rollin

European films have never really felt the obligation to provide audiences with a beginning, middle and end; the sort of cohesive narrative that American audiences, by and large, expect and demand. Working off the newfound freedom of the French New Wave, Jean Rollin’s The Rape of the Vampire started life as a quick commercial cash-in, but was expanded and evolved into an experimental art film with leftover gothic clichés.

As part of the second wave of Rollin titles released by Kino-Lorber under the Redemption label, Rape isn’t really a must-watch for anyone except those who purchased the previous set which repeatedly referenced the film in the original liner notes. It is less a coherent work than a document of Rollin’s education as a filmmaker. The plot - involving a family of vampires, their queen and some unsuspecting visitors - is broken into two parts, neither coalescing into anything conventionally logical. But the director’s fascination with the science behind the supernatural myths and his overarching theme of interspecies (human / vampire) love make their first of several repeat appearances here. Not to mention the director’s penchant for dramatic camera angles and artful composition.

Requiem for a Vampire attaches itself to the loosest of narrative threads: two women on the run stumble into a coven on vampires who use them as bait to lure more victims. The film is cluttered with clumsy soft-core erotica (the overseas title was Caged Virgins), which defuses Rollin’s relatively successful mood of meditative doom.

But once again he gets maximum value from his decrepit real-world settings that no stage or matte painting could duplicate. The abandoned castle in which our heroines are confined has a mood and texture all its own; every staircase, every arch, every brick imbued with a palpable sense of decay. Indeed all of Requiem seems to exist outside of everyday reality, in a world that has already passed on…but lingers like a ghost. It’s Rollin’s celluloid thumbprint.

The Demoniacs has a promising set-up that finds the director working outside of his usual supernatural tropes. A gang of “wreckers” – looters who lure ships onto the rocks then pilfer the washed up goods – come upon two female survivors from their latest escapade. After repeated brutalizations, the women are left for dead. But the wreckers are haunted by visions of their crime and set out to finish the job.

Once again, the film’s exploitation elements overwhelm most of Rollin’s more artistic (and more suggestive) tendencies. The attack scenes go on forever and add up to nothing more than Last House on the Left-style lurid shocks. A last act revenge story with mysterious warlocks and various hippies in clown make-up comes along too late to turn The Demoniacs into anything more than abusive exercise in lost potential.

All three discs feature wonderful hi-def transfers (The Demoniacs, ironically the most recent film, is the weakest of the bunch) and some superlative extras including deleted scenes, interviews, liner notes and (on Rape) Rollin’s early short film work. Although none of the films are quite as interesting as Redemption’s earlier Rollin titles, they make for a particularly fascinating study of one of cinemas most unusual purveyors of the fantastic.