Requiem of a Vampire

I realized that I hadn’t written even one Jean Rollin review since Night of the Hunted back in November of 2012. This realization also comes in that my blog has sort of fallen into a rut of mainstream horror and I fail to establish my fondness for Euro-horror (or fantastique, considering Rollin’s French as are his films) and the like. I hope to change this as we head into 2014.
**½

For me, the Requiem style films are attractive to me, mainly because I love how the chateaus are carved out of rock and fashioned by man into something quite magnifique. And of course Rollin has a few human skulls as “décor”.

Basically I think you could create your own back story for the two girls (both dressed in clown makeup) in a car with a male driver trying to evade a pursuing vehicle, engaged in a shootout while moving down the road in the French countryside at high velocity. The man is killed, the two deeply in sorrow, narrowly avoiding the car behind them by getting a slight distance out of their line of sight, pulling off onto a gravel road, coming to a stop, and eventually setting the car on fire after using gasoline as a source for the ignition. A hidden motorcycle in a building is used by them after momentarily getting out of costume, stealing a snack from a nearby food van (one of the girls temporarily gaining the attention of the male salesman while the other raided his vehicle). The motorcycle eventually kicks the bucket leaving the girls to seek refuge in a secluded chateau in some remote countryside. Why were the two cars exchanging gunfire? Did they see something they weren’t supposed to? Had they committed a crime along with those pursuing them, and the partnership ended badly? Was the second car police trying to catch the girls and their male driver? What we learn when asked by one of Lead Vampire's female follower's to the girls who try to flee, caught in the nearby cemetery by the cult, is far from extraordinary: the girls shoot a person who annoys them at a party (!)--which I assume was a costume party--scooting from the premises, hopping in the car with their male friend, with the victim's associates following after them. These absurd details could have been left out with us using our imagination to fill in the back story, but this is what we get so there you have it.

The details prior to the girls finding the chateau seem less important as Rollin shooting the girls in artistic ways in this gothic backdrop. They stumble into a world quite foreign to them and their lives will never quite be the same. I consider Rollin a visual artist little concerned necessarily with character development or scenario as much as place and its history with contemporary characters finding themselves thrust into the location and what might live (the undead) within its environs. There’s Rollin’s taste for the macabre and morbid in how the girls find this funeral chamber with skeletons in robes standing and faced towards a casket with a skull, as candles burn, and a vampiress plays the organ, as if sounding off her own musical dedication, interrupted by outsiders.

 

The girls run afoul of the vampiress and her barbarian ruffian slaves, embarking on ravaging them sexually. The girls shoot towards the vampiress but she is unharmed, not even bleeding from their gunfire. A second vampiress, with a whip, shows up to enforce her command over the men, with the girls rescued from certain rough rape.

I had mentioned that Rollin was a visual filmmaker. Not having the girls (or others that show up during the film) speak for an extensive period of time as if Requiem was almost a silent film, uses what we see to do the talking. Take a small scene very early in the film. Their male “partner” dies with their woe expressed with makeup. They come right towards us, the screen, but are planting a kiss (I assume, it isn’t necessarily shown, but implied) to the man. When they “resurface” backward, we see painted tears on their face telling us how they feel even if their expressions seem apathetic nearly. I never noticed this the first time I watched the film, but I was intensely paying attention to the film for such moments and felt rewarded by them.

Ultimately, I think I return to Rollin every now and then because he produces a different kind of vampire film. If I want Hammer, I will watch Hammer vampire films. I know pretty much what I will get with Hammer, but Rollin throws some unique images and situations at me. I like Rollin primarily for the atmosphere of the locales he was fortunate enough to find and the gothic trappings where his oft-nubile beauties find themselves. Rollin, too, gets the beauties to the chateau (or graveyard, ocean/beach he’s so fond of, etc.) out of these strange openings that seem to indicate a whole other movie altogether we never see. It isn’t about the characters’ past (well the contemporary protagonists) as much as what they confront at the present, often unknowingly entering potential doom scenarios that seem inescapable. What could prepare the girls in Requiem of a Vampire for what they were about to encounter? I could use this question for a number of Rollin’s films.

People hoping for dialogues of consequence should avoid Rollin’s films for the most part. I just never felt exchanges in long periods were important to Rollin. He seemed like the kind of director who wanted volumes spoken in the images and visuals presented on screen. He loved faces and holding the camera on his characters/actors.

I don’t get off on chained naked women getting sexually ravaged by brutes under the service of Lead Vampire and his two female followers. This cult, I’m guessing, take their pick from women who maybe hitchhike or from trips to the nearest location that have female inhabitants. These women are disregarded as fodder to be treated as the predators see fit. These scenes (there’s an absurd moment I found laughable involving a bat located on the vagina of one of the chained girls) are often prolonged and repetitive. I can quite frankly do without them, and I normally simply avoid them altogether because they are meaningless to me. I don’t get aroused by them.

Something else that bothered me besides the weird bats-on-necks-of-the-girls (they look like props glued/taped to their necks) moments are the quick bites of the vampires to mortals that seem to either kill or cause unconsciousness immediately. I just need a bit more realism here. Let’s see them endure the hardship of the bite for a bit like worms writhing on the hook…to me that gives the bites credibility when victims are rendered flaccid.

 Lead Vampire’s female vampire followers can walk about during the day and seem to have no need for sleep yet he is afflicted, later explained to be this way because the process isn’t instant but through stages they are slowly turned. The transformation to full bloodsucker happens over time so advantages for not being a total vampire exist for them while Lead Vampire no longer has that luxury. Eventually they will be in the same position as him, while his diminished powers over the centuries are starting to take their toll on him. He knows the girls are virgins who will carry on his legacy and maintain his line because they are sexually untouched. Lead vampire is the last of his race and he has “spread his malediction” to his small band of followers, with the grand plan to leave the girls in a position to follow in his footsteps long tread.

So we do get exposition, but I never felt like that was as vital to Rollin as what he produces visually and aesthetically. Marie-Pierre Castel laying on her stomach, kicking around her legs in a short skirt next to flowers in the valley of a graveyard of headstones from behind her is a good example as are Castel’s many close-ups face-to-face with fellow co-star, Mireille Dargent, as they look directly into the camera. Rollin loves the face of Dominique Toussaint and her teeth (I was thinking of a rodent-like Nosferatu while watching her emerge for the first time), and features her from time to time. Dominique has this slight smile that indicated to me she quite enjoys being a member of the undead (or close to being a member of the undead). The dungeon (his lighting of it quite a bright hue compared to other parts of the chateau) is quite the locale of choice in this particular film and Rollin isn’t about to let a good cemetery go to waste. The chateau is almost like a labyrinthine relic hewn from stone. I dig one particular escape attempt that keeps bringing the girls back to where they started. It seems as if escape is futile and they’re condemned to an eternal bloodlust unless a good stake and hammer silences them.

 

Of course, sex in a Rollin film is treated as fun and playful, painful and forced, and passionate and intense experiences. The dungeon sequence where girls are held captive against their will, sex is abusive, while each of the virgins have different kinds of sexual encounters; whether sex is a frolic, catch-me-if-you-can scenario or a lengthy embrace where hands caress and bodies close into each other tightly during penetration. The plan is to use the girls to seduce prey into the lair of the vampire. Vampires must survive and if some local guys (or girls) are in the area, these girls can lure them with their feminine wiles into certain death to be drained like cattle. Of course, doing this would to be gradually siphoning off your humanity in exchange for eternal vampirism.

Paul Bisciglia is a rather pitiable centuries-old vampire with quite a bit of fatalism written all over him in how Rollin presents him. He looks every bit the relic his tomb, cemetery, and chateau are. He is so “aged” and tired that by film’s end, even though Dominique and Louise Dhour seem on the verge of securing him a bloodline he needs to continue his legacy, Bisciglia surrenders to time. Because Dominique has turned vampire enough, she must join him to eternal condemnation while Louise watches over their tomb as a guardian (for all time?). I’m not sure if this was meant for comedy or tragedy, but it certainly is different than the way Dracula or other sinister vampires tend to take their dirt nap. He doesn’t necessarily ever look intimidating or savage, while Dominique seems to take all his villainy and runs away with the film, although she is a vampiress of few words but all business (she was seriously considering burying a knife in Castel’s eye while she hung naked with whip stripes all over her body thanks to her own friend, Dargent’s dungeon torture.) And Bisciglia seems so unimportant in the grand scheme of things, he might have five/ten minutes on screen tops. Castel and Dargent are the definite protagonists while Dominique seems to be the dominant antagonist. Louise seems to have an authoritative role and on several occasions stops Dominique from certainly harming the heroines, when it appears she was on the verge of doing so without a hint of resistance. Dominique, though, is a servant to Bisciglia, and obeys him at the end when he commands her to join him in his crypt.

I felt the film gets kind of silly with all the guns going off, and at the very end finally Castel and Dargent finally run out of bullets. The film seems to indicate Castel and Philippe Gasté's Frédéric will succeed in their romance and "love conquers all" build up as they appear to be on the apex of enduring sacrifice to Bisciglia as the forces of darkness are on the cusp of seizing upon them. But, as the opening was, the two heroines remain together. In a surprise Frédéric ditches her after realizing he was nearly dragged into his death when Bisciglia momentarily locked him in the crypt. Dargent, even though she tortured Castel, in the end protects her and the two scurry away with the curse of the bloodsuckers put to rest.

Just a note, this review is based on the English dubbed version released by Redemption, and I think I watched a different version when I reviewed it on my imdb account. I still enjoyed this for the majority, but if the Lead Vampire had been established a little more, I think I would have rated it just a bit higher. The chateau, however, is a thing of beauty and Rollin knew this because every angle possible was utilized to shoot it.