Horror Movie Reviews
More Details...Price: $24.99 |
Title: Requiem for a Vampire (1999) |
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Review of Requiem for a Vampire
- Two beautiful runaways seek refuge in a castle. When night falls, they become prey to a sadistic vampire named "The Last Vampire" who, as luck would have it, intends to use them to produce progeny who will continue his bloodline.
Description
- 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 and place in which figures (usually nude women) wander a deserted landscape. In Requiem for a Vampire, two school girls in painted clown faces and 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, and change into miniskirts, with nary a word spoken. They dreamily wander through a graveyard (where one falls into a freshly dug grave and is buried alive!) and into a castle, where they are suddenly set upon by cloaked figures and brutish henchmen and 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 and 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 and forth between surreal poetry and kinky decadence (which also includes scenes of sadomasochism and plenty of gratuitous nudity), but Jean Rollin's ethereal mood and fairy tale imagery gives the largely wordless film an eerie beauty and the surreal logic of a waking dream. The DVD features both French and English language tracks with optional subtitles, French and English trailers, and a gallery of production stills. --Sean Axmaker
Amazon.com
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Comments for Requiem for a Vampire
- Posted on 2008-06-29
Surreal scenes, sex, and vampires...
Like a fairy tale two women, on the run from the law... or somebody with guns, find a castle. In the castle is blood, sex and pain. No, I'm not joking. Vampires live within the castle and enjoy torturing, raping and draining victims they catch from the surrounding landscape. Some nudity, orgies and lots of guns this film. The film is always changing right before your eyes. Yet it didn't really sell very well and had to go under many other names in the USA, such as Caged Virgins, Virgins and Vampires and Dungeon of Terror. I think the thing that really kind of damages the film is, in the end, the lack of any real plot.
Score: 4
- Posted on 2007-04-13
Rollin curbs his cheeseball tendencies and makes an art film.
Requiem for a Vampire (Jean Rollin, 1971)
As usual, when you see a Jean Rollin film, you can be relatively sure you're going to get beautiful women and really cheesy effects. What's surprising about this one, however, is how entirely different it is from any other Rollin movie I've seen. And the things that make it different-- the things that seem to have made legions of Rollin fans consider this one of his worst movies-- are the things I think make it the strongest. Legend has it that the producers of the film asked Rollin for a single scene (which should be obvious, if you've seen more than one Rollin film) and let him free to do whatever he wanted with the rest of the movie. As such, he did quite a few things here that he'd never done before, and that he never did again.
The plot: two schoolgirls, Marie (Rollin regular Marie-Pierre Castel) and Michelle (Mirielle D'Argent, another Rollin regular, though she and Castel worked together in only two films-- this and Lips of Blood), find themselves lost in the countryside in clown suits after a high-speed chase and shootout that leaves their accomplice (Paul Bisciglia) dead. While trying to get their bearings, they wander onto the grounds of a chateau inhabited by a family of vampires, led by the enigmatic Last Vampire, who seems to have conflicting ideas on what he wants from the girls.
The first thing that will likely strike you about this movie is the almost total lack of dialogue in its first forty-five minutes. In an essentially silent movie, all you have is the visuals. And what visuals they are. There's some minor, and distracting, attempt to explain later why these two lovely young things are wandering around in clown suits. But who cares? Not Rollin, and certainly not us. They even take them off for a bit and then put them back on. I'm sure there's all kinds of weird psychological stuff going on (especially when Michelle comes close to getting buried alive by the world's least attentive gravedigger during the brief time they're not wearing their clown stuff), but beyond that there's just the simple fact that this makes absolutely no sense-- and Rollin has no intention of having it make sense. But does it have to? In poetry, the most important thing is not the words, but the sound the words make as they run together. Why should it be any different with movies and visuals?
There are also scenes here that achieve something I've never gotten from a Rollin film to date-- they're disturbing. The Last Vampire's thralls are bestial on their good days, and the whole batch keeps a few human women chained up in the basement for releasing of the beasts' tension. It's the scene where Rollin is most Rollin, sexploitation central, but there's more to it than that. It's not so much that it's savage; it's actually quite the opposite. I suppose for some, it will simply have the effect of shattering any sort of suspension of disbelief. I just kept wondering what sort of depraved mind could come up with a scene like this, and then choreograph it so beautifully. It's powerful, in a rough, raw sort of way. Which is always what Jean Rollin is about, really. *** ½
Score: 4 - Posted on 2005-09-08
Paris and Nicole with unshaven armpits meet Vampires.
This can best be described as what happens when a horny French teenager gets his hands on a movie camera after reading too many issues of "Vampirella". If you're looking for an artistic masterpiece or eye-popping horror, forget it. If you want an unintentionally silly, cheesy,sleazy(a bat in the shrubbery!) 1970's film, it is perfect. Director Jean Rollin tries to get arty in places, but the occasionally choppy editing and forcedness of the shots deflate every attempt. Questions abound: If the two female leads were cutting some school party in their clown costumes, why carry guns(much less shoot at their pursuer and torch their dead driver)? Why does every man have Gerard Depardieu's nose? How was Rollin prescient enough to cast that blonde chick who somehow looks hotter today than she did back then? Anyway, this film is perfectly enjoyable on its own terms, and worth owning due to some shots that no Hollywood film could get away with today.
Score: 5
- Posted on 2005-03-27
WARNING; DON'T BUY THIS TRASH
I watched this movie the other day and all I can think is I CAN'T BELIEVE I BOUGHT THIS PIECE OF SH*T!! I've only seen one other Jean Rollin film before and it sucked, too. I was hoping that Requiem would be better, but it was WORSE. There's no plot in this movie, the imagery is pointless and unmoving, and the acting BLOWS. Jean Rollin, if you are an Amazon customer and are reading this, let me tell you that you SUUUUUUUUUUUUCK !!!!
Score: 1
- Posted on 2004-12-02
weird and wonderful
this is the first film by jean rollin that i saw and it really left an impression. i remember sitting there thinking "wow!" and then wanting to see it again because it was so mysterious and poetic. it's like a dream on film with it's unusual twists and weird and yet often beautiful moments.
Score: 5