(1983)
Dir - Alain Robbe-Grillet
Overall: GOOD
The closest that avant-garde, Nouveau Roman filmmaker/author Alian Robbe-Grillet ever got to making a Jean Rollin movie was La Belle captive, (The Beautiful Prisoner). Teasing its hodgepodge of elements in an evocative, incoherent style that is purposely dreamlike, it is part fantastique eroticism, part film noir, and part René Magritte painting come to life. Less profound than it lets on, it more closely represents a series of desperate elements that fuse together at a moments notice the way that nightmares-within-nightmares do. This is not merely an excuse for the nebulous narrative as it provides the movie with an alluring, surrealist objective that works its magic better as the viewer sits back and soaks in its atmosphere and reoccurring series of images and set pieces. This includes Franz Shubert's "Le quinzième quatuor" playing consistently, Cyrielle Clair on a motorcycle, a mysterious château full of probably vampires, a beautiful blonde woman who randomly appears dead on the road or living in a painting, (and is also probably a vampire), plus a beach that is framed in red drapes where Daniel Mesguich is frequently attacked by police officers. In other words, weird stuff.
(1986)
Dir - Grzegorz Warchol
Overall: MEH
An oddity amongst European vampire films and even rarer in that it comes from Poland of all places, I Like Bats, (Lubie nietoperze), is the only theatrically released work from director/co-writer Grzegorz Warchol whose career has primarily been in television and in front of the screen as an actor. Tonally, the movie never lands anywhere and instead stagnates between unnoticeably dry humor and metaphoric undead motifs where Katarzyna Walter's blood-sucking affliction seems to be a stand-in for sexual frustration. A stubborn bachelorette, she seems to prefer killing those who make unwanted advances towards her while simultaneously growing more aggressive as the one man in her life that she fancies is perpetually dismissive of her. At least until he is not, at which point various signs of her vampiric nature seem to disappear. Everyone on screen is more of a caricature than a properly fleshed-out person, making for an eccentric assortment of set pieces where Walter's vampirism could be interpreted as just another off-shoot of mental illness along with every other weirdo that she comes in contact with. The pacing is too slack to propel things properly and the comedy does not land in any conventional sense, but this is also what gives the film its uniqueness.
(1988)
Dir - Mario Andreacchio
Overall: MEH
Working with in a conventional supernatural framework, Australian filmmaker Mario Andreacchio's The Dreaming explores some of the historical brutalization of the country's aborigines, specifically by a group of whale fisherman who massacre a tribe in the mid 19th century. The ghosts of both the indigenous peoples and the villainous whalers frequently appear as apparitions either in waking hallucinations or nightmare sequences, of which there are several throughout the film. While these do provide it with some eerie atmosphere that Andreacchio maintains along with a consistently dour tone, the plot regularly drags without any profound revelations along the way. Apparently the project was troubled in various respects, from initial director Craig Lahiff dropping out, to the FGH production company running into difficulty acquiring funds, to the script being changed from its original and more direct treatment of the sensitive material. Andreacchio had a prolific decade of television work behind him with only one theatrically released movie under his belt at the time, so he alleged that his control over the finished product here was minimal at best. Even with that being the case, it still achieves an decent amount within its real word context even if it is merely bog-standard as a horror movie.
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