Tied for the best movie I have ever seen

Purely Joyful Movie!

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Jean Rollin's premier feature is, unsurprisingly, highly abstract. It started out as a thirty-minute short before the director added an additional forty minutes. It starts out as straight-forward as he ever is. Four sisters live in an abandoned mansion and believe themselves to be vampires. One is blind, convinced a villager gouged her eyes with a pitchfork. The house is surrounded by crucifixes and the sisters sometimes take orders from a goofy-faced scarecrow who is also an old man? Someone bowls on a beach. A trio of college students appear and try to convince the sisters they are not, in fact, vampires. This goes badly for everyone. There's roving rioters and a guy with a hunch and a messed-up face.Part two: All the characters that aren't dead yet are on a beach. Some of them will be dead soon. The vampire queen appears. She has a trio of minions, a bearded guy, a guy in a white suit, and a girl in go-go boots. All three are annoying. The girlfriend of one of the students is now a vampire and she's very conflicted about this. The queen is secretly running a mental hospital. The guy who runs the hospital is looking for a cure for vampirism. The queen and her followers gather on a theatre stage to initiate the girl into the vampire lifestyle. There's a giant paper bat. Chaos breaks out. The vampires revolt against their queen. She drinks the cure and dies. Two people wall themselves up in a basement forever. A guy walks down the street, holding a dead girl in his arms, bemoaning the lack of innocence in the world. The end? Okay, it doesn't make much sense. The main reason to stick around is the images. The Gothic château is atmospheric. I like the idea of the blind girl who, after realizing she isn't actually blind, looses her eyes anyway. There's a wonderful sequence of the student trying to psychoanalyze the girl while the camera whirls around them. A scene of one of the vampires standing on top of the mansion, pleading with her invisible lord, sticks out.The film looses a lot of momentum in the second half. A shot of two straight-jacket bound characters writhing, two giant gum-ball-machine-like receptacles full of blood standing next to them, is goofy. The vampire queen is odd. The film can't decide if she's meant to be the villain or not. Why she wants to cure vampirism is never explained."Rape of the Vampire" is claptrap, though occasionally interesting. Rollin's images don't burn as much in black-and-white as they do in color. His complete abandonment of narrative isn't as freeing as it should be. Either way, he's an amazingly consistent filmmaker when it comes to the content of his films. There's lots of nudity, even a little sadomasochism. Vampires, beaches, old buildings, casual lesbianism, it's all here. I wish I had enjoyed it more.

Jean Rollin is a director who certainly divides opinion. Even amongst the horror community his films are at most marginally appreciated. The reason for this is that his movies don't really follow conventions of that genre very much at all. They are usually more interested in capturing surreal imagery than scaring the audience. The atmosphere in these films is less sinister and more melancholic. His movies often owe more to experimental cinema than Hammer horror. That said, Rollin's movies certainly belong in the horror genre. It's just that he uses typical iconography of the genre – vampires, graveyards, crumbling Gothic buildings – in unusual ways. The Rape of the Vampire is his debut feature and while it is atypically filmed in black and white, it is essentially pure Rollin. It's basically a template film and he would rework its basic ideas time and again but mostly with better results.A psychoanalyst visits a château which is inhabited by four vampire sisters. He tries to convince them that they are not in fact vampires at all. An old charlatan seems to be manipulating these women into thinking thus and he eventually turns the local villagers against them. This ends in bloody vengeance. But just as events turn most tragic, in from nowhere enters the Queen of the Vampires. It turns out that these sisters were actually vampires after all.Are you confused? Yeah well, it doesn't entirely make a lot of sense it has to be said! It wouldn't be very unfair to say that it's a somewhat baffling movie overall. It doesn't really have a very coherent plot-line. Or rather it sort of does and then gets mighty confusing as it progresses. This is down to the fact that it was originally a thirty minute short film that Rollin extended to feature length by adding additional material. Part one is called 'The Rape of the Vampire' and part two 'The Vampire Women'. The first half is easily the best. It's much more cohesive with some excellent photography. The second part of the film introduces several new characters, including the Queen of the Vampires. The problem with it is that it feels like it's tagged on primarily to extend the running time, and there isn't enough ideas to do this effectively. It becomes confusing and lacks the overall style of the earlier part.The best way to appreciate the film – and Rollin movies in general – is to just take in the odd atmosphere and bizarre imagery. The plot is not ultimately very important to be honest. Like all of the director's films, this one has pretty bad dialogue and amateur acting. So really there's quite a lot the average viewer needs to overlook if they are going to enjoy one of Rollin's films. This one, like all his films, isn't accessible at all. It's extremely left-field and will understandably irritate many who watch it. But for those of you who have a fondness for the strange style of this horror auteur, well this is where it all started and there is plenty to appreciate. It's not one of his stronger efforts to be fair but it's certainly typical enough.

Popular French art/cult director Jean Rollin's first foray into the horror genre calls itself a two-part melodrama and is divided into two segments that overlap; "Part One: The Rape of the Vampire" and "Part Two: The Vampire Women." In the first portion (which is the shorter of the two), psychoanalyst Thomas, his friend Marc and Marc's girlfriend Brigitte go to a mansion to investigate claims of vampirism. Living at the large country home are four psychologically troubled young women who are rumored to be ageless vampires by the superstitious townspeople. The villagers try to keep the women inside at all times by staking crosses everywhere and using a weird-looking, hairy-faced scarecrow that an old man provides the voice for. Thomas suspects the women have been brainwashed into believing they're actually vampires when it fact they're not, and sets out to get to the bottom of things. Even though the acting's not great, the dialogue is terrible and the editing is horrible, this segment is visually very beautiful. The images, the camera set-ups, the framing of shots and the clarity of the black-and-white photography are all done well. The director also proves to have a nice eye for detail, outdoor scenery, light and shadow. The art direction is also good, and though the storyline is a bit muddled it's still not too difficult to follow. Unfortunately, immediately after this shorter portion concludes, the film basically falls apart and it never recovers.With several of the principals either dead or turned into vampires at the end of "Rape," we now enter the second segment "The Queen of the Vampires." The "Queen" is an arrogant short-haired woman who is carried around on a bed by two of her goons and has a bunch of hipster followers at her side to do her bidding. No clue what she really wants or what's driving her, but it seems like she's power mad and wants to put on some kind of theatrical wedding where two people will have sex in a coffin that's nailed shut. She and her minions have also blackmailed a doctor into trying to come up with a cure for vampirism. They have turned the doctor's girlfriend into a vampire to edge him along. Several characters from the first segment wander in and out every once in awhile. It's all extremely confusing to watch and hard to keep track of what's going on, who is who and what it is whoever is trying to accomplish. This second and much longer portion also seems more rushed and less stylish than the first. It's also full of continuity errors and hacky editing splices that make it even more confusing. Both segments feature plenty of T&A shots, which were quite risqué for 1967 I'm sure.Discounting Rollin's super-cheesy living dead disaster ZOMBIE LAKE (which even his most devoted fans have a hard time defending), this is my first real look at the work of this director. I see a fantastic visual stylist with a lot of potential who needs a little help on his narrative structure and pacing. A happy medium can be met. Throwing a little clarity in every once in awhile never hurt a film. Of course, some people can and will defend the most senseless films ever made as long as they look good, calling them "poetic" or "dream-like" or "experimental." That's perfectly fine if this is a masterpiece in some people's eyes, but to me a movie this illogical really needs to sustain that other-worldly feel throughout to keep me interested. The first segment almost seemed to hit the right note, but the second didn't even come close. I'll certainly still check out more films from Rollin based on the positives here even though I was less than enthusiastic about this effort.

First looking at Jean Rollin's debut feature Viol Du Vampire was not very impressing. It looked very cheap, and the editing seemed almost amateurish. After a while though I learned to appreciate the movie's very unique pacing and artistic approach. Its been long since I've seen a movie as pleasant to look at. I found an interesting saying by a user at the amazon page: "Its boring, but in a good way". Which of course doesn't make sense to most people, but try seeing this. Relaxing, yet exciting. The low-tempered experimental music really is nice. You don't really have to understand what is going on though. Lots of nudity, blood, poetry, interesting characters... Yes, I really enjoyed this! If you like old art-house movies you should try it. Jean Rollins should be deemed as a great great artist.