La vampire nue

Ahhhh... the title of the film cheapens it so much.

I watched this largely because the BFI endorsed it and I was looking for a cheap, silly 70s horror, much in the vein of Dario Argento. By and large, that's what I got. Great.

I was however, pleasantly surprised, that it tried to be a bit more than just a slasher/vampire film. There was a story to it but unfortunately, that story was a bit incoherent and ill thought through to really appreciate. It had roots but just, didn't exactly sprout.

A film with potential but in the end, I think they just accepted their place among the vast collection of horror B-Movies of the time.

Worth a watch at 1 in the morning but not a main feature film.

Pierre Radamante (Olivier Rollin) tries to help a beautiful young woman (Caroline Cartier) who is being pursued by people wearing creepy animal masks and brandishing guns. Pierre is unable to save the woman from being shot and captured. He follows the masked people to their headquarters- a club where his father, Georges (Maurice Lemaître), is a member. Pierre sets out to discover what is going on inside, and finds out that his father and his associates are experimenting on the beautiful woman: they believe she is a vampire and that, through her, they will be able to achieve immortality.

Jean Rollin's The Nude Vampire doesn't deliver on its title: she's never actually nude, always draped in one of the director's trademark pieces of coloured chiffon, and she's not even a vampire. What the film does deliver are plenty of seriously strange and surreal sequences, none of which make much sense, but which are so totally bizarre that the film still proves a fairly entertaining experience. The random weirdness includes a woman in a red wig and plastic nipple cones dancing to bongo drums, women with white faces, bindi dots and blue nipples, a pair of twins who dress in identical bizarre outfits, an artist's model who busily fondles her breasts, Georges' bizarre collection of mutilated toy dolls, rituals involving sacks placed over the head, and a suicide cult. But Rollin saves the best for last, the final scene (which takes place on the same beach that is in the majority of his films) involving inter-dimensional mutants who are the next step in human evolution.

The whole film is summed up perfectly by an exchange of dialogue between a couple of Georges' associates: "Do you understand any of this?" says the first guy. "Not really," comes the reply. It makes me suspect that Rollin knew what an incomprehensible mess this really was.

Rollin in his usual mode impresses with place, color, dreamlike reverie. His women are unappealingly scrawny and bland, but his teasing of the cinematic imagination works for me enough to want to step in his ether - his films feel much less constructed than what passes as sensual these days, the night air and architectural walls of the thing always feel real, the texture real.

The film opens with a distraught 'virgin' being followed in dark streets by mysterious masked figures, everything in the film that is of that same somnambulist quality carries resonance and I would not dissuade you from watching. It really is fine in ways that you will seldom see in a horror film and that Kubrick bombastically killed in Eyes Wide Shut (it breathes here).

But damn it all to hell, if he isn't utterly inept as a storyteller and ruins every pleasure of touch. I don't mean that he wants to confound logic, I like that he does. I welcome filmmakers of the sort - Lynch, Ruiz, Zulawski, those who tether you to narrative threads you have much less control of than usual then pull and leave you scudding through the shattered story-parts.

It's quite the opposite with Rollin. Though the world feels real, the interplay of story dynamics is cartoonish at best. Every initially baffling element has to be explained in due time, and each explanation is dumber than a sack of rocks. He is not illogical in the sense that we cannot fathom more than bits of a deeply inscrutable world, quite simply he jots down a coherent story from a few absurd/fantastical elements then gives it to us in conveniently random ways.

In this case, the movie about vampires is a horror show being put on, the vampires are only vampires because we believe they are. This is repeatedly stressed out for us.

The point of all this is apparently the celebration of the rigor and 'purity' of youth, remember those where the Vietnam years, who in Rollin's garbled set of metaphors are equated with a mutant race of immortals.

Rollin's problem is that he is not content to be a perfume master who seduces the senses, he wants to be a bit like the meditating mentor in this film, someone who promises initiation into the 'hidden dimension' of truths so he ends up being as silly.

Bizarre vampire/sex fantasy about rich brat Martin, who stumbles upon secret bourgeois-like society, which conducts secret perverse ceremonies in a mansion rented by his father.

Let me say, this is a prime example of style over substance. While I am sure there is substance here (most of which does not make any sense), that is overshadowed by colorful costumes, strange alien vampires and just an array of unpredictable moments -- many connected in some way to nude women.

Best part of the movie? The chicks falling down the stairs. While one twin takes it pretty seriously, the other one is determined to reach the bottom step, even if she has to keep pushing herself. Sure, it does not look natural, but it got me chuckling a little.

Nude Vampire, The (1970)

** (out of 4)

Strange film from French director Rollin has a young man coming across a nude woman who he witnesses shot dead minutes later. The man decides to investigate, which leads him to a strange scientist doing experiments with blood and a suicide cult. I've seen quite a few Rollin films over the years and this one here just doesn't work. The film doesn't have many brains but it throws in this wild story and it just never really makes any sense. This is one of those low rent films that tries to be a lot smarter than it actually is but for the most part all of this stuff just leads to boredom. The biggest problem with the film is its slow pace, which is the norm for a Rollin picture. Sometimes this slow pace really helps but often times it hurts and that's the case here. The performances really aren't anything special and even though there's quite a bit of nudity, none of it is ever erotic. The cinematography is quite good as is the music score but that's about the only thing this film has going for it.