Search - Requiem for a Vampire on DVD

Rollin curbs his cheeseball tendencies and makes an art film

Robert P. Beveridge | Cleveland, OH | 04/12/2007

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Requiem for a Vampire (Jean Rollin, 1971)

As usual, when you see a Jean Rollin film, you can be relatively sure you're going to get beautiful women and really cheesy effects. What's surprising about this one, however, is how entirely different it is from any other Rollin movie I've seen. And the things that make it different-- the things that seem to have made legions of Rollin fans consider this one of his worst movies-- are the things I think make it the strongest. Legend has it that the producers of the film asked Rollin for a single scene (which should be obvious, if you've seen more than one Rollin film) and let him free to do whatever he wanted with the rest of the movie. As such, he did quite a few things here that he'd never done before, and that he never did again.

The plot: two schoolgirls, Marie (Rollin regular Marie-Pierre Castel) and Michelle (Mirielle D'Argent, another Rollin regular, though she and Castel worked together in only two films-- this and Lips of Blood), find themselves lost in the countryside in clown suits after a high-speed chase and shootout that leaves their accomplice (Paul Bisciglia) dead. While trying to get their bearings, they wander onto the grounds of a chateau inhabited by a family of vampires, led by the enigmatic Last Vampire, who seems to have conflicting ideas on what he wants from the girls.

The first thing that will likely strike you about this movie is the almost total lack of dialogue in its first forty-five minutes. In an essentially silent movie, all you have is the visuals. And what visuals they are. There's some minor, and distracting, attempt to explain later why these two lovely young things are wandering around in clown suits. But who cares? Not Rollin, and certainly not us. They even take them off for a bit and then put them back on. I'm sure there's all kinds of weird psychological stuff going on (especially when Michelle comes close to getting buried alive by the world's least attentive gravedigger during the brief time they're not wearing their clown stuff), but beyond that there's just the simple fact that this makes absolutely no sense-- and Rollin has no intention of having it make sense. But does it have to? In poetry, the most important thing is not the words, but the sound the words make as they run together. Why should it be any different with movies and visuals?

There are also scenes here that achieve something I've never gotten from a Rollin film to date-- they're disturbing. The Last Vampire's thralls are bestial on their good days, and the whole batch keeps a few human women chained up in the basement for releasing of the beasts' tension. It's the scene where Rollin is most Rollin, sexploitation central, but there's more to it than that. It's not so much that it's savage; it's actually quite the opposite. I suppose for some, it will simply have the effect of shattering any sort of suspension of disbelief. I just kept wondering what sort of depraved mind could come up with a scene like this, and then choreograph it so beautifully. It's powerful, in a rough, raw sort of way. Which is always what Jean Rollin is about, really. *** ½
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