Bonehead-XL "Lips of Blood" has a great narrative hook. Frederic vaguely remembers a dreamy encounter he had as a child. While staying at an old castle (Of course), he spent the night sleeping in the arms of a beautiful woman. Upon spying a photograph of the castle, the memory comes rushing back. He becomes obsessed with finding the girl, especially since she starts appearing to him in visions. A trip to an old tomb doesn't yield anything but coffins full of bats… Or so it would appear. Vampire girls, dressed in colorful see-through shawls (Of course!), emerge from the crypt and begin to feed across France. A man attempts to assassinate Frederic. It becomes obvious there's a conspiracy preventing him from finding the old building and reuniting with the girl of his dreams.Narratively, the film is more focused then usual. Pacing-wise, it's still a mess. Scenes drag into each other. The long opening sequence is so soft that the next scene, a fairly explicit nude modeling session, throws you off. Moments of the vampires attacking people seem unrelated to Fredric's quest. A scene of a woman leading him into a room with promises of revealing the castle's location doesn't have much to do with the story. The vamps help him out at least once but we never find out why. I like the mustachioed assassin, even if it's a bit out of place in this horror love story, but that storyline isn't resolved either. Generally speaking, the subplot about the legion of vampire girls never meshes with the main storyline. It seems like a blatant excuse for Rollin to insert his fetishes into the film. I mean, more so then usual.The worst part? There aren't that many memorable visuals. A shadow of a statue of a bull is the only striking pure image I can remember. Some memorable scenes arise. A pair of nurses pulling down their surgical masks to reveal fangs is darkly funny. The vampire girls weigh a victim down in chains before kicking her up a flight of stairs. Hilariously, during a particularly windy night, a purple dress billows up into a girl's face. I doubt that was intentional.When the focus is on the love story and the conspiracy, that's when it works. Jean-Loup Phillippe gives an excellent performance as Frederic, especially in a scene where he pleads with the girl's spectre to prove she's real. Annie Briand is enchantingly beautiful as the strange girl at the story's center. It's easy to see why she would inspire such obsession. Natalie Perrey as Frederic's mother delivers exposition but her performance makes it go down easy. The scene of the arrant vampire girls being exterminated is nicely brutal, such as two girls being impaled on the same stake, but also obviously elegiac. Rollin loves his monsters and hates to see them slaughtered.That monster love shines through in the lengthy epilogue. Following an obvious slight-of-hand, the protagonist is reunited with his love. They frolic on the director's favorite beach (Of course!!) and make love, before she bites him, turning him into a vampire. The nude lovers float off, where they live in vampirey bliss happily ever after. Aww. "Lips of Blood" is a muddled affair even if Rollin's strength for romantic sincerity and some strong actors keep it afloat.

chaos-rampant Not every filmmaker can work from emptiness, it's one of the toughest lines to toe the thread between sleep and lucid dreaming. It's all the difference in the world.Tarkovsky accomplished several times, Resnais in Marienbad, Herzog in Heart of Glass. Lately Lynch and perhaps Weeresethakul. Not to set the bar of comparisons inordinately high of course, but precisely because Rollin does not at all compare, say, with Hammer, even though they've worked from similarly disreputable material, or Bava who looked to simply paint with light, whereas Rollin aims to dream; so exactly because he's a little farther out from what he's often grouped together with, I feel that even when he fails he fails where most horror filmmakers haven't dared to.Rollin has repeatedly tried and been only moderately successful, when he structures with a single-pointed concentration around a sense of place, but the effort alone places him higher than most horror filmmakers in my estimation. He dares to play dumb enough so that we can perhaps dream for a while; so his plots fail to make sense when we'd like them to, where the storytelling coherence we have devised to chronicle our world would demand it, but it's a strategy of deliberate abstraction. He breaks logic so that we may flow on subconscious winds. From our end as viewers, we need to stay lucid enough to make it work.The story here is about the quest for a subconscious image from childhood; it involves a seaside castle and a young woman, a repressed memory about these. For most of the film we wander towards it, starting with a scene inside a movie theater where our protagonist gets up and follows the woman through a door. The door is by the stage, giving the impression that he disappears inside the screen. But that is the thing about emptiness, why Rollin cannot seem to sustain what he sets out to do. It is not a matter of stillness or immobility, but concentrated mind. It is a vital process. It needs to flow from a center.So far only Fascination has really worked for me, where he weaved a story about nonsense that we could safely discard around a sense of place we couldn't. The result was a captivating aura, itself a simple thing but hard to accomplish. This is equally dreamy but scattershot. Just the same, Rollin means what he does. Look at the ending here and tell me the man is just not truly, hopelessly romantic in his morbid way. He means well, you should watch him in spite of everything that works against him.

suspiria56 The films of Jean Rollin will be an enigma to many who have not experiencing his work, yet for those who allow themselves to be taken elsewhere by his cinema it can prove a highly rewarding experience. The viewer is often taken to places that invoke bewilderment, unease, and sexual desire. By no means Rollin's best film, Levres De Sang (aka. Lips of Blood) is a beautifully lyrical, slow burner that has the uncanny ability to take the viewer into an ethereal, dream like world, where the erotic and the neurotic are intertwined.The story of a photographer, upon seeing a poster, is reminded of his childhood where a mysterious female vampire. However, this being Rollin, do not expect a traditional vampire movie (although his vampire films are arguably the most faithful to the Gothic aura and mythology of the vampire). Mostly dialogue free, with the acting catatonic, this only adds a surreal edge to the proceedings. And no vampire films have a greater sense of eroticism; it is easily to succumb to female vampires whenever they are on screen. For the uninitiated, approach with caution. But this is a fine example of the originality and unique approach which is to be found in 1970s European sex and horror cinema. Of which, Jean Rollin was undoubtedly the master.

HumanoidOfFlesh "Lips of Blood" is actually one of my favourite films made by Jean Rollin.The film was shot in just three weeks and basically it's a love story filled with lesbian vampires and a lot of female nudity.The film is relatively slow-paced,but offers plenty of wonderful Gothic atmosphere and a tiny bit of gore.The four lesbian vampires are incredibly hot.The story may be boring for some,but I still think that this film is better than most of the crap being put out today.Unfortunately "Lips of Blood" failed to generate much interest at the box office,so Rollin moved toward hard core pornography.Anyway,if you like Jean Rollin's erotic vampire movies give this one a look.Recommended!