Musings on Virgins and Vampires

This 1997 book on Jean Rollin's films, written by Peter Blumenstock and published by Crippled Dick, occasionally shows up on Ebay.



Earlier today it sold for £77, more than I was willing to bid.

In relation to cult and culture I'm thus wondering if an interest in cult films thereby requires not just often considerable cultural and subcultural capital (e.g. the ability to justify a Rollin film as being worthy of study, perhaps through reference to Feuillade, Surrealism and so on) but also relatively high amounts of economic capital (owning a book like this, with Rollins own remarks about Feuillade, Surrealism etc.)

Cult and Cultural Access

One of the things I like about living in Edinburgh is that it has one of the UK’s copyright libraries, The National Library of Scotland. Copyright libraries are libraries where publishers are required to deposit a copy of whatever they publish.

Something I’ve found, however, is that the usefulness of the copyright library when you’re studying film depends somewhat upon the kind of film that you are studying: If you’re looking at cult film, more likely to be written about in fanzines than professional magazines, then you’re less likely to find the publications you are looking for, in large part because they aren’t part of the ‘official’ culture.

Much the same seems to apply to film, albeit with a much worse initial starting point on account of the historical understanding that they were ephemeral, commercial products that didn’t need to be preserved.

While all manner of stuff that I’d never dreamed of seeing 15 or 20 years ago is now available on DVD, or can be accessed via torrents of Greek VHS rips, Italian TV broadcasts or suchlike, the fact nevertheless remains that by and large it’s so much easier if your tastes are confined to the hegemonic Hollywood and European arthouse canons.

Discuss...

Giugno '44 - Sbarcheremo in Normandi / Commando Attack / Seven into Hell

What we have here is a classic example of the late 1960s Italian-Spanish co-production war film, in which a hand-picked group of misfit soldiers is assigned a near-impossible mission that only some of them will come back from.

Though inspired by The Dirty Dozen such films lacked their model’s budget and scope. This manifested in a number of ways. They tended to feature only about half the number of men – witness Commando Attack’s alternate title of Seven into Hell – and truncated the training sequences and build up to quickly get into the mission and keep the running time down to a concise hour and a half.

The nominal star of Commando Attack, or the one that the typical US moviegoer might remember from many years back, is Calum Rennie. He’s an odd choice for the Lee Marvin type role, not least because he looks too sensitive and old to be playing the action man. The filmmakers are astute enough to turn this apparent disadvantage into a virtue by commenting upon it via his recruits, who include Aldo Sambrell.



Just days before D-Day the seven men are dropped into Nazi-occupied Normandy, where they are to meet up with the resistance and destroy an enemy radio station that bombers have failed to take out. They reach their rendezvous point only to find their contacts dead, with the signs pointing to a traitor within the resistance...

Though the film delivers in terms of derring do and has some nicely drawn characters, it is a bit too mechanical and stretches credibility, with the Nazi stormtroopers showing all the tactical awareness and competence of their Star Wars counterparts.

Needless to say it also plays fast and loose with the historical details, with IMDB reviewers noting that the GI’s carry German and Italian guns amidst a host of other inaccuracies.

But all this is to be expected: You don’t go exactly into one of these films expecting realism.

As such, where the film failed for me was in replacing the anti-authoritarian cynicism of its model with something bordering on romanticism.

With the exception of an Archer Maggot inspired rapist, the recruits are volunteers rather than conscripts and, in the cases of the bored rich guy looking for excitement (“Why should a playboy like you volunteer for a mission like this?” “I find that my playing gets more and more monotonous”) and the young guy with a death wish (“For me to be killed is the goal of my life”) are basically there as audience-identification figures; predictably the latter is cured of his condition by the love of a good partisan woman.

We’re also asked to believe that D-Day is really up to these guys and that they aren’t just there as a diversion, misdirection or outright sacrifice.

Bruno Nicolai’s music is bold and striking, thought not necessarily the most appropriate.

Mal d'africa / The Final Prey

It’s impossible to approach this 1968 mondo film without reference to Africa Addio. This is because writer-director Stanis Nievo was production manager on it and looks to have constructed his own largely out of material shot for Giacopetti and Prosperi’s film but never actually used.


A credits statement of intent cum apology

The film opens with what seems to be original footage of blacks in present-day London, visiting the zoo, on the streets and attending a church service.

While exploitative and of dubious authenticity it’s imbued with a sense of fun via the camerawork and Riz Ortolani's music. It also functions to neatly help set up many of the themes that the subsequent material attempts to engage with. In particular, the place of ‘the African’ – scare quotes because there is nothing to indicate that those we see are ‘genuine’ Africans, admittedly introducing another set of scare quotes in what could be an infinite regress – in the contemporary and/or modern world.

The fun aspect declines considerably as we then move to Africa itself and to footage of riots, firing squads and the carnage of a train derailment, purportedly by guerrillas. Though this may well have been the case the impact of the scene is lessened by the way the camera picks out a (white) doll that just happened to have been there.

It’s not all doom and gloom, however, as we’re later also given more ‘light-hearted’ footage of African fashions, ostrich racing and workers joyfully striking oil – tellingly then juxtaposed with the destruction to flora and fauna wrought by a oil spill.

Time and again we are taken between something that seems to be saying ‘this is progress’ and something that adds a question mark at the end of the statement or inverting its first two words: ‘this is progress?’ ‘is this progress?’


Dead stuff

Elsewhere we get footage of a live elephant, chalk marks divide its body up into ‘usable’ parts, contrasted with a group of pygmies literally diving in as they butchering an elephant. Or then there is the assembly-line type enterprise mass-producing animal head trophies.


Surreal found images?


Surreal constructed images

What are we supposed to think about tradition and modernity and presumed correlations with black and white or African and European in relation to these images? Was efficiently meeting a demand for animal head trophies a good thing or was the wider issue the existence and perhaps even encouragement of this demand, for instance?

The film offers no answers. But in its own, admittedly unsatisfactory, way it at least helps raise the questions to make you think...

[Interview with the film's director, in Italian: http://www.progettobabele.it/autori/STANISLAONIEVO.PHP]

Phantasmes / The Seduction of the Amy / Once Upon a Virgin

The emergence of hardcore porn films in the early 1970s posed many European genre filmmakers with a challenge:

Should I embrace this development or resist it? If I embrace it should I do so fully or reluctantly and on its own terms or my own?

In Jean Rollin’s case the engagement with porn was a largely reluctant one: Most of the dozen or so hardcore films he directed in the mid- to late-1970s and beyond were strictly works for hire which he didn’t sign with his own official name, instead using Michel Gentil and Robert Xavier among others.

1975's Phantasmes / The Seduction of the Amy / Once Upon a Virgin is the exception. It was the first of Rollin’s hardcore films and the only one to credit him as director.

While certainly more sex film than Rollin film, it nevertheless includes enough Rollin touches to be worth a look from the committed fan.

The film begins with Amy being attacked by a man, played by none other than Rollin himself. He attempts to rape her and throws her into a pond.

She’s then rescued by Count Gideon and taken to his castle.

Wandering the grounds Gideon meets a female friend. Gideon discusses finding a Latin manuscript by an associate of the Marquis de Sade in the castle, and how it has provided him with a source of inspiration, cueing us into the first of many ‘proper’ sex scenes that occupy the bulk of the remaining running time.

The next of the Rollin touches is the appearance of what would otherwise be two orphan vampires or their victims to be in the form of the Castel twins, but they too are soon caught up in the sex. (While we are on the subject of the cast, female lead Mylène d’antès / Evelyne Thomas later appeared in The Grapes of Death and Fascination, while critic, filmmaker and frequent Rollin associate Jean-Pierre Bouyxou is also in there somewhere.)


The Castel Twins, playing errant schoolgirls

After 40 or so minutes – all timings here refer to the cut, dubbed and rescored US version – there are some nice Gothic atmospherics as Amy wanders arounds the castle, finding a naked and chained woman in the dungeon in the process


Being naked, playing dead

We also get the merest hint of a plot, as it is hinted that Gideon needs a good woman to save him from the castle, the others and his own evil.

According, after some more sex scenes, Amy then saves Gideon, with the two of them consummating their relationship in that most Rollin of locations, the beach.


The beach

The end, at least as far as the US version is concerned, with the original then having Gideon recount the events just witnessed to a journalist (played by Monica Swinn) to provide a framing narrative.

To sum up: 15 minutes of the ‘real’ Rollin punctuating 50 or so of hardcore which, while occasionally shot and lit in imaginative ways, is otherwise predictable genital close ups, in and out and suck and fuck action, invariably climaxing (sorry!) in proof of orgasm / frenzy of the visible ejaculations.

Im Schloß der blutigen Begierde / Castle of [the Creeping Flesh / Bloody Lust / Unholy Desires]

A group of four party-goers decide to go for a ride. Elena’s horse then gallops off into Count Saxon’s lands. This is bad news, as he has a sinister reputation and apparently does not like intrusion. However, when the other three approach the castle, they find the Count tending to the injured Elena and that they are welcome guests.



This is despite the fact that the Count’s own daughter was attacked by a man a couple of days ago and dies not one hour ago.

Rather than an extreme case of noblesse oblige, the Count has ulterior motives. He is intent on bringing his daughter back to life through a spot of mad science, with subjects/material always being welcome. He also wants avenge his daughter, with one of the party – the one earlier most insistent on the Count’s bad reputation, unsurprisingly – having been the one who raped her.

Directed by Adrian Hoven under his Percy Parker pseudonym, this 1968 West German horror feels very much like a Jesus Franco film, such that it comes as no surprise to learn the Spaniard – who worked with Hoven on a number of occasions around this time – in fact provided the original story.

Admittedly this might have amounted to little more than a few notes and ideas, but the same could also be said of many of Franco’s own films.

The film benefits from a strong and enthusiastic Euro-cult/trash cast, including familiar Franco faces Janine Reynaud, Michel Lemoine and Howard Vernon (all three appeared in the same year's Succubus).

But while Reynaud removes her clothes at the slightest pretext, Lemoine stares unblinkingly and unnervingly throughout and Vernon just does his thing, it isn’t enough to overcome an awkward narrative and the unpleasant inclusion of considerable amounts of real surgical footage that Hoven clearly acquired somewhere and wanted to make use of.


Obvious latex torso


Vernon and his assistant


And some real gore

The rape-revenge aspect of the plot is never made sufficiently clear, while the Count’s paralleling of his own situation with an ancestor some 300 years ago comes across as padding and introduces a supernatural element that jars somewhat with the otherwise contemporary setting and approach.

This is also reflected in the music, with Jerry Van Rooyen’s big band jazz jarring with the classical cues, or vice-versa.


Is it real or in her mind? Well, it's obviously just in her mind.

Still, it’s probably also fair to say that any film which introduces the detail that a bear is loose on the Count’s grounds as the set-up for an eventual appearance of a man in a bear suit isn’t terribly concerned with credibility and coherence as a whole.


Eroticised chicken eating!

Rather it’s more about the individual images and moments. Unfortunately there are more misfires than hits here, although a food scene comes across, intentionally or accidentally, as a parody of a similar moment in Tom Jones.

Der Todesrächer von Soho / Allarme a Scotland Yard: sei omicidi senza assassino / The Corpse Packs his Bags / El muerto hace las maletas

The opening minutes of this 1972 krimi gave me a strong sense of deja vu: Hadn’t I seen it before?

I hadn’t, with my impression being down to the fact that the film uses the same Bryan Edgar Wallace source as the first of producer Artur Brauner's CCC krimis, The Mystery of the Black Suitcases some ten years earlier.

The mystery of the that title is somewhat clarified by this film’s own title, the corpse of the English and Spanish titles title referring to the fact that several people have been murdered by the knife-throwing death-avenger of the German title.


The walls are closing in

But while the hotel’s Soho location is familiar, the way director Jess Franco presents it is not. He doesn’t bother giving us stock location footage and Big Ben’s chimes in a vain attempt to convince us that this really is London we’re seeing, not Spain.


Making the camera operator work for his money

Although Scotland Yard are soon introduced, in the form of Inspector Rupert Redford (Fred Williams), the film as a whole continues to do things very much its own way:

While krimi regulars Siegfried Schurenberg and Horst Tappert are among those present, they’re both cast against type. Schurenberg plays a drug smuggler rather than a Scotland Yard higher-up, Tappert a decidedly enigmatic and ambiguous figure.

Nor is there a romantic subplot between the Scotland Yard man and the ingénue in danger that ends in their inevitable marriage. And while the final confrontation does take place in dungeon-cum-laboratory there’s a conspicuous lack of dozens of armed regular uniform police.

All this is perhaps to be expected given that this is a Franco film. While undoubtedly familiar with the krimi universe (the name of his most famous character, Dr Orloff, derives from the 1939 version of Dark Eyes of London, remade by Rialto as Dead Eyes of London in 1960) the director has always tended to approach the business of adaptation very much on his own terms.




Into the void


Neo-noir

The thing that makes the film interesting as a Franco film, meanwhile, is its visual style. There isn’t a great deal of zooming. But there are numerous striking images and some stunning compositions - a Welles-inspired shot of two characters in an infinity of mirrors, a Bava or Argento style staircase spiralling into the void, a studied use of colour and its selective absence - all beautifully captured by cinematographer Manuel Merino.

A definite curio.