Continuing my journey thru Jean Rollin's entire film catalogue released by Kino, 10 down 5 to go . This time I was really expecting a disaster. The plot didn't seem very imaginative: a bunch of rich hot chicks kill people and drink their blood for kicks. And get naked.

But wow. Yet again I was really surprised & impressed. Like all Rollin films I've seen, the magic is under the surface. Yeah it's about rich naked hot chicks drinking blood, but first off it's set in 1905 and really authentically done with great locations (a castle in Loiret France), really good costumes, and great period music. I know enough French to feel the dialects and formal manner of speech are spot on.

But what's really cool is the whole theme of class divisions which is really at the heart of why the story revolves around rich chicks in 1905. The idea being that they can get away with murdering & mutilating the dregs because nobody's going to investigate anyway. The arrogance of the upper class is brilliantly played by the entire cast (whoda guessed half of them are porn stars). They're not cartoonishly smug, but their elitism is shown in the way they show no fear, only childish amusement, when the rogues threaten them at gunpoint and try to order them around.

The whole film feels like a metaphor for how the 19th century French nobility treated their inferiors as playthings. So even though the killers aren't literal vampires, or threatening in any outward way, you get the feeling that they are almost supernatural beings because they show no fear of mere mortals. In this case their aristocratic arrogance is perfectly counterbalanced by the hero's misogynistic arrogance: he's a man among women so he has nothing to fear and he amusedly plays along with their plan to eat his azz at midnight. Thus the suspense is kept high even though the plot is 'predictable'. It's a battle of egos.

Love the scene where he tries to humiliate the matriarch by stripping her (nudity in context) and threatening to burn her with a cigar. Neither one flinches. Really tense thematic moment even though it's not significant to the plot.

It's a cryin shame that Rollin's native France trashed him. I guess his allegorical fantasies and traditional old-school storytelling didn't sit well with the New Wave which was all about rejecting tradition. I believe they shunned the great Henri Georges Clouzot for the same reasons back then. So glad Rollin gained an international fanbase and a mild cult following in recent years (huge thanks to Kino's releases). I think toward the end of his life he realized he had in fact made an impact.