Requiem for a Vampire

French director Jean Rollin made his reputation with a series of horror films that combined eerie beauty and kinky decadence driven by the loony logic of a waking dream. Requiem for a Vampire (1973), a mad mix of dark fairy tale and surreal poetry, is one of his masterpieces—albeit one of his weirdest, craziest, most beautifully ethereal movies. The opening scene features two nymphs, Marie and Michelle (Marie-Pierre Castel, Mireille d'Argent), in clown garb, blasting handguns from the back of a getaway car careening down a country road. Soon the pigtailed young women are dreamily wandering through a graveyard (where Michelle falls into a freshly dug grave and is nearly buried alive!), before being lured into a castle of dying vampires and lascivious henchmen. The lyrical first half, with its fantastic imagery and unsettling beauty, eventually gives way to astonishingly brutal scenes of kink and cruelty, laced with nudity. Viewers with more adventurous tastes in cult movies will appreciate the art of Rollin's filmmaking, which incorporates a sense of delicacy amidst the exploitation. Presented on DVD and Blu-ray, extras include the retrospective featurette “The Shiver of a Requiem,” as well as an archival interview with actress Louise Dhour, who also appears in the film. Also newly available on DVD and Blu-ray are two other Rollin films, The Rape of the Vampire (1968) and The Demoniacs (1974). Recommended, overall. (S. Axmaker)