AKA The Seduction of Amy, this film finds Jean Rollin stuck yet again in that horrible trauma of having no money to make the movies that he wants to make and instead making adult films and trying to sneak in art amongst all the same old in and out.

It’s set in a castle where de Sade once performed black magic rites and there’s a beach — there’s always a beach — and the Castel twins show up and spank one another, so I’m not made of stone, you know? That said, it’s kind of a kick in the pants to go from slow drone Rollin to just basic coupling and it’s so static and clinical and there it is — just coitus — when I’ve been inside the magical movie drug world, you know?

Back in Video Watchdog #31, Rollin said very much the same: ” I was sure that, with this type of film, one could come up with something new and of interest. I tried with Phantasmes but failed miserably. The reason for the death of French hardcore culture, if you want to use that term, is that the audience just doesn’t care. They don’t want cinema, they want people screwing and that’s it. That’s why after Phantasmes, I made my porn films in a rather uninspired way. I was very disappointed with the failure of that film. I really tried to make something out of it and nobody gave a damn. It was a porno with a real story, with real direction and real actors. The Castel Twins were in it again, for example. Knowing what I know now, I would say it is impossible to turn pornography into something of interest. There is simply no market. I don’t like the other porn films I did, that’s true, but I enjoyed shooting them. I made the acquaintance of a lot of very interesting people and I have respect for them. Today, the actors only do it for money, but back then, it was something different. Some of them did it because they wanted to explore their desires, some because they wanted to enter the film business, but they all had something in common. They were proud of what they did, like a little group of outsiders, because they did something which most people didn’t dare to do. It was some sort of rebellion, a statement, and it was honest.”

As he attends a media event that launches a new perfume, Frédéric (Jean-Loup Philippe) stares at a photo of a château by the sea, which reminds him of the days when he actually walked to the gates of that crumbling castle and met a girl inside not much older than him. He feels that she was trapped within that place after they met and despite his mother telling him it was all a dream, he feels as if it actually happened.

That woman is Jennifer (Annie Belle, Fly Me the French Way, The House On the Edge of the Park, Absurd) and she’s been trying to reach out to our hero and he’s been struggling because his mother has sent women who claim they are Jennifer — yet get killed by vampires — and hired guns to keep her from finding this woman from his dreams.

After being committed by his mother, Frédéric learns that this place was Sauveterre Castle and his mother claims that he can never go there, as Jennifer really is a vampire and that she will destroy him. Let me tell you about gorgeous dangerous women, mother of Frédéric. This ends, as it must, with boy and vampire girl climbing inside a coffin so that the tide can drag them to Sand Island, a place where they can kill rich sailors without consequence, which is as close as Rollin gets to a happy ending.

Seeing the Castel twins appear as the servants of Jennifer made me happy, as if I were seeing two old friends from a distance and waving hello to them fervently.

Also, if you didn’t get that Frédéric is Jean Rollin, well, he made about six other vampire movies to clue you in on that. He’s also the caretaker who is killed by the vampiric thralls.

This was remixed and had Rollin use his Michel Gand name to re-release this gorgeous work of art as the adult film Suce-moi vampire, which is quite sad, as so much of this is about innocence to me.

You can watch this on Kino Cult.

Lousie (Alexandra Pic) and Henriette (Isabelle Teboul) are the two orphan vampires of the title, blind and lost by day, wandering the streets of Paris for blood by night.

Based on his book Les deux orphelines vampires, Jean Rollin is a man of obsessions, coming back time and again to his nighttime world of lost bloodsuckers, a bleak place where tragedy is always close, but yet I find true joy within his films.

I also love that a copy of the Cathal Tohill and Pete Tombs book Immoral Tales: European Sex & Horror Movies 1956–1984 shows up at one point, a book that introduced me to Rollins, Franco and Larraz, a debt that I can probably never repay.

Ghouls, a female bat named Venus (Veronique Dajouti, who permanently injured her back during this scene and never sued Rollin) and werewolves live in this fairy tale and oh yes, Brigitte Lahaie and Tina Aumont.

I could wander these same foggy paths — and assuredly will — with Jean forever.

You can watch this on Kino Cult.

There’s a gang of wreckers who lure ships to the rocks on a foggy shore that destroys them, led by The Captain (John Rico), and including Le Bosco (Willy Braque), Paul (Paul Bisciglia) and Tina (Joëlle Coeur). The latest ship they’ve smashed has two survivors — played by Lieva Lone and Patricia Hermenier — who are dazed and damaged as they struggle down the beach and into the arms of the crew that’s already taken so much from them. They’re assaulted and left for dead as the pirates drink away their cares, but The Captain keeps seeing the girls, so they go back and trap them in a ship and set it on fire.

Yet that’s still not enough to put them away. They run to some ruins where a clown (Mireille Dargent) takes them deeper into the grounds where a demon (Miletic Zivomir)  is imprisoned and if they allow him into their bodies, he will give them a limited time to have his power and gain the revenge they desire.

Jean Rollin is the only director who I could say was inspired by his childhood to make suce a strange and upsetting movie. Yes, it’s another return to the beach but there are no vampires, instead the ghostly hauntings of victims and the sheer insanity of Tina. Seriously, Coeur is an absolute force in this movie, as seductive as she is frightening, demanding more carnage and becoming sexually aroused by the death and horror that she helps create.

This is at once a film filled with sex and one desperate to destroy your desire. Rollin was challenged by how big this production was and yes, there are some pacing issues, but it’s another journey through bleak unending sadness on a beach and my feet are soaked and the sand is in every pore.

You can watch this on Kino Cult.

AKA Tout le monde il en a deux AKA Bacchannales Sexuelles, even Jean Rollin has to make money to pay for idiosyncratic works so why not make something a little, well, adult? And hey, if making porn is beneath him as an artist, maybe he also brings something strange to the party because, well, I don’t think he knew any other way.

Valérie (Joëlle Coeur) is crashing at her cousin’s apartment in Paris — yeah, it’s Rollin’s apartment — seems a perfect place for her to call over her friend Sophie (Marie-France Morel) who decides to climb a high bookshelf and nearly dangle from it while wearing knee boots and a skirt that can charitably be said to barely be there. What else can they do put pour vodka all over one another and tumble into the very convenient mattress on the floor, then throw on some see-through nightgowns and lie together?

Before you get used to what’s going on, two burglars (Marie-Pierre Castel and Catherine Castel) have rolled up Sophie in a rug and just walked out the front door. It’s enough to get Valérie to call her man Fred (Alain Bastin) over for protection and yes, that means another sex scene.

She’s been taken by Malvina (Brigitte Borghese), a priestess in the Cult of the Pure Flesh and the reason why Valérie’s cousin is out of town is that they are hunting him down for exposing him in an article he wrote. But now they have Sophie instead of Valérie and despite her protests, decide to whip her while cult member Karl (Marcel Richard) brings his al dente noodle to the spaghetti house of Frida (Minia Malove).

While her friend is being tortured, Valérie and Fred keep on doing two-person push-ups, which only increases when the cult sends a maid over to spy on them and she ends up in the tub with the couple. Then the real maid shows up, a fight breaks out and the plot is figured out.

This is the point where Malvina decides to own this movie, pulling off stunts like shooting well-dressed mannequins in the crotch before making out with them and donning chain mail eveningwear and getting every single person in a sex ritual all ready to go. Then everything gets all Eyes Wide Shut 15 years early before things wrap up with a happy ending.

Not that kind. Come on.

I mean, it’s a super low budget French softcore movie so I’m not going to pretend it’s art — see Just Jaeckin for that — but it’s still fun, what with sex cults, twin maids and an evil lead who’s a blast.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This was originally posted February 1, 2022.

Originally filmed as La nuit des étoiles filantes (The Night of the Shooting Stars), Jess Franco felt that this movie was one of his favorites and he even appears as Basilio, a man who wanders the movie speaking to a chicken’s head, and his wife Nicole Guettard is also on hand as a nurse.

But then, remixes started happening that had nothing to do with the original work Franco created.

It was released twice — as Christina, Princess of Eroticism in 1973 and in Italy in 1978 as The Erotic Dreams of Christine, both versions cwith  porn inserts directed by Pierre Querut — before Jean Rollin was hired to shoot zombie footage, the porn inserts removed and a new title A Virgin Among the Living Dead.

Christina von Blanc (The Dead Are Alive) is Christina Benson, who has come to Europe for the reading of her father’s (Paul Muller, a Franco regular) will. Soon learning that her relatives — like Howard Vernon as Uncle Howard — are all the living dead, she sees them as a way to avoid her loneliness and invites them to stay. But her father committed suicide, so the Queen of the Night (Anne Libert, The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein) owns his soul forever unless she can save him.

You know how Lisa and the Devil has another world that takes over our own? Franco does that here but, being Franco, it’s filled with zooms, nudity and a gigantic phallus that all live in their own world, a place where things like logic, pace and common sense are cast aside much like the clothing of his actresses.

We should all commit to the joys of walking into the ghostly swamp.

You can watch this on Kino Cult.

A Virgin Among the Living Dead is also on the ARROW PLAYER. Head over to ARROW to start your 30-day free trial. Subscriptions are available for $4.99 monthly or $49.99 yearly. ARROW is available in the US, Canada, the UK and Ireland on the following Apps/devices: Roku (all Roku sticks, boxes, devices, etc), Apple TV & iOS devices, Android TV and mobile devices, Fire TV (all Amazon Fire TV Sticks, boxes, etc), and on all web browsers at https://www.arrow-player.com.

So yeah, that title sounds like this is going to be totally a sexploitation movie — and it totally is — but Jean Rollin directed it so that means there are going to be times where things move so slow that you’re sure you just drank a whole bottle of 70s cough syrup from back when that stuff was really a drug and you had to drink NyQuil in bed because it would knock you to the floor otherwise and it’s the only movie I know that has a torture gazebo with stained glass windows.

So much of the popularity of Rollin’s movies was the sex scenes, so he became Michel Gentil and started making sexy films but couldn’t forget the horror or the weirdness. Monica (Joëlle Coeur, who made twenty movies in four years, many with Rollin, then retired because she had no problem with going nude or doing sex scenes but hated hardcore; I imagine she is very much into Tales of Ribaldry) and Jackie (Gilda Arancio) wander the woods and come upon an abandoned house and before you can say José Ramón Larraz they’re in trouble.

Before that trouble, they make love, then Monica makes love with a man who just wanders in (Pierre Julien), then there’s a threeway when Jackie comes back, then they run afoul of that man’s partner Beatrice (Marie Hélène Règne) who is sure they stole the treasure that they were there to steal in the first place. A private detective and his assistant show up and fumble about while Beatrice whips the girls like she’s a French Olga before the day is saved and our lovely ladies hold hands and skip into the woods all innocent but we just watched them endure a lot over the running time of this film.

Oh yeah — that’s totally Rollin as the owner of the house.

I’d like to pretend to be above these matters, but one of the things that struck me about Jean Rollin’s The Iron Rose is just how supernaturally gorgeous Françoise Pascal is and when you accept that, you’ll understand why anyone would follow her not just into a maze of a cemetery but toward death itself.

Born in Mauritius, a one-time colony of the United Kingdom, Pascal had already appeared in Norman J. Warren’s Loving Feeling, Pete Walker’s School for Sex, Incense for the Damned, Burke & Hare and There’s a Girl in My Soup, as well as having had a short singing career and being selected as the Penthouse Pet of the Month for August 1970 and being the first cover girl for Club International in 1972. She moved to France where she’d star in her first of several movies with Rollin; she’s also in The Grapes of Death.

In this film, she’s an unnamed woman who meets a man for a picnic and bike ride. As you do, they see a cemetery and decide to go inside. He lures her inside a crypt — a place of death — and together they engage in the act of making new life as a clown places flowers on a grave, a strange man (Rollin) watches and an old woman closes the gates.

What follows is deep dialogue — “They say that the stars are gods sending us signals.” — as they stroll through the graves, gradually going mad as they find their way at the city of the dead’s center, a place filled with small coffins and even smaller skeletons. He gives no concern to where they are, smashing and attacking the headstones as she quickly goes mad. As she gives into sheer insanity and an acceptance of the world of the dead, she draws him into a crypt and leaves him to die as she dances past the rememberences of people long gone, life and beauty and art giving way to decay, entropy and the void. She lowers herself into that same grave as the sun rises and those gates are opened again.

Also known by the just as great if not better titles The Crystal Rose, Friedhof der toten Seelen (Graveyard of Lost Souls) and La Nuit du cimetière (The Night of the Cemetery), this film finds Rollin attempting to move past the vampire horror that he was known for and trying a more adult and artistic way of making horror. It failed — this is not a new thing to Rollin — and he was making adult films for years before trying again. Yet he did try again and that’s the real magic.