Scarecrow-88 Two "teenage virgins", Marie & Michelle(Marie-Pierre Castel & Mireille Dargent)have escaped from I'm guessing a reform school. Their driver was killed as another car's inhabitants(I'm guessing the police)blast out their vehicle's back window with gunfire. Hiding away from those hunting them and burning the car(..and dead driver), Marie and Michelle hide out temporarily in a cemetery(..in one weird scene, Michelle trips into a freshly dug grave knocking herself out on the casket while a member of the grounds almost buries her alive!)until their safety is assured. There's seemingly abandoned greystone ruins of a château near the cemetery surrounded by massive trees and an idyllic countryside for which Marie and Michelle decide to hopefully inhabit for the time being. What they don't expect is a female vampiress, Erica(Dominique Toussaint)who has a barbaric entourage of hunters as servants who rush them. When the girls try to flee, bats hanging from tree branches "hypnotise" them enabling Erica to capture them as she plans for Michelle and Marie to meet her master, the last full male vampire whose powers have weakened over the ages. Erica isn't completely a vampire despite her fangs and blood-drinking..she can still tolerate sunlight and isn't a true member of the undead. Her blood sister Louise(Louise Dhour)is even less a vampiress for she doesn't have the luxury of fangs. Louise is the type of vampire sister who hands down the orders from her lord and plays the piano; she's also the one who watches her master's casket. Michelle and Marie are introduced to the last male vampire as he bites them from behind. Michelle and Marie try to escape the next day but run around in circles it seems..despite following different paths hoping to escape, they always return to the château with a skull at the door. Louise informs Michelle and Marie that they are to be initiated into the vampire fraternity having received the "divine bite of the vampire", but first must lose their virginity to him. Louise points out that you can not be a virginal vampire. They wish for Michelle and Marie, before their initiation, to lure male prey to the château by nightfall. Marie meets, falls in love with, and loses her virginity to a man walking the cemetery one day named Frederick. She later tries to save him from being a victim of Erica's. The older man who Michelle lures(thanks to a striptease & drawing him by giving chase)isn't so lucky. Michelle must find out where Marie has hidden Frederick for he threatens the vampire whereabouts and identity(..this leads to a whipping torture as Marie hangs with stripes down her back and Michelle, devastated for what she has done, with tears staining her cheeks). Will Marie be seduced into the way of the vampires? Will Marie give up her love's hiding place(where he is hidden is certainly an interesting place)? Will the last male vampire's legacy live on through his blood daughters?If you are familiar with Rollin, this film carries his various signatures..beautiful french countryside, atmospheric cemetery, Gothic greystoned ruins of a castle where rows of steps are endless and halls echo, skulls make their mark throughout showing up near tombstones, places marking the vampires' lair, etc., limited dialogue and back story, fluid camera-work capturing the entire landscape squeezing every bit of ambiance available, an abundance of nudity and sex, and a jazzy organ score in the background. The version I watched had gratuitous extended scenes of sexual molestation as Erica's barbaric servants rape and abuse various enslaved nubile females, chained within a pit, as she takes a few bites for good measure. This might serve as titillation for many(there's also a scene where Marie and Michelle grope each other), but I yawned through most of this. I thought Dominique Toussaint was striking(she seemed to have such a presence that leaps from the screen)as Erica, wearing a clinging gold dress and purple cape that swings open..the way she opens her cape might be theatrical to many, but I lapped it up(..*woof*..*woof*). She really looks like something out of a comic book..now I do not mean this as an insult, far from it. I think Erica just looks incredible and Dominique just runs with it, easily overshadowing the weary last male vampire who is in the film mere minutes and looks as if his powers were weakened. This film's strength is some truly stunning uses of the château(the way Rollin shoots overhead as Marie and Michelle try to flee Erika, and when Michelle leads the horny old man on a wild goose chase through halls & up steps, are really thrilling set-pieces), the vibrant green and red colors Rollin uses in the last male vampire's mausoleum, the cemetery bright blue skyline at dawn as Marie(believing she had lost her love to the last male vampire forever)woefully walks across with various crosses in the distance, and the windy green covering the cemetery grounds as Marie and Michelle comb the area in search of refuge from a shady past. My favorite scene(other than when Erica appears)is when Marie and Michelle hear organ play from within the château cathedral believing cloaked monks await inside..only to find skeletons behind those very cloaks and Louise, the vampiress playing the tune they heard. Don't expect a satisfying story or a quickened pace..Rollin isn't the type of filmmaker that worries about moving anything too fast. I don't even think we see the first vampire until thirty minutes into the film and the sexual sequences in the bondage chamber go on forever it seems.

MetalMiike Initially, this incredibly simplistic film may look like a step backwards for Rollin after the highly experimental Rape of the Vampire and the highly strange The Nude Vampire but it could also be argued that it is, in fact a precursor to the dream-like The Iron Rose. It looks like it was shot over a long weekend and, indeed, would perhaps have worked better as a short film. The plot, what there is of it, concerns two girls (dressed as clowns) on the run after killing a would-be rapist. After their getaway driver is killed, they stumble upon a castle in which resides the last of the vampires and his servants. Aside form the odd diversion (one of the girls meets a man in a graveyard and offers him his virginity so as to remain free of the vampire's curse) that's about it.Upon first viewing the film, there is very little to get out of it aside from the odd bit of S+M imagery (chained up naked girls attacked by bats, a kinky lesbian whipping scene) but ones whole perspective changes when one discovers that Rollin wrote it in ONE NIGHT. For those unfamiliar with Rollin, this would simply re-enforce the notion that what they are watching is complete crap but for those familiar with his work, it provides and excellent insight into the man's unconscious. Rollin's work is all about repressed sexual desire; his films are essentially adolescent fantasies, which is why many of them feel like fairy tales; they disguise their true meaning through the circumstances under which the images are presented. This is a true relic of the 60's/70's, a time in which Western culture was going through its own adolescence. Perhaps part of the problem with cinema today is that it has none of the innocence of that sexually uncertain time.

Lee Eisenberg I would imagine that few Americans can identify Jean Rollin. But Portland's video/DVD store Movie Madness has a whole shelf of his movies. From what I saw in "Vierges et vampires" (aka "Requiem for a Vampire"), I would derive that his movies involve gore and full-scale erotica. Specifically, this one has two hot teenage girls running away from school and ending up in a castle inhabited by sex-obsessed vampires. By sex-obsessed, I mean that there's a scene where the vampires torture some prisoners, and much of the whole sequence consists of shots of women's naked bodies.So, since I haven't seen any of Rollin's other movies, I'll have to assume that his movies consist of this...and I LIKE IT! As far as I'm concerned, this is what horror movies were meant to be! If there's any guiltier pleasure, I'm not sure that I want to know about it. Specifically, this is the sort of movie that I'd like to experience.So, I recommend this movie. If, having not seen this movie, you thought that you knew to what extent the French are into love and sexuality, then you ain't seen nothing yet! Because I must repeat: those girls were REALLY hot!

suspiria10 Two lovely ladies are on the run (why? I'm not sure} and find shelter in a rather Gothic, sprawling castle in the French countryside. They soon run into the lord of the manor, an aged vampire looking to use their luscious, virgin (yeah, right!) bodies as vessels for his progeny. A lot of flesh, a bit of bondage and a touch of lesbianism punctuate another erotic horror masterpiece from French filmmaker Jean Rollin.It's somewhat hard to recommend a Rollin film to the uninitiated. Often surreal but almost always beautiful, thanks in part to the lovely ladies frequently in the buff and the photography pf the locations. Rollin clearly has an eye for beauty. However the plots and story lines are often very slight. Heck there is hardly any dialogue in the first thirty to forty minutes of 'Requiem'. But man does he have an eye.