Requiem for a Vampire
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. InRequiem 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