Director and writer Isaac Rodriguez had Last Radio Call on the site a few months ago and it was an interesting idea in spite of its found focus look. That same need to show found footage is in this movie, which tells the story of masked serial killer Mister Creep (Brian D. Anderson) and how his twenty years of murders are being investigated by students John (Ali Alkhafaji), Beth (Amber Lee Solis), Val (Shaela Payne) and Dave (Thomas Burke).

For years now, Mister Creep has killed and killed and killed — two hundred victims at least — and broadcasted each kill, which has obsessed Val. Now, she and her friends have followed that need to know about Mister Creep into what we all know is a trap, but as always, would we have a movie otherwise?

There’s also the story of Mr. Creep’s childhood, as told by his biographer and friend Mary (Judy McMillan), who goes mad while telling the story. And then, well…why not go to the abandoned transmission tower that Mr. Creep used to send his signal from?

I said exactly the same thing when I watched Rodriguez’s other film: He’s talented and knows how to make a scary movie. A reliance on found footage is actually a detriment to his cause, as it takes away and limits what he can do with the film. I hope he keeps on making more movies but also expands how they’re made.

The Stray Dreamer, directed and written by Damien Aimé Dupont and Yvan Pierre-Kaiser, is an attempt to tell the story of Jean Rollin and to create “the portrait of a real artist, the last surrealist, a poet who created his very own dreamworld.” The best part of this is that so much of the story of Rollin is told by the artist himself, even revealing that at times, he would shoot all night and have an ambulance called to take him to the hospital for kidney dialysis in the morning. He also says what makes the most sense about his films, which often makes viewers struggle to make sense of them: “My vision, either good or bad, is personal.”

As many talking heads speak about what makes Rollin essential, it is Rollin who proves it, discussing the struggle to find his voice and tell his stories. Over the last week, I’ve written of each of his films and the themes they explore and I still feel that even with as many watches as I’ve watched, I am only at the surface level of his work and my understanding of it.

I did love getting to hear from Pete Tombs, whose book Immoral Tales: European Sex & Horror Movies, 1956-1984 introduced me to Rollin. I don’t know if I was ready for him in the late 90s and early 00s, as most of the movies I loved were fast movie Hong Kong gun fights or gore-soaked effects-driven blasts of wildness. I did not yet understand the way that movie drugs worked, that you didn’t need cocaine highs all the time and could find a much better high through long droning passages of vampire women wandering ship-strewn beaches and iron-gated cemeteries.

Based on the novel by Mitali Perkins, the Rickshaw Girl of the title is Naima (Novera Rahman), who may not have been much of a student yet is an incredible artist. Her father (Naresh Bhuiyan) encourages her to develop her talent by allowing her to paint his rickshaw, but seeing as how they live in a poor area of town and her father only pulls other and more successful men in his rickshaw, the chances of her escaping to become a fine artist are quite limited.

That goal moves even further away when her father gets ill and a loan shark (Nasir Uddin Khan) takes back the rickshaw. As her father needs medicine to live, she eventually finds her way to working in the very same business, hiding her sex under restrictive clothing so that her boss (Ashok Bepari) believes that she’s a boy. A boy with a brightly painted rickshaw that gets her noticed by movie star Siam Ahmen — playing himself — and a role in his next movie. Yet when her secret is revealed, perhaps things won’t work out.

Director Amitabh Reza Chowdhury’s film moves quickly and tells a story that is relatable to anyone, no matter where you are from in the world. It’s issues of class, debt and gender make sense anywhere.

It was thought that Jean Rollin’s 2007 film House of Clocks was his final film of his career, but then he made this one-hour short which was screened at the Cinémathèque de Toulouse. Then, he added twenty minutes of additional scenes and cut the film into two distinct parts just like The Rape of the Vampire.

Instead of vampires, this is the story of three sisters, Medusa, Stheno, and Eurydice. Rollin’s wife Simone plays Madusa as she stalks the stages of the Grand Guignol after her sister Euryale (Sabine Lenoël) and she have had a psychic battle that left one mindless and the other blind. A girl (Gabrielle Rollin, Jean’s granddaughter) plays for the reptiles and is turned to stone and then we hear a long conversation between a janitor (Jean-Pierre Bouyxou) and the figure of myth surrounded by posters advertising past bloody performances.

After a shocking battle between Stheno and Meduda, the second part really feels like the past films.  Stheno(Marlène Delcambre) wanders a cemetery holding the head of her sister, meets Cornelius (Delphine Montoban) and says things like “The two orphan vampires danced on the graves in Père Lachaise. We’ll dance under them,” before the two dance to a song from Fascination.

There are several moments near the end of his career where Rollin made movies that tried to unite his past works and say something about getting close to the curtain. This is one more and yes, as lovers of his films seem to always say, this may not be the best one to start with. But do start. Get obsessed.

Jacques Regis stars as a vampire hunter who is dragged along his apprentice (Denis Tallaron) on the hunt for the many descendants of Dracula (Thomas Desfossé), which leads him to The Order of the White Virgins and monsters that include a dwarf (Thomas Smith), smoking nuns who also — of course — kiss, a vampire woman (Sandrine Thoquet), an ogress (Magalie Aguado), a wolf-woman (Brigitte Lahaie) and Isabelle, a young woman destined to be the latest bride of Dracula (Cyrille Iste).

Dracula lives inside a clock, which alows us to know that this is the work of Jean Rollin, as that image was such a part of The Shiver of the Vampires. The other major clue is that this ends on a beach, where a sacrifice and a wedding and doom are due along the shore. And hey — one of the nuns is half of the Castel twins, Cathy, making an appearance after Rollin was critically re-evaluated and had a comeback big enough to get to make this.

There’s also a heart ripped clean out of a chest and a baby being eaten, making this one of the bloodier Rollin films. It’s also odd that Dracula himself appears instead of just being hinted at, but in a world that by 2002 had seen everything there was to see about fanged blood drinkers, leave it to Rollin to show us more by going back to what has always worked. Druggy, slow, doomy wanderings through musty castles and overcast coastlines.

I love that so many reviews start with “This shouldn’t be your first Jean Rollin movie.” There are more of those than where to start!

You can watch this on Kino Cult.