Tag Archives: Fantastique

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CAPSULE: LIPS OF BLOOD (1975)

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Lèvres de sang

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Jean-Loup Philippe, Annie Bell (as Annie Brilland), Natalie Perrey, ,

PLOT: Sparked by a castle he sees on a poster, a man has visions of a long-forgotten girl he fell in love with as a boy; mysterious forces try to stop him from finding the locale in the photograph, while a vampire coven helps him from afar.

Still from Lips of Blood (1975)


WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Slow, atmospheric, with vampires in see-through nighties; Lips of Blood seems a little strange to the ordinary horror fan, but by the surreal standards Jean Rollin set for himself, it’s a bit blasé.

COMMENTS: For a movie about the living dead, Lips of Blood is lifeless. For a supposedly erotic movie, most of the time it just lies there. Only Rollin’s trademark dreamy cinematography and a few bold images save this action-and-suspense-free horror from being a complete bore. The scenario sets up a mystery that is not very mysterious, and posits a timeless romance in which we feel only a theoretical involvement. The movie is peppered with poorly scripted moments that don’t come across so much as absurd as simply awkward. For example, when protagonist Frédéric tracks down the photographer who snapped the photo of the castle he sees in his visions, she just happens to be photographing a nude woman masturbating (in a surprisingly explicit moment). When he asks the photographer, herself a beautiful woman, for the location of the mysterious château, she promises to tell him later at a midnight rendezvous, strips naked, and gives him a long wet kiss! Not only is this whole diversion a shameless device to shoehorn in two more nude scenes, it actually damages Frédéric’s character, since he’s supposed to be pining for the mysterious dream girl with whom he has a deep psychic connection, not fooling around with nude models. In a more exploitative movie this brand of brazen sleaze would be entertainingly incongruous, but in a film with serious ambitions as a moody psychological horror, it’s a misstep. The intended eroticism is somewhat better Continue reading CAPSULE: LIPS OF BLOOD (1975) →

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: THE NUDE VAMPIRE [LA VAMPIRE NUE] (1970)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Olivier Rollin (as Oliver Martin), Maurice Lemaître, Caroline Cartier, Ursule Pauly,  (as Cathy Tricot), (as Pony Tricot),

PLOT: A young man discovers his father has kidnapped a vampire and is studying her in hopes of learning the secret of immortality.

Still from The Nude Vampire (La Vampire Nue) (1970)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: As we explained in our review of Shiver of the Vampires, we’re expecting to add one of Jean Rollin’s surreal erotic vampire films to the List (though we’re open to the possibility of more than one making it). We want to consider all of the director’s major horror works first, however, before picking the best movie to represent Rollin’s arty and irrational vampire vision. 1973’s Shiver showed a notable improvement in Rollins’ technical filmmaking skills, but Nude, with its suicide cult and multi-dimensional twist ending, holds a slight edge as being the more delirious film. Compared to Shiver, Nude is amateur and raw, but this may be a case where worse is better—or at least, weirder.

COMMENTS: The Nude Vampire opens with a scene of a hooded woman stripped naked in a laboratory by other hooded figures; they take a sample of her blood. Next we find ourselves following a woman slinking through oddly deserted Paris streets in a sheer orange negligee. She’s carefully and quietly followed by men wearing animal masks: a chicken, a bull, some sort of cross between a frog and an insect, and a lavender stag with enormous, impractical horns rising from his head. She meets a strange man outside the Metro and touches his face; together they flee the masked cultists, until the stag-man catches up with her and shoots her on a bridge. Oh, and this entire 8 minute introductory sequence contains no dialogue, just atonal free jazz explorations, first from a wailing baritone sax and then from a screeching violin.

If you’re not at least a little intrigued by that opening, well then, you may be browsing the wrong site. Nude tantalizingly rides the fine line between sense (the plot points do connect from one to the next) and nonsense (the entire premise of a suicide cult kidnapping a mutant transdimensional vampire is preposterous). Some scenes are exquisitely haunting: the stag-man standing on cobblestone streets, the slow torchlit march of the undead. Other scenes are staged with an embarrassing amateurism, as when a woman committing suicide fails to react on time to a badly dubbed gunshot to her own temple; or, when two miniskirted women are killed after a third waves a torch in their general direction, causing them to roll themselves down a flight of stairs (flashing their white panties as they work their way around a bend in the staircase) in a way that defies the physics of murder.

From moment to moment the movie could be categorized as either a pretentious student art film or a bad b-movie fever dream (scenes where topless dancers wearing avant-garde pasties gyrate before businessmen weave both strands into one variegated thread). The result of these competing elements is an ambiguous style that makes the distinction between “good” and “bad” irrelevant. Moments of brilliance and flubs are both subsumed into the atmosphere of general weirdness. There’s always something new popping up on screen to raise your eyebrows, like the sexy twin assistants whose favored uniforms are scale mail miniskirts with mobiles covering their breasts, a nude model who goes into a spontaneous interpretative dance, and a suddenly sci-fi ending that might remind you of Phantasm (1979). You’ll sympathize with the minor character who, near the end of the movie, asks the rhetorical question “do you understand any of this?” Rollin’s films failed financially in their day because they proved too pretentious for general horror fans and too exploitative for art-house patrons, but today they hit the sweet spot for cult movie enthusiasts who crave utter unpredictability in their scare flicks.

Although it’s not chaste by any stretch, there is less sex and nudity in this production than would show up going forward in Rollin’s oeuvre. In the interest of truth in advertising, the movie should have been titled The Vampire in the See-through Nightie.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a strange work of conspiracy, family rebellion, and innocence imprisoned, both a vampire film and a strange science fiction fantasy…”–Sean Axmaker, Parallax View (Rollin retrospective)

The Nude Vampire (US Limited Edition) [4K UHD]

The Nude Vampire (US Limited Edition) [4K UHD]
  • The Nude Vampire (US Limited Edition)
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List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: SHIVER OF THE VAMPIRES [LE FRISSON DES VAMPIRES] (1971)

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AKA Strange Things Happen at Night

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Sandra Julien, Jean-Marie Durand, Dominique,  (as Marie-Pierre Tricot), Kuelan Herce, Jacques Robiolles,

PLOT: A honeymooning couple stops at a creepy castle to visit the bride’s distant cousins, but find their hosts have been turned into vampires.

Still from Shiver of the Vampires (1971)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: The films of Jean Rollin come with a reputation/warning: their mix of artistry and exploitation isn’t for everyone, and they’re all variations on the same idea. The director’s formula is thick Gothic atmosphere, beautiful visuals, mild surrealism, nude female vampires, and an indifference to rational plotting. In terms of making the List, what this suggests is that one Rollin movie might be appointed to represent the director’s entire canon; but, is Shiver the chosen one? We’ll have to see them all to decide for sure.

COMMENTS: Plotheads need not apply to a Jean Rollin movie. Shiver of the Vampires does have a story, but it’s thin and generic, full of the usual staples of the vampire genre: coffins, stakes through the heart, crumbling castles, crucifixes. Rollin approaches this film more like a painter than like a storyteller, and you have to engage with the film as if you’re looking at an art exhibit rather than listening to a ghost story. Certain startling imagery jumps out at you by design—the vampire emerging from the grandfather clock, the goldfish bowl containing a skull, the deadly spike bra—but the decadent backgrounds are just as appealing to the eye. It’s the kind of film where curvaceous maidens in diaphanous gowns walk through dusty corridors carrying candelabras, and there’s always mist wafting across the tombstones at night. There’s ample nudity—the women of Shivers doff their duds at the slightest excuse—but it’s shot with an artist’s rather than a voyeur’s eye for the female form.

Otherwise, however, the sexuality of vampirism isn’t presented with much subtlety; a female vamp is dispatched in a phallic staking ritual, and when nude vampires are exposed to sunlight they writhe in a torment that looks remarkably like orgasm. With liberal use of red gels, aquamarine backlights, and pigmented fogs, the color schemes are brilliantly unreal (proving the Eurohorror tradition of crazed chromatism well predates 1977’s Suspiria). A prog-rock guitar, drum and bass trio dither ecstatically over the action; the electrified score contrasts with the Gothic atmosphere, but it works well to ground the otherwise timeless tale in its contemporary era. There are also unidentifiable, animalistic howls that show up on the soundtrack at strategic points. A pair of nameless “bourgeois vampires” who bow and scrape, finish each other’s sentences, and lecture on the worship of Isis adds further oddness to an already strange story.

Shiver is partly a tribute to and partly a parody of bloodsucker conventions, but the film’s overall tone is hard to pin down, except to say that it’s detached and dreamlike. The human victims’ reactions to their predicament are dazed and out of sync with reality, as if they’re drugged or hypnotized. Isle appears not at all terrified when a strange woman emerges from a grandfather clock in her room (and her modest attempt to cover her bare bosom is woefully inadequate).  After the groom witnesses a vampiric ritual he returns to the conjugal chamber but, rather than rousing his bride to flee, strokes her naked sleeping body. Terror transforms into lust quickly inside Shiver‘s hermetic dream. For decades, Rollins’ slow-paced, arty, irrational musings on the vampire myth have frustrated horror fans looking for old-fashioned bloodletting, but they are subtly strange artifacts that reflect the unique preoccupations of their creator. These fetishistic documents are ultimately of more interest to fans of neo-surrealism than of horror.

The French title, Le Frisson des Vampires, does literally translate as “Shiver of the Vampires,” but “frisson” has a secondary connotation of “thrill” (like the pleasant spine tingles provided a good horror movie shock). Rollins’ two previous features had more salacious titles: Le Viol du Vampire (Rape of the Vampire) (1968) and La Vampire Nue (The Nude Vampire) (1970).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… [a] vexing piece of psychedelic nonsense…”–Robert Firsching, Rovi

Capsules

CAPSULE: HORROR RISES FROM THE TOMB [EL ESPANTO SURGE DE LA TUMBA] (1973)

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DIRECTED BY: Carlos Aured

FEATURING:

PLOT: The head of a medieval warlock possesses the bodies of young people staying at an isolated country estate, turning some into zombies and causing them to kill each other.

Still from Horror Rises from the Tomb (1973)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Horror Rises is a worthwhile, but not quite exemplary, illustration of the tendency of 1970s Eurotrashy fantastique horror to elevate atmosphere and effect over sense and logic. Made out of equal parts camp, decadence, and incoherence, it’s a decent choice for a midnight viewing some evening when you don’t want to think too hard while getting some pre-bedtime chills.

COMMENTS: Most of the plot developments in Horror Rises from the Tomb need to be prefaced with the phrase, “for unclear reasons…”  When invited to a seance with a medium, swinging playboy Hugo suggests they contact an ancestor of his who was hanged for practicing witchcraft (and vampirisim and lycanthropy), then decapitated so his head and body could be laid in separate graves to prevent him from rising from the tomb.  The same warlock ghost has been haunting Hugo’s artist pal, dripping blood from his severed head on his canvases.  After successfully contacting the spirit, Hugo, the painter and their girlfriends travel to Hugo’s isolated country estate to go digging for the head but are waylaid by bandits, then rescued by vigilantes who execute the criminals on the spot.  Upon arriving the foursome hires village locals to dig up the head, or buried treasure, whichever they find first.  Halfway through the movie, after the cast is mostly dead or possessed, the caretaker’s daughter remembers that her father hid a magic talisman that would protect them from any evil spirits that would rise from the nearby tomb in a well.  Besides possession, the warlock also creates a mini-army of walking corpses, and when daylight comes Hugo goes to dredge up their corpses from the river (where he dumped them earlier—for unclear reasons) and burn the bodies, even though he already incinerated them the night before.  And so it goes. The storytelling is jumpy—characters are killed off before you even realize who they are—and awkward editing exacerbates the problem.  According to legend, star Naschy took anywhere between two days to a week to write the script, and it’s easy to believe.   You go into every story segment presuming it’s not going to make sense, and you’re surprised when, on reflection, there’s a hidden logic to some development.  Besides writing the script, Naschy is also credited as playing three roles (the warlock and Hugo are two of them, but somehow I missed the third one). Horror Rises gets by on atmosphere—beautiful, misty Spanish scenery; gorgeous doomed women in gauzy nightgowns; floating heads; zombies; Paul Naschy flinging his black cape about and keeping his bushy arched eyebrows flying at full mast.  There’s also a screechy organ score that is irritating but effective in keeping you on the edge.  The decadent exploitation, in combination with the disjointed storytelling and jittery editing, produces a comic-nightmarish effect typical of 1970s Eruohorrors; it’s a style that can become addictive if you give yourself over to it wholeheartedly.

The version of Horror Rises from the Tomb reviewed here is the edited, full frame version, likely compiled for television broadcasts, that’s commonly found in multiple-movie bargain packs.   This edition cuts out the abundant nudity and most of the gore (including, reportedly, heart-eating) and runs 10-15 minutes shorter than the uncut film.  The frequent edits to produce a TV-friendly, PG-rated product likely increase the incoherence factor, but given the movie’s edited in the purely expository scenes, I don’t believe the complete version makes significantly more sense.  The out of print but widely available BCI/Eclipse DVD contains both cuts of the film, along with a third “clothed” version intended for European distribution that substitutes alternate takes for some of the nude scenes but keeps the blood and guts intact.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…there was no denying the strange, unsettling otherness of this film as I watched it in a dark room, illuminated only by my portable black-and-white TV set.”–Troy Guinn, Eccentric Cinema (remembering a 1970s TV broadcast)

Canonically Weird (The List)

67. SUSPIRIA (1977)

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“For Suspiria I was inspired by… everything that German Expressionism means: dreams, provocations, unreality, and psychoanalysis.”–Dario Argento

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DIRECTED BY: Dario Argento

FEATURING: , Joan Bennet, Allida Valli, Stefania Casini

PLOT: Suzy, an American ballet student, is accepted to a German dance academy, but when she arrives there one stormy night she is denied entrance and watches as a young woman flees the school and runs into the forest. The next day she returns and is admitted to the academy with apologies, but she soon falls ill and becomes too weak to practice with the other students. After a series of bizarre occurrences and disappearances, Suzy becomes convinced that the faculty and staff of the academy are not who they pretend to be.

Still from Suspiria (1977)

BACKGROUND:

  • Suspiria (concerning the “Mother of Sighs”) is the first and most notable of Argento’s “Three Mothers” trilogy. Subsequent installments are Inferno (1980, about the “Mother of Darkness”) and Mother of Tears (2007). The idea of the Three Mothers came from opium-addicted English writer Thomas de Quincey, who invented a myth of three witches analogous to the three Fates in his collection of fantastical essays Suspiria de Profundis (“suspiria” is Latin for “sighs”).
  • Argento originally wanted the story to feature a school of girls in the 8-10 year age range, but producers balked at the idea of showing gruesome murders of children. Although he cast adults to play the roles, Argento left in some childlike dialogue, and actually raised the doorknobs on the set so that the actress’ would have to reach up to turn them, as if they were children.
  • Argento has said that the color scheme for Suspiria was inspired by Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).
  • In an early scene in the taxicab Argento’s scowling face can be seen momentarily reflected in the glass that separates the driver and the passenger; the effect is nearly subliminal.
  • Suspiria was one of the last films made using the Technicolor process.
  • Argento co-composed the remarkable soundtrack, performed by the Italian progressive rock group Goblin.
  • Rumors of a remake have been circulating for years. A project entitled Suspiria is (at the time of this writing) listed as “in development” on the IMDB, scheduled for a 2012 release. There are reports that Italian producer Marco Morabito has confirmed that David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express) will direct. Earlier rumors speculated that Natalie Portman would play the lead. (UPDATE: the remake is here, and it was almost none of what was predicted).

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Isolating a single indelible image in the movie is an impossible task; Suspiria shapes its surreality from the play of supersaturated colors on the baroque walls of the dance academy, and from its impossible, unnatural lighting schemes. The colors as a whole are indelible; there are perhaps a dozen impossibly lit individual shots (scenes that look as if they were inked by a demented gnome) that together form an impression of a world gone luminescently awry. The image of Suzy posed in front on a neon peacock as she enters the witch’s chamber, with a background column glowing an improbable scarlet from an unseen light source, is as a representative an image as any.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Although there are plenty of “weird” (in the sense of “uncanny” or“ occult”) occurrences in Suspiria—such as the rain of maggots—it’s the stylized sensual elements, the brilliantly unreal cinematography and the relentless unnerving score, that catapult the movie out of the realm of ordinary supernatural horror and land it in its own unique fairy tale nightmare realm.

Edgar Wright’s commentary for Suspiria trailer for “Trailers from Hell”

COMMENTS: Suspiria is more an assault on the senses than a narrative; it’s Gothic horror Continue reading 67. SUSPIRIA (1977) →