The Nude Vampire
From The Deuce
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Also known as
- La Vampire Nue (France)
- La Vampira Nuda (Italy)
- Das Lustschloss Der Grausamen Frauen (Germany)
Main Details
- Released in 1969 (USA 1970)
- Color
- Running Time: 82 Min.
- Production Co: ABC Films
Cast and Crew
- Directed by Jean Rollin
- Starring: Christine Francois, Olivier Martin, Maurice Lemaitre, Bernard Masson, Jean Aron, Cathy & Pony Tricot
- Music by Yvon Gerault
- Cinematography by Jean Jacques Renon
Film Review
Jean Rollin’s 2nd dissection of vampire mythology, following 1968’s black & white ‘Le Viol Du Vampire’, ‘The Nude Vampire’ is a pop art kaleidoscope of pulp sci-fi and macabre Gothic eroticism.
In a strange laboratory men in red hoods drain blood from naked girls while another girl in a bright orange night-gown is pursued through the city streets by shadowy figures wearing distorted animal head masks. A young man intervenes in the chase but is unable to save the girl from being shot, apparently dead, and carried away by the men in masks. The building that the girl’s body is smuggled into happens to belong to the boy’s father and he watches from outside as party guests arrive.
His father refuses to divulge what’s going down at the mysterious mansion so the boy gatecrashes the next party only to witness one of the guests commit suicide and the girl in the orange night-gown reappear to drink blood from the corpses neck. The other guests turn on him and he barely escapes with his life. On fleeing the house he is stopped by a man in a long white cape who tells him to head over to his father’s office where more mysteries await him. And, oh boy, he’s not kidding.
A more detailed plot synopsis would ruin the many surprises that the film has in store and if you’re unfamiliar with the unique cinematic world of Jean Rollin then ‘The Nude Vampire’ is a great place to start.
The difference between grindhouse movies and arthouse movies can often be boiled down to how a film was marketed. Take for example Roger Vadim’s ‘And God Created Woman’. To one audience it’s an exotic continental melodrama, sophisticated and highbrow by virtue of it hailing from the country that gave us Jean Luc Godard and Coco Chanel. To another audience it’s a teenage delinquent potboiler the highlight of which is getting to see Bridget Bardot’s bare ass. The significance of Bardot’s butt in exploitation film history cannot be overemphasised, but I digress.
‘The Nude Vampire’ manages to achieve an almost perfect synthesis of art and exploitation and as such should tick boxes in both the arthouse and the grindhouse halves of the film fan brain. Anyone at the back of the class inclined to raise their hand and cry out ‘But Miss, what about the mainstream?’ can go fuck themselves as I am not ranting and drooling for your benefit.
Rollin’s films are without doubt the work of a peculiarly intelligent autuer. As stuffed as they are with horror genre archetypes and iconography the best of them are also obviously intensely personal. Fanciful and bizarre ‘The Nude Vampire’ may be but there is a strong political element to the story in it’s opposition of a group of mysterious, perhaps supernatural, gypsies and hippies against the corporate bourgeoisie who wish to exploit them. As always Rollin allies himself with the romantic creatures of the night.
Despite it’s obviously low budget the costumes, the music and the set dressing all contribute brilliantly to the film’s atmosphere of the uncanny. The visual motif of symmetry that persists through all of Rollin’s films can be seen here most explicitly in the casting of twin actresses Cathy & Pony Tricot. ‘The Nude Vampire’ blew my mind when I first saw it and it continues to blow my mind every time I revisit it.
Reviewed by Narcan - 20 JAN 2010
Cool Quote
- The Master – ‘What you have seen tonight, and what you will see, is not real’