Requiem for a Vampire

Starring: MariePierre Castel, Mireille Dargent Director: Jean Rollin Dvd Release: 3rd August, 1999 Number Of Discs: 1 Format: Colour, Dolby, Letterboxed, NTSC, Region 0 Encoding Subtitled In: English Dubbed In: English

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The films of French cult director Jean Rollin belong to a genre all their own, horror fantasies that plunge viewers into wild fantasy worlds out of time & place in which figures wander a deserted landscape. In Requiem for a Vampire, two school girls in painted clown faces & goofy polka-dot garb shoot out of the back of a speeding car on a desolate country road. For 45 minutes, we follow the adventures of the braided young nymphs as they ditch the car, wipe off the clown white, & change into miniskirts, with nary a word spoken. They dreamily wander through a graveyard & into a castle, where they are suddenly set upon by cloaked figures & brutish henchmen & made the servants of a tired, sorry-looking vampire desperately attempting to perpetuate his race with fresh blood. The lyrical first half, with its often beautiful & bizarre imagery, gives way to an astonishingly brutal scene in which the henchman molest the women they have chained naked in their dungeon. The film bounces back & forth between surreal poetry & kinky decadence , but Jean Rollins ethereal mood & fairy-tale imagery gives the largely wordless film an eerie beauty & the surreal logic of a waking dream.

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