The Nude Vampire (1970)

I love this movie so much

Powerful

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

This film essentially begins with a scantily clad woman (Caroline Cartier) being stalked at night by men wearing animal masks. She happens to come across a young man named "Pierre Radamante" (Olivier Rollin) and although she doesn't say a word to him appears to be attracted to him all the same. But as luck would have it, the stalkers corner the young couple and shoot the attractive woman. They then allow Pierre to escape while they take the woman's body back to a large mansion. Not long afterward, Pierre manages to enter this mansion and discovers this same woman drinking blood from the body of a woman who has just killed herself. It's all rather strange but this is essentially how most of the movie plays out with one bizarre occurrence after the other and the audience is left trying to make some sense of it all. Throw in some gratuitous nudity here and there and that pretty much sums up the overall plot. Only at the end does the director (Jean Rollin) tie it all together. The acting is bad, the costumes were pathetic and the dialogue (which was originally recorded in French and later dubbed in English) is extremely basic. On the other hand, I liked the artistic use of nudity and the way the director maintained the mystery from start to finish. Be that as it may, I felt that the good attributes failed to outweigh the bad and for that reason I have rated the film accordingly. Slightly below average.

Rollin in his usual mode impresses with place, color, dreamlike reverie. His women are unappealingly scrawny and bland, but his teasing of the cinematic imagination works for me enough to want to step in his ether - his films feel much less constructed than what passes as sensual these days, the night air and architectural walls of the thing always feel real, the texture real. The film opens with a distraught 'virgin' being followed in dark streets by mysterious masked figures, everything in the film that is of that same somnambulist quality carries resonance and I would not dissuade you from watching. It really is fine in ways that you will seldom see in a horror film and that Kubrick bombastically killed in Eyes Wide Shut (it breathes here).But damn it all to hell, if he isn't utterly inept as a storyteller and ruins every pleasure of touch. I don't mean that he wants to confound logic, I like that he does. I welcome filmmakers of the sort - Lynch, Ruiz, Zulawski, those who tether you to narrative threads you have much less control of than usual then pull and leave you scudding through the shattered story-parts.It's quite the opposite with Rollin. Though the world feels real, the interplay of story dynamics is cartoonish at best. Every initially baffling element has to be explained in due time, and each explanation is dumber than a sack of rocks. He is not illogical in the sense that we cannot fathom more than bits of a deeply inscrutable world, quite simply he jots down a coherent story from a few absurd/fantastical elements then gives it to us in conveniently random ways.In this case, the movie about vampires is a horror show being put on, the vampires are only vampires because we believe they are. This is repeatedly stressed out for us.The point of all this is apparently the celebration of the rigor and 'purity' of youth, remember those where the Vietnam years, who in Rollin's garbled set of metaphors are equated with a mutant race of immortals.Rollin's problem is that he is not content to be a perfume master who seduces the senses, he wants to be a bit like the meditating mentor in this film, someone who promises initiation into the 'hidden dimension' of truths so he ends up being as silly.

Jean Rollin is admired by many of my fellow Eurohorror enthusiasts for his delirious visual elegance. I agree that Rollin's films are visually overwhelming. While I get why people admire this talent, however, I mostly do not find the style of Rollin's films sufficient to make up for the complete lack of a logic, continuity, or anything happening. The one exception is his great Zombie Gore film "Les Raisins De La Mort" ("The Grapes of Death", 1978). The prime example for Rollin's tendency to be stylish but boring is arguably "La Rose De Fer" ("Rose of Iron") of 1973, which is simultaneously one of the most visually elegant, and one of the most tiresome Horror films I ever sat through. It is not quite as bad with "La Vampire Nue" aka. "The Nude Vampire" (1970). The film is, once again, visually elegant and at least some events are happening in this film. However, they almost entirely lack any logic or tension.The storyline is (very vaguely) about a bunch of scientist who want to examine the secret of immortality, and a pretty girl who is immortal as long as supplied with blood. Luckily for her, there is a suicide cult of people willing to sacrifice their own lives in order for the girl to maintain her immortality. Why? - Because! Then there are many long sequences of typical Rollin nonsense. This is not to say that the film has no genuine qualities. As mentioned above, the settings and cinematography are highly elegant. The female cast members are very nice to look at, and some of them have exhibitionist tendencies. However, there's not even quite as much female nudity as one might expect in a Rollin flick called "The Nude Vampire". The two twin maids (played by twins Marie-Pierre and Catherine Castel), who are dressed up in nothing but a bunch of bizarre gold plates, are the most notable aspect of the whole film; apart from being lovely to look at, they also provide the film's funniest and most interesting moments.I cannot say that "La Vampire Nue" is a complete failure; the film has its qualities, and might be appreciated by fans of surreal stuff. However, even though I consider myself to be exactly that, I fund this to be rather tedious. Overall, this is worth checking out for Rollin-fans. When it comes to European directors associated with erotic Horror films, I will personally always prefer the great Spaniard Jess Franco, some of whose films may be nonsensical, but almost all of them highly entertaining. My rating of "La Vampire Nue": 4/10

Nude Vampire, The (1970) ** (out of 4) Strange film from French director Rollin has a young man coming across a nude woman who he witnesses shot dead minutes later. The man decides to investigate, which leads him to a strange scientist doing experiments with blood and a suicide cult. I've seen quite a few Rollin films over the years and this one here just doesn't work. The film doesn't have many brains but it throws in this wild story and it just never really makes any sense. This is one of those low rent films that tries to be a lot smarter than it actually is but for the most part all of this stuff just leads to boredom. The biggest problem with the film is its slow pace, which is the norm for a Rollin picture. Sometimes this slow pace really helps but often times it hurts and that's the case here. The performances really aren't anything special and even though there's quite a bit of nudity, none of it is ever erotic. The cinematography is quite good as is the music score but that's about the only thing this film has going for it.