User Reviews

Jean Rollin's first full length movie, "The Rape of the Vampire", doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but it is visually interesting.

It's shot in black and white, and has some interesting images:

An old man is surrounded by female vampires in hooded cloaks. He tries to fight them off weakly with his walking stick, but fails.

The queen of the vampires (I assume), a young black lady, has a string of blood run down her mouth in extreme close up travel in different directions, probably through running the footage backwards and forwards in alternate takes and then layering them.

A guy who looks like one of the Oasis brothers driving his Triumph pick up truck up to another car, climbing out mid-drive and climbing onto the roof of the other car, gaining entrance for a little blood suckage.

Not sure why it was called "The Rape of the Vampire". Couldn't remember any rape or even any sex. There are quite a few women walking around with breasts hanging out and wearing see through clothing, however.

All up I would've preferred this movie to make sense. I like visually arresting images, but find it more powerful when these images are in service of a plot.

Le Viol du Vampire was the first film directed by Jean Rollin and is a short film with added footage to make it a complete feature. It's two parts are The Rape of the Vampire and The Queen of the Vampires. It was commissioned by French retailer Jean Lavie, owner of a network of small theatres who needed a short vampire film to play before the 1940 American film Dead Men Walk, which he had bought the rights to and was planning to rebroadcast.

Rollin had only worked on short films and documentaries, but he was excited to work on this film/. With a budget of 200,000 francs, he started making his fantasy film which would be influenced by American adventure serials. The filming, other than the beach scene, was all at an abandoned Paris house called Château de Gressy.

Debuting on May 27, 1968, the film was lucky - maybe - to play to big audiences who were in the midst of strikes and riots and needed entertainment. Lavie's theaters had it and as they sat through his dream-like film, they weren't happy.

Rollin told KinoEye, "Le Viol was a terrible scandal here in Paris. People were really mad when they saw it. In Pigalle, they threw things at the screen. The principal reason was that nobody could understand the story." It would go unreleased on video until 2000.

Four sisters - including model Ursule Pauly and exotic dancer Nicole Romain - believe that they are vampires, making them all fear the daylight and the crucifix, as well as be very suggestable to the old man who orders them to kill and also likes to casually grope them and also be slaves to the idol in the forest who speaks directly to them.

Three people from the big city - Thomas, Brigitte and Marc - have come to cure them of this insanity, believing the villagers have driven them mad. The old man, sure that he will lose his power over them, orders them to kill the outsiders and then unleashes the village on everyone. Thomas begs one of the sisters to prove that she is a vampire and is stunned to learn that she really is, just in time for Marc to kill everyone as he has been driven mad by the death of Brigitte.

The second part of the story involves the queen of th vampires as she attempts to escape her curse and Thomas and Brigitte coming back to life after drinking the blood of the old man. Of course, this being a Rollin movie, a woman is whipped on the beach and everyone ends up dying rather than giving in to their thirst for blood.

Rollin improvised most of the story because he lost the script on the third day of production. Just imagine how wild this man gets when he has no plan if his planned films seem so odd. He'd continue his obsession with vampires, lesbians, old cemeteries and eroticism. This is the DNA that runs through so many of his films with several moments recaptured and reshot later.

A very muddled, incoherent story, hard to follow, dumb ending. People who are not vampires return from being dead, vampires are killed with a gun (mowed down with a machine gun at the end), daylight does not bother them, no one gets killed with a stake in the heart...more like a cult trying to act like vampires. And the "Queen" vampire is ridiculous. There is no well defined "hero" to cheer for. Just a conglomeration of people with no one to really take the lead. Lots of nudity which is apparently what Jean Rollin was depending on to attract viewers. Supposedly Rollin lost the script three days into the movie and improvised from there - and it shows. The first part about the four girls who believe they are vampires shows promise, but three are quickly killed off. What may have been a good psychological thriller was lost. The second part is just all over the place with no cohesiveness. If you want a good story, pass this one up.

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.

A psychoanalyst tries to cure the ills of four young women believing themselves to be vampires from centuries ago. It seems they have been manipulated into this type of thinking thanks to an old man with a cane. The old man builds up animosity in a mob of villagers against the young women, and the psychoanalyst's friends, a couple named Marc & Brigitte pay the ultimate price getting caught within the violence of the attack. Soon the psychoanalyst realizes that in fact they were vampires, and this Queen has control over them. The old man was supposed to kill the three mortals who were interfering with her "initiation process". The Queen also has a doctor, against his will, working within a hospital attempting to find a cure/antidote for their undead affliction..the doctor will attempt to betray the Queen with the psychoanalyst and his vampiress lover's help. But, the Queen plans to have a "blood wedding" betrothing her doctor with his mortal fiancé, turned vampiress so that he'd work on the antidote.

Well, this is the synopsis I tried to derive from the film director Rollin put together into two melodramas. I thought the first segment of Rollin's theatrical French vampire film, was rather surreal, but somewhat easier to follow. There were some very beautifully shot sequences using the allure of the vampire women, their decadent candle-lit home and the countryside(..and beach nearby)I think which show Rollin's talent at capturing the visual image. I think MANY will find his sacrificing coherent story-telling(..and lack of acting talent)for capturing surreal and bizarre imagery a bit difficult to swallow. I'll be the first to admit that I often voiced to myself, "Huh?!" & "What the..?!" during this entire low-budget production. I was often quite bewildered at many moments and character behavior in this film. I truly felt that Rollin had these images planted in his brain and put them to celluloid, not worrying too much about whether they fit into any type of true narrative or not. I think he cast people who fit a certain type of image regardless of whether or not they had a remote shred of talent. I found myself personally in awe at certain shots(..like the amazing "death march" of Brigitte, walking across the vast space of unfarmed fertile soil towards the end of the first part of the vampire tales told by Rollin, or the four vampire women with candelabra's in hand walking in unison together throughout their home;and the beach-front with the long row of logs which spring forth from the ocean for which Rollin would use repeatedly in other films afterward), while befuddled at other scenes(such as the naked blind vampire reaching for a possible groom in the ocean with those who tricked her into doing this gone from the area, or the same blind woman feeding the dead Brigitte food, talking to her as if she were an infant). The actress who plays the Queen just has a field day in the role. She reinforces dutifully the joy of being the leader of her vampire cult, by either grinning widely, exploiting her fangs, laughing uproariously, or flamboyantly accepting her title ordering her slaves to do this or that under her command with quite the authority. This cult is in many ways operated as a totalitarian dictatorship, with her people robotically obeying each request. It's easy to see why she's eventually fall to even as small an uprising as the doc and Marc(..enraged at what the Queen does to Brigitte, after her corpse is stolen by a faux funeral procession, in an inspired set-piece from Rollin;from a distance this looks like the typical Catholic family or mourners and pall bearers, until Rollin closes his camera in showing that they have fangs and the cross of Christ they are carrying is upside down)because she's too full of herself and the organization built by her hand. Still, I think this will appeal to the Rollin faithful, while other fans of vampire Gothic chillers will be at their remote control eject button dying of boredom. Rollin has talent, but tells his films in a certain way which will alienate some, and please others.

This is French film director Jean Rollin's first feature film. It was released at a time of local political unrest, and was one of only a few films available. As such, it drew large audiences who were often angry and scathing at the unconventional nature of the story-telling.

A lot of the back-story is initially conveyed by narration. The four sisters who are convinced they are vampires are suitably seductive and other-worldly, and the three who travel from Paris to 'cure' them of their perceived illness are, by contrast, very ordinary. With the exception of Jean-Loup Philippe (as Dr Samsky, strangely uncredited), no professional actors were used for budgetary reasons.

Typical Rollin flourishes are here from the outset: it takes less than three minutes for a young topless girl to be seduced, for example. In a scene where the character of Brigitte (Solange Pradel) is stumbling across an open field, there are glimpses of the real world - society, industry - in the distance, but always out of reach, always on the periphery. The events are firmly rooted in a heightened reality, cocooned almost by the unreality of the world of the vampires. This is a theme prevalent in many Rollin pictures.

Denying a Rollin film colour is stripping it of one of his most defining hallmarks, but monochrome nevertheless gives his usual flair for imagery starker, more desolate tones far removed from the comparative 'comfort' of his love for rich palettes. The dilapidated buildings look colder, the skeleton trees in the woodland look starker. It isn't until act two (the film was originally intended to be a short, but a second chapter was added so that it could be released as a full-length film) that we see the first glimpses of 'Rollin beach' (Pourville-lès-Dieppe) which would feature in many future productions.

It is this location in particular that Rollin favoured as it left a haunting impression on him as a child, and that eagerness to lend a child's view impression on his projects is what makes them so appealing to fans of 'personal' films. The filming here always takes place in the cold months, under grey, heavy skies - in black and white, it looks very barren indeed. A perfect location for the arrival of the vampire queen (Jacqueline Sieger). Sieger's acting is very theatrical, but there is no denying she brings an extreme and exotic nature to her character that sets her apart from the others.

Yvon Géraud and François Tusques's chaotic jazzy/violin soundtrack is used to both work for and against the unsettling mood: 'against' because it seems so inappropriate, and 'for' because that very jarring quality makes even straightforward scenes unnerving.

The vampire fangs are achieved more successfully here than in probably any other Rollin film. More subtle than usual, they are located on the teeth outside the incisors.

The titles of the two chapters are 'The Rape of the Vampire' and 'The Vampire Woman/Queen of the Vampires'.