally in the way Romero had, at that time, recently become famous for. Even so, Catharine seems less like a zombie than a vampire, or vampire/zombie hybrid, and the relationship between Catharine and Helene prefigures, a little bit, the one between Eli and Oskar in Let the Right One In. The other side of the Helene/Catharine relationship is what was it exactly before Catharine died (we never find out how she died, by the way)? It seems pretty clear to me that it was a romantic and sexual one, but Rollin is never explicit about that. Which is the other thing about Rollin. I've said this before, but nudity and sex in his films can often function in ways that carry it beyond exploitation. There's a fair amount of nudity in The Living Dead Girl, but none from Marina Pierro, and, it should almost follow, and does here, no sex between Catharine and Helene. So if they are lesbians, they're lesbians just because the characters are lesbians, not for titillation.

Anyhow, the ending of the film is where the fascination really (pun not intended, but also unavoidable) begins. And I don't care to give it away. But the "emotionally incendiary" is just part of what makes the last ten or fifteen minutes of The Living Dead Girl so unusual. The other part is that at one point Rollin very consciously tells his plot to go right out and fuck itself, in a way that might strike some viewers as absurd, but which played to me as an invigorating refusal to be hemmed in by what more narrow-minded individuals would consider the necessities of formula. It's pretty obvious to me at this point that formula didn't interest Rollin at all, but rarely have I seem him say as much with such vigor. And then, yes, that "emotionally incendiary" climax...I'm here to tell you, Tim Lucas ain't wrong. It ends with a howl of despair and loss and blood and meat, and it can't be quickly forgotten.

Two Orphan Vampires - More abstract, weirder, clumsier, shaggier, and occasionally more haunting is this film, which, Tim Lucas's essay informs me, was being prepared shortly after Rollin was diagnosed with kidney failure. He would go on to live another fourteen years, but Two Orphan Vampires is even more death-haunted than The Living Dead Girl, and even more so than the vast majority of films in the genre, which you'd think would have "death-haunted" as its absolute baseline requirement, but oh well. Two Orphan Vampires (which has, by a huge margin, the least amount of nudity of any Rollin film I've seen so far, a point that may seem irrelevant and childish to you, but which I nevertheless find genuinely interesting) stars Isabelle Teboul and Alexandre Pic as Henriette and Louise, two young vampires who are, indeed, orphans, and who are also blind. As the film begins, they are being adopted out of the Catholic orphanage run by kindly nuns by Dr. Dennary (Bernard Charnace), an eye doctor who is intrigued by the enigmatic nature of their vision loss, but whose actions are inspired by his being naturally good-hearted.

What Dennary doesn't realize about these sweet young ladies is that, for one thing, they're vampires, and for another they actually can see, sometimes -- at night, specifically, when they can "see blue," a visual idea that manifests itself through Rollin's camera in about the way you'd expect. But it's at these times that the girls go hunting, and while we see the whole film from their point of view, and while we can even sympathize with Henriette and Louise, Rollin doesn't choose, as so many others would, to portray any of the victims as flippantly unlikable. You don't generally know much about them, but Rollin stages these killings with an eye towards morally unbalancing the viewer -- you might want to like these girls, but you never can quite, and if you think you can then you're fooling yourself. One killing in particular is chilling in its...not casualness, exactly -- it's the one time when the girls actually aren't that casual about what they're doing -- but I suppose its almost Chabrol-like directness. These girls are vampires, but for whatever reason -- the fantasy element of such stories, probably -- when a vampire kills someone it's never thought of as "murder." But this one, this is murder.

None of this gets across what an odd film Two Orphan Vampires really is. The girls travel outside even during the daytime, when they are, in fact, blind, and often they will meet someone, another woman, another horror creature...one time they meet a female werewolf, untransformed at the time, and another time they meet what I guess is a kind of vampire queen, who protects them for a night. This stuff is, as you'd guess and as I've implied, quite odd, and not entirely successful. It's strange enough to be interesting, but not good enough to work. Still, these scenes do fit into the film's overall rambling, plotless vibe, which itself fits into what is at the film's heart.

Which is what? Also odd is how vampire-like Henriette and Louise are -- they have fangs, but the story they relate to each other -- each is the only one the other has to talk to, no matter how kind anyone else is -- is about a never-ending life, or death, or living death, or death in life. They talk about being killed, but they always seem to, eventually, come back. This isn't something we ever witness, but I have no reason to doubt their word. So the film is about the existence of these girls, and their friendship and love (this relationship appears to be platonic), and essential loneliness and need for each other. Occasionally the film can take on the air of your typical French coming of age film, as when Henriette and Louise con their way into buying a bottle of brandy, and we see them giggle as they nervously sip their way through it. That Rollin can make a film that is that, as well as being the bizarre horror film it is on its surface, is quite impressive. More impressive still is Rollin's ability to surprise and thrill this late into his career.

Where Black is the Color, Where None is the Number

So I'm really getting into this Jean Rollin fellow, and Kino Lorber continues to be the best source for his films on DVD and Blu-ray. Recently, they released three of his films -- Requiem for a Vampire, The Demoniacs and The Rape of the Vampire -- on this latter format, and I watched them all. Please for to see below.

Requiem for a Vampire - This film, from 1973, is pretty singular in its weirdness, even after Rollin bails on, or moves on from, the deep craziness of its first two-thirds. It begins with two young women (Marie-Pierre Castel and Mireille Dargent) dressed in clown costumes firing guns at someone or another from a car speeding down a rural French road. Driving the car is a man who will very shortly be killed, leaving the two clown women to fend for themselves (after having, apprently, given their pursuers the slip). The film, also known as Caged Virgins, which is as accurate a title as Requiem for a Vampire, which is to say "pretty accurate," proceeds from there almost silently through a series of odd and spooky encounters, which includes one of the girls being almost buried alive when she falls into an open grave, and on to the point where the girls seek refuge from a general lack of resources inside an old castle. There they meet a woman who is almost a vampire, a woman who is sort of the middle manager of things, three rape-minded men dressed as either aristocrats, in the case of two of them, or a barbarian of some sort in the case of the third, and a full-blown vampire for whom we shall presently be experiencing a requiem. The idea is that he is the last vampire, and in order to propogate his kind he needs to transform these two women, who are virgins, and in the meantime task them with luring victims back to the castle for him and the near-vampire woman to feed on. One of the women, Dargent, takes to the idea more or less willingly, while the other, Castel, is a good deal more reticent -- she ends up storing her chosen victim safely, she hopes, within the castle.

That's the plot, and most of it comes in the film's last chunk. Rollin seems to have disdained dialogue, preferring to function as a strict mood filmmaker. A lot of the imagery inside the castle, when the girls first arrive, is of the Halloween haunted house variety, with skeletons wearing clothes and chains on walls holding decaying corpses, and even a green glow when the vampire first arrives and spreads his cape. The "What is that about?" nature of the clown costumes (which are shed as quickly as possible, in favor, at first, of nothing, and then of what I guess would have to count as regular clothes) initially gives the film the kind of dreamy tone Rollin so liked to imbue his films with, so it's sort of surprising that he bothers to offer an explanation for them later. Surprising and disappointing, to a degree. Also somewhat disappointing is the sudden rush of plot, but here Rollin is actually heading somewhere rather interesting. There are a few things about Rollin that are unique to this kind of film, and that make their way into Requiem for a Vampire. Among them is that the lesbian scenes, of which he was a great supporter, aren't really there just to be there. Castel and Dargent's naked lounging may at first seem like gratuitous skin, and it certainly is that, but as the film goes along you realize that they were lounging naked not because it's the 1970s and these chicks'll do whatever, man, but because they actually have a relationship together, which becomes important. Important also is the film's title, its original title, and it's fascinating the way Rollin brings an air of melancholy to the film's climax. It's not melancholy in the way vampire stories tend to be melancholy, because a vampire's life is so very difficult, but because the vampire in this film is the last, the end. We may not like vampires much, you and I, but he's not only the last of a breed, as it were, but of a culture, which is maybe perhaps part of what Rollin's on about here. Not specific vampires, but the Gothic tradition in horror was not to be popular, or even practiced, for very much longer, by 1973, and Rollin might well have sensed the end. In Requiem for a Vampire, he may have been preparing to say goodbye to the kinds of films he loved. Of course, as it happens, the end was not quite so imminent as all that.

The Demoniacs - In this film from 1974, set in an 18th or 19th or something century port town, Rollin at first appears set to continue his mostly dialogue-free ways, but only after introducing his four villains (John Rico, Willy Braque, Paul Bisciglia, and Joelle Couer as the shockingly perverse Tina) by showing us their faces and describing the rough personalities of each and the roles they play in their group of “wreckers,” that is a team of scoundrels who lure ships with fake signals to crash on the rocky shoreline, after which point the wreckers commence plundering and raping and killing any survivors. The Demoniacs begins with such an assault. Following an unseen shipwreck, the wreckers descend upon the casks and boxes and crates that wash up on shore, as well as the two young women (Lieva Lone and Patricia Patricia Hermenier) who emerge, ghostly and dressed all in white, from the surf. The brutality that follows is, as I’ve implied, nearly wordless (because what needs to be said?) and lasts for several minutes. The violence is broken up by shots of Joelle Couer parading nude or rutting (the only word for it) with John Rico. However, through what can only be described as clumsiness on the part of the two lower-rung wreckers, the girls escape, and make their way to a haunted island where their thirst for revenge will be indulged by a man who may actually be the devil.

The Demoniacs has a wonderful folkloric feel to it, and turns out to be relatively talky (it’s also the nakedest Rollin film I’ve watched so far, and that’s really saying something). The events on the haunted island, which involve a helpful clown and, as I’ve said, maybe the devil, are reasonably bonkers, but they feed into the legends being whispered on the mainland, where the wreckers know that something terrible is heading their way. That terribleness does not come in any ordinary way, and in fact Rollin might well be accused of allowing his film to turn a bit flabby in the final stretch as he chooses to restore his heroes to some kind of humanity, but as a result turns a great deal of set up into a lot of wasted breath. Though I suppose it depends on how you look at it. For people like Rollin and Mario Bava, with whom he has a few things in common, a rigorous adherence to plot, either in terms of coherence or even classic structure, are not especially important. Of the Rollin films I’ve seen, The Demoniacs actually comes the closest to this kind of storytelling, (barring perhaps Fascination, which may not have much plot, but sticks to what it has), but the story finally becomes a meandering tour through the various sights Rollin would like to show you. Ultimately, I don’t really have a problem with this because The Demoniacs concludes on a note of what I’ll have to describe as localized Apocalypse. There’s nothing much good to take away from the water-logged horrors of the ending – even Joelle Couer’s nudity, up to now used as an enticement of an admittedly depraved sort, becomes a symbol of full-on hellishness. But her character always was the siren of the group, and you all know where sirens lead you.

How a film can contain this image and somehow not be ridiculous is a question I'm afraid you'll have to take up with Mr. Rollin

The Rape of the Vampire - And of course, just when I thought Rollin's films couldn't get any more bugfuck, I watch this one, his 1968 feature length debut. Subtitled a "Melodrama in Two Parts," The Rape of the Vampire somehow manages to be at once itself and its completely off-the-rails sequel, the climax of part one seguing into part two without changing scenes but still being a completely different animal. The first half of the film tells the story of a psychiatrist (Bernard Letrou) and his two associates who seek out four women who have secluded themselves in a Gothic manor, where they either are, or simply believe they are, vampires. They are supported, and in fact possibly brainwashed, into this belief by the elderly lord of the manor. The inhabitants of the surrounding village also believe in their vampirism, and rather quickly any naive belief the viewer might have that this will be some quiet mood piece is shattered. The Rape of the Vampire is a film that rather amazingly includes things like gunfights and car chases, but in the film's first story these elements appear as the signal that reason, what little of it that was available, is shattering around the psychiatrist. Not a vampire story in any ordinary sense, this section of the film is already anticipating the horror, and specifically vampire horror, deconstruction of films like George Romero's Martin, while never distancing itself from the Gothic trappings of torch-lit duels at night or tortured maidens in nightgowns. Or, for that matter, death on the rocky beaches of France, the tides washing over fresh corpses, images and ideas Rollin would return to again and again in, for example, well, The Demoniacs, as well as Lips of Blood.

As good, and as interesting, as the first part of The Rape of the Vampire is, however, it's the second part, called "The Vampire Woman," that truly reveals that Rollin was already, with his first film, playing a game far different from everyone else. Utterly bizarre, relentlessly so, the film's second half begins on the aforementioned beach and shifts gears from our piles of bodies from the previous story to the Queen of Vampires (Jacqueline Sieger) and her quest for women recently killed violently, and her clinic run by a doctor (Jean-Loup Phillipe) who has been tasked by this queen to find a cure for vampirism. The story here is so mental that, in his essay about the three films discussed in this post that is included in each of the Kino Lorber discs, no less an expert on this sort thing than Tim Lucas was moved to call the film "baffling." And so it is. But fascinating, too, in the way it continues the subversion of vampire films it began with such relative subtlety earlier. Here, though, vampires as an idea are so thoroughly upended that they might as well not even be vampires -- they could be creatures of any undead sort, so little do they pursue normal vampire interests, nor do they go out of their way to avoid what a vampire might ordinarily want to steer clear from. Eventually, The Rape of the Vampire will become positively Bergmanesque in its imagery, and even in the sound of the words being spoken, by which I mean the tone of voice, and the cure, when it is revealed, and for reasons beyond its spooky similarity to drug use, addiction, and overdose, is a devastating punchline, one that reminds me, just now as I write this, and in the most ancillary way imaginable, of Isaac Asimov's "The Obvious Factor," one of his Black Widower mystery stories. In both the Asimov story and The Rape of the Vampire, which otherwise resemble each other not in the least, reason, or a version of it in the case of Rollin's film, is restored through simple logic. The reception of this logic is one of the many differences between the two works -- in "The Obvious Factor," it is greeted with a kind of smug delight (not a knock on the Asimov story, which is the kind of mystery story that can only be written once, and so it has been, by Asimov, so that one is now completely off the table), while in The Rape of the Vampire the characters regard it with humble dismay. Of course that's the answer. What a nightmare.

Anemia

The Adventures of Tintin and War Horse (d. Steven Spielberg) - As an unrepentant fan of the films of Steven Spielberg, I was chagrined by my own reaction to the announcement of two new Spielberg films hitting theaters in 2011, to be released a mere week apart. That reaction was basically "Oh, well, okay," because, for all the time I've spent defending Spielberg to his wrong-headed detractors, I had to admit that neither The Advenutres of Tintin nor War Horse particularly, on the surface, turned my crank. The former, based on the the beloved comic book by Herge', was one of those new "motion capture" dealies, a technology I'm ambivalent about, and leaning towards weary over, and War Horse, about a horse that passes from owner to owner during World War I, appeared to show the director wallowing in all his worst tendencies, of which only his most wrong-headed defenders could deny he has many.

So. Plus you have to remember that either one, whichever came first would be Spielberg's first film since Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, from 2008, a film that is not -- and almost physically could not be -- as bad as so many claimed, but is still not very good. And I couldn't work up any enthusiasm. Therefore, it follows (maybe not for you, but it does for me) that I skipped both The Adventures of Tintin and War Horse in the theaters. I've since caught up with both, however, and I'm here to tell you that I was only half right.

The Adventures of Tintin is pretty spectacular, I must say, one of Spielberg's best and most inventive action films in a very long time. Those raised on the comic books have bemoaned the loss of Herge's clean and clear drawings in favor of what they might regard as clutter and havoc, but as clutter and havoc go, it's still awfully clean and clear. It's a film that steadfastly refuses to let up, but at no point was I unsure of where I stood, of what was happening, or why. And the action itself is completely thrilling, from an an escape from a ship full of gun-wielding thugs into the middle of the not-necessarily-less-dangerous ocean, to a "one take" (not really sure what that means when motion capture is at play, but regardless) chase after various pieces of paper caught in the wind, or being snatched from one character by another, and back again, to the climactic crane fight (the big metal ones, not the birds), all crunching steel and shattering glass...well, it's all pretty breathless. And a lot of damn fun, to boot, and you don't even have to make excuses for the motion capture. It makes a lot of this possible, and given that unlike most uses of this technology on this scale, Spielberg is adapting drawings, not attempting to represent reality, so the character designs and their broadness of motion and action are entirely fitting.

War Horse, though, is about what I expected it to be. It's not quite as tiresome as I'd feared, I have to say, but it's still a big, epic, sentimental animal movie about a brave horse and the brave boy who volunteers to fight in World War I so that he can find the horse he raised and bring him home safely. Now, I'm not a total grump, I'm not entirely immune to this sort of thing, but I have my limits, and when a climactic scene -- this is going to count as a Spoiler Warning -- can be paraphrased like this:

"That horse needs to be put down. It's for its own good."

"Wait, a young blind boy is whistling! Everybody stand aside! I have no good reason to believe these two things are related, but let's not shoot the horse until we see how this pans out."

...then something's wrong somewhere. Specifically, Spielberg is either too devoted to the idea of replicating a certain time-honored, or shopworn, romanticism that he allows his imagination to run thin, or he's too willing to fall back on that romanticism as an excuse. That thinness of imagination affects his approach to combat and violence in War Horse, which is necessarily toned down from his usual approach, this being what might be called a Family Movie. And I'm entirely on board with that, and looked forward to seeing what he did with those restrictions. In some cases, as when the execution of two deserters is obscured by the slow arc of a windmill blade, it works a treat, but on a larger scale the results can be unintentionally close to slapstick. When Spielberg cuts from a wave of British cavalry to a wall of blazing German machine guns, and then to a shot of riderless horses racing over the German line, I was reminded of all those cartoons where a horse, or some other similar animal, suddenly realizes his rider has gone missing, only to find him stuck in the low branches of a tree. I also thought that those horses were damn good at dodging hundreds of bullets fired by dozens of machine guns.

The damn thing just didn't work. The episodic nature of War Horse keeps things moving at a better pace than I would have thought possible, and there are some acting highlights along the way -- Emily Watson, Peter Mullan, and Niels Arestrup were all very strong -- and I wanted the horse to live as much as the next guy. But if accepting the danger the horse is facing means I have to accept that, for instance, a German tank would go out of its way to kill a random horse for no particular reason, other than the well-known hatred Germans have for horses...well, okay, I guess now that I say it out loud it makes sense.

Fascination and Lips of Blood (d. Jean Rollin) – Not long ago, I received an e-mail from a guy who said they’d discovered this blog while searching for articles about the horror writer T. E. D. Klein. He’d found my post about Klein, and, in reading other posts by me on similar topics, had learned about Robert Aickman, and was inspired to read Aickman, whose writing he now loves. That’s a very nice thing to hear, but what I found interesting about it was that someone could be deep enough into horror literature to know Klein, but to not have even heard about Aickman. It’s certainly not inexplicable, of course – I knew about Klein before I knew about Aickman, myself – but it did make me wonder about my own gaps, in a “we don’t know what we don’t know” kind of way.

Which brings me to Jean Rollin, a filmmaker I’d never even heard of before reading a description of a scene, or an image, from Rollin’s Fascination in Steve Erickson’s film-mad novel Zeroville a few years back. Needing a good running start as I do, it took me until this past Monday night to finally get around to watching Fascination, my first Rollin, and then Lips of Blood the next night, and by then I’d learned, somewhat to my surprise, that he made the kind of 1970s horror films that were almost as much about the quantity, and quality, of the nudity contained therein as anything else. Or, sort of, anyway. Fascination is a terrific movie, and doesn’t need me or anyone else to make excuses for it. It’s set in Old Timey Days, and the plot, briefly, is a thief (Jean-Marie Lemaire) steals from some other thieves and is caught, but before they can kill him he escapes and ends up on the grounds of a beautiful old French manor, in which he finds only two young women, Eva (Brigitte Lahaie) and Elisabeth (Franca Mai), who claim to be servants. Everyone else is away, they assure him, but will be returning before too long. In the meantime, what Bernie Bernbaum once termed “bed artistry” is engaged in by Eva and the thief, and Eva and Elisabeth, with the promise of more to follow.

Except we know there’s something much more sinister going on, as Rollin’s eerie prologue, involving society women hanging around what appears to be a slaughterhouse, drinking blood from wine glasses, suggests. The vampirism that we might assume is set to pop at any moment turns out to be not quite that, but something altogether, somehow, more skeevy and unnerving. You might say it amounts to the same thing, but it feels quite a bit more unhinged to me. In any case, it all pays off beautifully, with Rollin somehow making the introduction of a coven of nude women wearing only brightly colored, but entirely see-through, sort of...smocks, I guess, not seem gratuitous. Or if it is, it’s not only that. In fact, I’d say that for all the seemingly endless attempts by writers and filmmakers to marry horror to eroticism, Rollin seems to be one of the very few to really know what he’s on about. There’s a dark thrill to it all, and to bring Freud into it, which is often the default mode in these kinds of things, is to simplify it to the point of pointlessness. Its visceral in a thoughtful way, but not an academic one. Plus, Brigitte Lahaie. Homina homina homina.

Lips of Blood is an almost, but not quite, altogether different kettle of fish. The naked ladies with the flowy pink smocks are in this, too – different ladies, but the effect is much the same – and there’s still a man wandering into worlds he’d be better off, probably, keeping clear of. But Lips of Blood is much more bizarre. As a plot, Lips of Blood has a bit more of a hook to it, a nice, old-fashioned piece of horror weirdness involving our hero (Jean-Loup Phillipe) seeing a landscape photograph used for an advertisement, on display at a party. He’s immediately absorbed by it, certain that he’s been to that place before, as a child, and met a young girl there, next to whom he slept all night. This sets him off on a quest to find out where that place is so he can go back and maybe see the girl again. Things go hinky almost right away, as the photographer who took the picture informs him that she was paid a great deal of money not to reveal that information to anyone, and as he begins to see the girl (Annie Belle) appear, and disappear, several times along his journey. The photographer, who ends up dead shortly after agreeing to give him the information she was supposed to keep to herself, only adds to his dismay.

A couple things about Lips of Blood: 1), if it contains the gratuitous-but-also-not brand of nudity featured in Fascination, it also has a fair bit of the straight-up gratuitous kind, which, as someone who would not consider himself a prude, I’m pretty much okay with, but watching this after the intriguing balance struck by Fascination, I was concerned that that film was maybe a one-off, and that from here on out a certain cheapness, in terms of straight filmmaking, would start to creep in and pollute the well a little bit. That sounds more judgmental than I’d like, but I mean it strictly in terms of Very Good Movies vs. Pretty Good Movies. However, 2) as Lips of Blood unspools it becomes, as a horror film, much more mysterious and ethereal. A bit goofy, too, as the man with the gun on the train can attest, but Rollin closes his film with a massacre and a kind of floating, spiritual doom. There’s a little bit of Roger Corman’s Poe films in this ending, even more so than in the seemingly more Corman-esque Fascination. By the end of it, Lips of Blood, a film set in the year it was made, is concerned with matters far more ancient than Fascination, with its period trappings. None of which is meant to imply that I don’t think Fascination is a better film. I remember reading someone exalt one particular film over another particular film by saying it was “more complete.” I’m not really sure what that means, but whatever it means I bet it applies here. But if Lips of Blood isn’t better, it is more interesting.

So, Grapes of Death next, probably. Or The Night of the Hunted.