Jean Rollin's premier feature is, unsurprisingly, highly abstract. It started out as a thirty-minute short before the director added an additional forty minutes. It starts out as straight-forward as he ever is. Four sisters live in an abandoned mansion and believe themselves to be vampires. One is blind, convinced a villager gouged her eyes with a pitchfork. The house is surrounded by crucifixes and the sisters sometimes take orders from a goofy-faced scarecrow who is also an old man? Someone bowls on a beach. A trio of college students appear and try to convince the sisters they are not, in fact, vampires. This goes badly for everyone. There's roving rioters and a guy with a hunch and a messed-up face.
Part two: All the characters that aren't dead yet are on a beach. Some of them will be dead soon. The vampire queen appears. She has a trio of minions, a bearded guy, a guy in a white suit, and a girl in go-go boots. All three are annoying. The girlfriend of one of the students is now a vampire and she's very conflicted about this. The queen is secretly running a mental hospital. The guy who runs the hospital is looking for a cure for vampirism. The queen and her followers gather on a theatre stage to initiate the girl into the vampire lifestyle. There's a giant paper bat. Chaos breaks out. The vampires revolt against their queen. She drinks the cure and dies. Two people wall themselves up in a basement forever. A guy walks down the street, holding a dead girl in his arms, bemoaning the lack of innocence in the world. The end? Okay, it doesn't make much sense. The main reason to stick around is the images. The Gothic château is atmospheric. I like the idea of the blind girl who, after realizing she isn't actually blind, looses her eyes anyway. There's a wonderful sequence of the student trying to psychoanalyze the girl while the camera whirls around them. A scene of one of the vampires standing on top of the mansion, pleading with her invisible lord, sticks out.
The film looses a lot of momentum in the second half. A shot of two straight-jacket bound characters writhing, two giant gum-ball-machine-like receptacles full of blood standing next to them, is goofy. The vampire queen is odd. The film can't decide if she's meant to be the villain or not. Why she wants to cure vampirism is never explained.
"Rape of the Vampire" is claptrap, though occasionally interesting. Rollin's images don't burn as much in black-and-white as they do in color. His complete abandonment of narrative isn't as freeing as it should be. Either way, he's an amazingly consistent filmmaker when it comes to the content of his films. There's lots of nudity, even a little sadomasochism. Vampires, beaches, old buildings, casual lesbianism, it's all here. I wish I had enjoyed it more.
Part two: All the characters that aren't dead yet are on a beach. Some of them will be dead soon. The vampire queen appears. She has a trio of minions, a bearded guy, a guy in a white suit, and a girl in go-go boots. All three are annoying. The girlfriend of one of the students is now a vampire and she's very conflicted about this. The queen is secretly running a mental hospital. The guy who runs the hospital is looking for a cure for vampirism. The queen and her followers gather on a theatre stage to initiate the girl into the vampire lifestyle. There's a giant paper bat. Chaos breaks out. The vampires revolt against their queen. She drinks the cure and dies. Two people wall themselves up in a basement forever. A guy walks down the street, holding a dead girl in his arms, bemoaning the lack of innocence in the world. The end? Okay, it doesn't make much sense. The main reason to stick around is the images. The Gothic château is atmospheric. I like the idea of the blind girl who, after realizing she isn't actually blind, looses her eyes anyway. There's a wonderful sequence of the student trying to psychoanalyze the girl while the camera whirls around them. A scene of one of the vampires standing on top of the mansion, pleading with her invisible lord, sticks out.
The film looses a lot of momentum in the second half. A shot of two straight-jacket bound characters writhing, two giant gum-ball-machine-like receptacles full of blood standing next to them, is goofy. The vampire queen is odd. The film can't decide if she's meant to be the villain or not. Why she wants to cure vampirism is never explained.
"Rape of the Vampire" is claptrap, though occasionally interesting. Rollin's images don't burn as much in black-and-white as they do in color. His complete abandonment of narrative isn't as freeing as it should be. Either way, he's an amazingly consistent filmmaker when it comes to the content of his films. There's lots of nudity, even a little sadomasochism. Vampires, beaches, old buildings, casual lesbianism, it's all here. I wish I had enjoyed it more.