1960s Foreign Horror Part Six

OBRAS MAESTRAS DEL TERROR

(1960)

Dir - Enrique Carreras

Overall: MEH

This Argentine version of American International Pictures' Edgar Allan Poe anthology movie Tales of Terror has director Enrique Carreras stepping in for Roger Corman and Narciso Ibáñez Menta filling the Vincent Price role by appearing in all three stories as well as penning the screenplay.  Obras Maestras del Terror, (Masterworks of Terror), itself was a television series that had previously run for three seasons, this full-length version being the theatrical tie-in that would also be re-released five years later in English speaking markets as Master of Horror, where it was dubbed and had the final "Tell-Tale Heart" segment omitted.  Though it is a fun showcase for Menta and features a few nice, diabolical touches along the way, it does not provide much of an interesting variation on the often-filmed source material.  The most severe issue is the two-hour running time as each installment could easily afford to lose at least fifteen to even twenty minutes, something that would obviously make for a tighter viewing experience.  Since such unnecessary padding is detrimental, perhaps partaking of the American version and then the last five minutes of the aforementioned "Tell-Tale Heart" will suffice.

 

LE VIOL DU VAMPIRE

(1968)

Dir - Jean Rollin

Overall: GOOD

Jean Rollin's debut Le Viol du Vampire, (The Rape of the Vampire, The Queen of the Vampires), established many of the fantastique motifs that he would continue to use throughout his career.  Originally commissioned as a short film by an owner of several local Paris theaters, it was expanded into a feature which explains it being broken up into two different sections and involving a barrage of characters who become increasingly difficult to keep track of.  The movie is anything but coherent, yet abstract storytelling is just one of the elements to most of Rollin's work, this one being his only in black and white as well as featuring a particularly fitting avant-garde musical score.  In addition to that, the usual components of beautiful women, evocative, on location scenery, minimal production qualities, and unprofessional actors whose awkward performances sit right at home with the surreal nature of everything else are also present.  The length is problematic at times yet despite the small budget, many of Rollin's later films would utilize an even smaller one which makes the results here somewhat ambitious, though not at all in a bad way.

EMBRUJADA

(1969)

Dir - Armando Bo

Overall: MEH

 

Depending on the source, Argentine sexploitation couple Armando Bo and Isabel Sarli's Embrujada, (Bewitched), was either released sometime in 1969 or 1976 and is one of the duo's numerous cinematic collaborations where Sarli is enormously naked throughout.  As per the course, the emphasis is on then boundary-pushing sleaze.  The synopsis has a kidnapped native woman who is made the wife of a brutal lumberyard owner that cannot get an erection, ergo sending her on a quest to have an Aryan, male baby with any man on earth that will lustfully satisfy here.  This bizarre set-up is treated as such throughout since Bo's no-budget filmmaking abilities mean that he is at the mercy of stock footage from one of his earlier movies, plus the editing is hilariously arbitrary and the look of a folkloric demon called Pombero is nothing more than a guy in wool clothes wearing a garish Halloween mask who is always shown in broad daylight to make him even less threatening.  Sarli's purpose seems to be as mouthwatering eye-candy as her character's lone personality trait is "horny", plus a significant portion of the running time is dedicated to gratuitous montages, almost all of which involve her in her birthday suit.  There is also a "blink and you'll miss it" homosexual scene that is never explained which could have been thrown in merely to rustle some conservative feathers.  In any event, this is a strange, Z-rent bit of Euro-trash if ever there was one.

2000s Jean Rollin

DRACULA'S FIANCÉE

(2002)

Overall: GOOD

A few years after his long-awaited return to form with 1997's Les deux orphelines vampires, Jean Rollin's next archetypal fantastique film Dracula's Fiancée, (La fiancée de Dracula), went into production, continuing his singular, throwback trajectory.  During the shooting, Rollin was unfortunately undergoing kidney disease treatment and was regularly off-set, which led to occasional collaborator Jean-Noël Delamarre taking over some of the location filming.  Speaking of locations, Rollin's favorite locales including the Dieppe beach and Seine-et-Marne château are present, plus Brigitte Lahaie, Nathalie Perry, and Catherine Castel return in supporting roles.  Even with Rollin's absentee health issues in tow, it still has the look and feel of the filmmaker's more prominent works from decades past.  A fairy tale type logic is maintained where seemingly arbitrary rules apply to an endless amount of rituals involving manic nuns, evil sorceresses, a wicked, love-stricken dwarf, an ogress, and a Van Helsing type character plus sidekick all seemingly playing some sort of role in freeing, (or holding captive), Count Dracula himself who has been promised a willing bride.

LA NUIT DES HORLOGES

(2007)

Overall: GOOD

Though it was his penultimate work in cinema, Jean Rollin's La nuit des horloges, (The Night of the Clocks, Night Clocks), acts much more as a proper swan song for the filmmaker.  Not only does it feature archival footage from most if not all of his previous entries in the fantastique genre as well as several of his favorite actors, but the story itself blurs the lines with what happens to an artist and their creations once they are no longer alive to create.  Characters both new and old play real life variations of themselves, floating in and out of a variety of scenes while former pornographic actress turned writer/director Ovidie searches for the presumably deceased Rollin, (here given the name Michel Jean).  The meta angle is an interesting one, serving as a quasi-autobiographical musing on a career's worth of bizarre, nostalgic, erotic, violent, and captivating images, presented in the ethereal, dreamlike, and purposely slow-paced fashion that Rollin exclusively works in.  On the one hand, the repetitive dialog, meandering nature of the plot, and clearly minuscule production values can hardly be seen as faults since such things are unmistakable in all of the director's movies, but outside of it being a part greatest hits compilation, it does not quite conjure up the same majestic, macabre weirdness of the films that it homages to.  Still, it is definitely worth seeing for Rollin fans who are clearly the only people that this was made for in the first place.

LE MASQUE DE LA MÉDUSE

(2009)

Overall: MEH

Jean Rollin officially closed out his career with the typically strange, barely budgeted fantastique film Le Masque de la Méduse, (The Mask of Medusa).  An hour long cut of it was originally screened at the Cinémathèque de Toulouse film institute before Rollin shot an additional twenty-minutes and then re-edited the whole into its finished, two-part form.  It mostly takes place at the Theatre du Grande Guignol though the famed Père Lachaise Cemetery where Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, George Méliès, and Sarah Bernhardt are buried is also used in the latter segment.  The story itself is a simplified reworking of the Gorgon Greek mythology tale with Rollin's wife Simone in the title role, delivering a particularly, (yet surely deliberately), unemotive performance.  While this has the same comatose pacing that is always present in Rollin's work, it is all done on such a minor scale and with the most limited of production values that no bewitching atmosphere is accomplished.  Instead, it is just heavily talky and stagnant, with a strange enough tone that makes it difficult to tell if the several moments of goofiness are there on purpose or acciental.  Some of what is going on here is fascinating and it is certainly a treat that we got one last cinematic full-length out of Rollin before he respectfully checked out, but this really only functions as a minor curiosity.

1990s Foreign Horror Part Five

SINGAPORE SLING: THE MAN WHO LOVED A CORPSE

(1990)

Dir - Nikos Nikolaidis

Overall: MEH

 

A truly perplexing and off-putting avant-garde film from Nikos Nikolaidis, Singapore Sling: The Man Who Loved a Corpse, (Singapore Sling: O Ánthropos pou Agápise éna Ptóma), combines black humor and perverse sexuality with film noir, all in a relentlessly pretentious manner.  Also there is a mummy who has sex with his maybe daughter because weird.  Nikolaidis claims that his original intention was to make an exploitative comedy with Ancient Greek tragedy elements and knowing this, it does rather adhere to such aesthetics even if audiences may find it more unapologeticly ostentatious than funny.  The film is edited in a completely impenetrable manner where random music plays whenever it wants, scenes are constantly interrupting themselves with flashbacks or flash-forwards, and characters speak directly to the camera while in the middle of conversations with each other.  Not that bypassing such tactics would have made the movie any less confusing since it all only chalks up to one-hundred and eleven minutes of clearly insane people doing clearly insane things.  It is wonderfully photographed though and stubbornly sticks to its arthouse spoofing guns so if one can turn their brains off and just bask in the lunacy of it all, a rewarding experience may very well be had.

 

JACK BE NIMBLE

(1993)

Dir - Garth Maxwell

Overall: MEH

 

While most of its curious, supernatural ideas are half-baked, New Zealand writer/director Garth Maxwell's Jack Be Nimble makes it a primary focus to present an adequately heightened look at severe childhood trauma and separation suffered by abandoned siblings.  Maxwell's ambitious seem genuinely sincere as things are played straight, bloody, and dark.  The performances are all quite strong with Alexis Arquette and Sarah Smuts-Kennedy carrying most of the weight in the leads, handling such heavy material that requires a persistent amount of intensity which both actors thankfully keep from ever becoming problematically camped-up.  Story-wise, it feels a bit rushed at times and besides Arquette and Kennedy, every other character is underwritten to varying degrees.  There is a creepy atmosphere that intensifies in the third act where overlapping, screaming voices psychically bombard inside of Kennedy's head, all while the keyboard music blares and the images become more surreal.  The results are a tad too messy to persistently work, but this is disturbing, macabre stuff that is admirably and interestingly approached at least.

 

LES DEUX ORPHELINES VAMPIRES

(1997)

Dir - Jean Rollin

Overall: MEH

 

A return to form for filmmaker Jean Rollin, Les deux orphelines vampires, (The Two Orphan Vampires), is his first vampire movie in nearly two decades and it does amazingly seem to have stepped out of a bygone era.  This is largely due to the fact that Rollin's films are inherently singular in the first place, even during the 1970s when he was turning out strange, deliberately paced, no-budget arthouse horror that was persistently unlike the work of any of his peers.  This fits very much at home then with La Vampire Nue, Requiem pour un Vampire, La Rose de fer, Lèvres de Sang, or even La Nuit des Traquées in its depiction of two undead "twins" who spend large parts of time wandering around chateaus and cemeteries.  Even the most patient of Rollin's admires can admit to having a hard time staying persistently engaged with his low-key, zoned-out aesthetic and at over a hundred minutes in length, this one very much could use a tighter edit to approach some semblance of user friendliness.  Problematic meandering aside, it also has a jaunty, cheap keyboard score that occasionally disrupts the mood.  At least Rollin finds a way to narratively explain the day for night scenes though, which dominate the proceedings.

1980s Jean Rollin

THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTED

(1980)

Overall: GOOD

One of Jean Rollin's most beautiful if still largely impenetrable films, La Nuit des Traquées, (The Night of the Hunted), was made on virtually nothing within a nine day shooting schedule.  Rollin had done a number of adult films at the time and growing bored with such work, he convinced producer Lionel Wallmann to let him make a quasi-horror movie with pornographic actors, once again including the always alluring Brigitte Lahaie.  The result is an incredibly lethargic-paced meditation, relatively low on both nudity and gore but overwhelming with comatose-inducing atmosphere.  As one of Rollin's cinematic trademarks had always been quiet, hypnotic, and very slow moving scenes, a film about victims of an environmental accident whose brain cells deteriorate to the point of becoming zombie-like, human vegetables is perfectly fitting.  Music and dialog are used equally sparingly and switching to a contemporary, urban setting instead of dilapidated chateaus and graveyards, Rollin's ability to evoke a chilling mood is still unwavering.  While appropriate for the material, the film is still too stagnant to recommend to anyone but the most devout Rollin fans, (ideally ones that are loaded up on caffeine as to stay awake), but its setting and haunting themes of succumbing to mental illness are a welcome departure.

ZOMBIE LAKE

(1981)

Dir - Jean Rollin/Julian de Laserna

Overall: WOOF

 

One of the most boring zombie films ever made was the rushed hack-job Zombie Lake, (Le lac des morts vivants).  A French/Spanish co-production that was originally to be directed by Jesus Franco, (and stars one of his mainstays Howard Vernon), Jean Rollin came in with virtually no notice once Franco had a falling out with the distributor.  With the same basic Nazi zombie premise as Ken Wiederhorn's 1977 film Shock Waves except done on a piss poor budget, the entire production seems noticeably uninspired.  Though its arduous pacing may be obvious due to Rollin being behind the lens, the move in fact has none of the filmmaker's strange, dreamlike style.  It is just atrociously dull.  Stilted dubbing, awful makeup effects, a stagnant plot that frequently stops cold in addition to never picking up momentum in the first place, random, stock music; the whole thing feels like it was pieced together while everyone involved was busy doing something else at the same time.  A topless woman runs into a bar screaming "Lake! Lake!", Rollin makes a small appearance where he appears to be kissed to death by zombies, and another wide-eyed zombie makes friends with a small girl, so there are at least a few chuckles to be found if you can stay awake through everything else.

LA MORTE VIVANTE

(1982)

Overall: MEH

 

Returning to his primary theme of beautiful, aloof women succumbing to vampirism or something, Jean Rollin's La Morte Vivante, (The Living Dead Girl), also ups the gore level considerably.  The very opening scene features the undead, zombie-fied blood fiend of the title, (Françoise Blanchard, working with Rollin for the first time here), poking a man's eyeballs out and slicing another one's throat open with her nails, both in fully-lit, close-up detail.  Later on, a woman gets set on fire and another one gets her stomach torn open so there is plenty of nastiness to be sure.  There are some unfortunately annoying characters present as well with a half-American couple eating up screen time while arguing with each other.  Though nudity is still liberally present, the emphasis is less on eroticism than usual for the filmmaker.  The result is more repulsive at regular instances than haunting, which is a shame in that it still flows sluggishly without consistently creating the right mesmerizing mood.  There are still moments that are strangely enticing though and the ending in particular finds the right balance of eeriness and grotesqueness.  It is just a shame that the rest of the film often fails to live up to such a finale.

1970s Jean Rollin Part Two

REQUIEM FOR A VAMPIRE
(1971)
Overall: MEH

The forth film in a row to involve vampires, naked women, and abandoned ruins and chateaus, Jean Rollin's Requiem for a Vampire, (Requiem pour un Vampire), sufferers too much from the director's customary, lackadaisical pacing to truly stand as one of his better works.  That said, it has plenty of the filmmaker's other wonderful, curious trademarks on display.  There are shots of hands protruding out of the stone walls, robed skeletons standing in a church, bats eating out a woman's vagina, (or something), two women dressed as clowns in a high-speed shoot out, a piano being played outside in the middle of a wooded area, and almost childish visuals with vampires opening up their red capes and revealing their silly, awkward looking fangs.  Rollin was often a fan of fusing some of these campy, horror cliches as well as preposterous dialog with copious amounts of eerie, tranquil scenery, nudity, and a dab or two of nasty violence, making the whole thing that much more odd to behold.  For nearly the first thirty minutes here though, nothing seems to be happening and random sex, rape, and torture scenes slow things down even further later on.  It is still frequently fascinating, just a step or two down from some of his more commendable movies.

DEMONIACS
(1974)
Overall: MEH

Jean Rollin's follow-up to his first non-vampire film The Iron Rose continued in that vein with Demoniacs, (Les Démoniaques).  Wrought with the usual budgetary problems as well as some non-ideal casting choices allegedly, Rollin attempted a fairytale-esque adventure film that appealed to his more youthful exuberance from reading pirate stories and the like when he was a kid.  That mixed with even more nudity and violence than usual.  As with every movie from the director, Demoniacs has a number of surreal, notable moments, the best of which is probably in a pub adorned with Halloween decorations where a mad Captain hallucinates and sees the ghosts of the two young women he may or may not have just killed.  Another steadfast Rollin motif of a woman in clown make-up also shows up and there are more vague, unimportant religious symbolism that further baffles and enthralls in equal measure.  Elsewhere, too much rape and boring sex scenes plod everything down and while the ending makes as much sense as any for a Rollin movie, (meaning none at all), it is still a bit underwhelming.  Not without its merit here and there, Demoniacs' imperfections unfortunately render it a missed opportunity of sorts.

THE GRAPES OF DEATH
(1978)
Overall: MEH

Made before George Romero's Dawn of the Dead dropped, Jean Rollin's quasi-answer to the zombie film was The Grapes of Death, (Les Raisins de la Mort).  While it is an interesting enough take on the sub-genre, (there are no reanimated corpses here, just infected people who lapse in and out of mindlessly violent outbursts), it is structured very much like your typical, apocalyptic zombie film with characters on the run, growing paranoid, and consistently hiding from all of the crazies after them.  The budget is sparse yet effectively utilized, the simple make-up is more pus-like than bloody, and the deserted village and countryside that the movie takes place in elevates the doomsday feel.  Being a Rollin film of course, it drags along at large intervals with only a small handful of set pieces and lots of slowly-walking-around-moments in between.  The conclusion is sadly very weak as well, forcefully undoing the would-be happy ending with an unnecessary and rather dumb final moment of unpleasantness.  Rare for a Rollin movie, there is even some mild social commentary on hand and honestly it is a bit disappointing that Grapes of Death is so straightforward.  The tone may be low-key and the pacing as deliberate as ever, but the dreamlike, truly bizarre aura of most of Rollin's work is far more lacking.  It is a step in a different direction for the filmmaker, but also one that does not play to the man's strengths as much as it should.

1970s Jean Rollin Part One

THE NUDE VAMPIRE
(1970)
Overall: GOOD

Jean Rollin's sophomore effort and first film in color, The Nude Vampire, (La Vampire Nue), is more ambitious than his debut Le Viol du Vampire though still as leisurely absurd as any of his works.  Very common for a Rollin film of course, the pacing is pretty stagnant throughout.  Characters routinely say things like "all will be revealed to you another time" instead of just explaining things when they have the opportune time.  The film pretty much revolves around Rollin's half-brother Olivier looking like a kid who is excited to be in a movie, going from one scene to the next while being told that he will be told what is going on eventually.  It is all nonsense primarily and gets more ridiculous as it goes on, but it is also breathtakingly weird at regular intervals.  Not one but two bizarre, creepy cults partake of standing around in animal masks and hoods, walking about a chateau either naked or in robes while holding candles, plus the Castel twins wear outfits made of glass.  As usual, the very slow presentation and nonexistent interest in telling a clever story can either enhance or hinder the experience depending on the audience member, but it is assuredly a textbook example of Rollin's singular and at the very least unusual, auteur style.

THE IRON ROSE
(1973)
Overall: MEH

Finally breaking the erotic vampire mold, Jean Rollin made his most deliberately placid and inconclusive movie, (saying something), with the exceptionally lethargic The Iron Rose, (La Rose de Fer).  Outside of an early scene at a normal enough wedding reception and a few strange cameos including a clown putting flowers on a grave and Rollin himself as a questionable looking hobo, the film only features two actors and one location, a gargantuan, labyrinth like cemetery in Amiens, France.  A knowing gamble was taken since Rollin himself has gone on record as saying that he knew the movie would be a commercial disaster, but as always, he took his non-existent budget and concocted something truly dreamlike and unapologetically strange.  While the man's dedication to his own eccentric, art-house whims are routinely admirable, so little actually happens in The Iron Rose that it inescapably becomes a chore to sit through after awhile.  Any moments of menace are so subtle that they may in fact not even be there.  It is wholly possible that the viewer could be imagining that the movie is more intricate and creepy than it actually is.  Still, there is sensational beauty to be found here as with most of the director's works.  The opening, (and especially re-occurring), sequences of Françoise Pascal naked on a beach and the camera exploring the vast graveyard at night, (and not shot in day-for-night as many films of the day were), are wondrous to be sure, but it goes a little too far in its ambiguity to maintain one's full attention.

LIPS OF BLOOD
(1975)
Overall: GREAT

The first of Jean Rollin's films that could fairly be called a masterpiece, (at least by erotic, Euro-horror standards), was his return to vampirism in Lips of Blood, (Lèvres de Sang).  Rollin's movies were always deliberately paced, void of any noticeably budget whatsoever, and nonsensical.  Yet at his best, he was able to transcend these would-be shortcomings into something rather hypnotic and enticing.  It also always helped when he was benefited with extraordinary locations to shoot in.  Utilizing both contemporary Paris, graveyards, crypts, abandoned buildings, castles, and villas, Lips of Blood has beautiful scenery in nearly every shot.  Any moment that take place in apartment buildings or standard, boring rooms are shot in such a flat, brightly lit manner, making the dark, bleak shadows of all the truly eye-popping settings that much more visually remarkable.  This is also that very rare Rollin work where the story is downright comprehensible, though he still takes great liberties in having a number of moments remain unexplained by film's end.  The final sequence involving naked people, a coffin, and the rising tide under a gloomy dawn is the kind of highly memorable and strange visual tapestry that the best of art-house horror has to offer.  Rollin would transcend even what he accomplished here in a few later releases, but this unquestionably ranks among his finest.