Rating: C
Dir: Jean Rollin
Star: Cyrille Gaudin, Jacques Orth, Denis Tallaron, Thomas Smith
Rollin is very much the parson’s egg of cinema, in that parts of his filmography are good. I’ll happily defend Fascination as among the best-ever low-budget vampire movies. However, nothing else I’ve seen of his, has come close to the same level. This does, at least, have vampires, and shares a similarly dream-like ambience. Turns out, these are not quite enough to sustain my interest for a whole movie. Who knew? It follows the quest of a vampire hunter, known only as “The Professor” (Orth) and his acolyte, Eric (Tallaron). They are looking for a woman, Isabelle (Gaudin, resembling a budget Charlotte Rampling), who is – as you have probably guessed from the title – betrothed to Dracula, and wish to stop the impending wedding.
This proves a bit of a quest, first requiring them to get information from a series of bizarre characters called “parallels”, which brings them to a group of nuns called the Order of the White Virgins. They’ve been taking care of Rebecca, but the insanity resulting from her engagement has proven rather infectious. Just before the Prof and Eric get there, Rebecca is whisked away by Dracula’s henchman, a dwarf called Triboulet (Smith), and handed over for safe-keeping to a baby-eating ogress. Preparations for the wedding are handled by a horse-riding she-wolf, played by Brigitte Lahaie – fun fact, she did equestrian commentary for a French radio station in the 2012 Olympics. Though her contribution here is largely limited to killing a trio of nuns.
If the above paragraph seems more than slightly nonsensical, it has clearly done its job. Because this is less a coherent movie, than a series of disjointed ideas, loosely linked. Dracula, for example, lives in an alternate dimension, which can only be reached through a portal in a grandfather clock. This is, admittedly, not something I’ve seen in a vampire film before. You could argue, thought, that this absence is for very good reason, since it doesn’t make much sense. Then again, “sense” is present here only in levels which would require a mass spectrometer to detect. This is a world in which vampires can’t get destroyed by the sun, if they can’t see it. Think about that.
The only thing to which I can speak with certainty, is Eric’s obsession with Isabelle, fuelling his desire to save her from the vampire. It’s as close to a core narrative as you’ll get. Visually, it’s decent enough, with some striking imagery which does a good job of capturing that dreamy sensibility. But when you consider this came out the same year as Blade II, it’s clear Rollin is a man looking back to the past. The film could easily date from twenty or even thirty years earlier, and outside of Lahaie, there’s almost nobody here delivering what I would call an acting performance. If you’re not used to the director, I couldn’t recommend this as a starting point. It’s definitely for experienced Rollinists only.