Now let us hail the return of...

HORROR MOVIE JOURNAL

Presenting a special, giant sized edition split into three thrilling instalments.

Part One: VAMPIRES!

Martin (George Romero, 1977)

Often stated to be Romero’s best non-Living Dead related film (personally, I’d go for ‘The Crazies’ – see below - but it’s a close call), this is an intelligent, low key affair about a socially retarded teenage boy who attacks women and drains their blood with razorblades and syringes. His superstitious Eastern European relatives have him pegged as a vampire; “Nosferatu!!” his hysterical Catholic uncle frequently bellows, in between commands and threats to stake him through the heart. Romero does an excellent job of exploring the ambiguities of mental disorder versus supernatural phenomena – Martin violently rejects his uncle’s ‘magic’, laughing in the face of garlic, crucifixes etc... but he still cheerfully admits to being 85 years old, and jarring flashbacks suggest he has the memories to prove it. Understandably, he acts mute and near imbecilic in front of his family, but speaks with complete honesty to a late-night radio call-in show he uses to unburden his soul – his slurred monologues are truly chilling, and one of the highlights of the film. Obviously other things happen too, but I want to leave you some reason to watch the damn thing. Romero keeps things together masterfully with his patented combination of sharp editing, almost painful visual realism and occasional outbursts of dream-like imagery that will prove instantly familiar to anyone else out there who regards ‘Night of the Living Dead’ as a holy cinematic text. A strange, excellent film and one to file alongside Abel Ferrara’s ‘The Addiction’ (with which it has quite a bit in common..) and, er, not that many other films at all really, in the roll call of well made, serious, non-generic vampire movies.

Le Frission Des Vampires (Jean Rollin, 1970)

At completely the other end of the vampire scale, weird film junkies heed my words; THIS IS THE ONE! By far the best Rollin movie I’ve seen, and to be honest I can’t even conceive of how he could possibly make a better one. Like ‘Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!’ or ‘Psychomania’, ‘Le Frission Des Vampires’ is one of those examples of mind-boggling, unbelievable b-movie perfection that makes me rejoice in the glory of creation.

For those of you unfamiliar with Rollin's oeuvre, a brief recap: he is the one-of-a-kind French director of surrealistic, soft-porn vampire movies which inevitably involve wide-eyed, under-dressed girls wandering around medieval chateaux getting involved in weird, ritualistic blood-letting and soft-core sexual antics. His films function according to a baffling dream logic bearing only the slightest relation to reality or conventional cause and effect motivations. He directs with an artist’s eye, utilising the kitsch value and primal power of horror movie imagery and mixing it with moments of lunatic surrealism to great effect. Somehow he seems to invest an almost childlike emotional connection into his wafer-thin characters as they stumble through the repetitive, incoherent, fairy tale narratives, giving a strange feeling of innocence to his films, despite their concentration on senseless sex and violence. It’s evident that he films cheaply, quickly, entirely on location in castles and graveyards and often in daylight – the latter a particularly bizarre touch when making horror movies.

Clearly a guy who knows what he likes, this is the formula Rollin has followed throughout his career despite commercial disinterest and public bafflement (or so I can only imagine, although who knows, maybe people turn out in their millions for this nonsense in France..?), his body of work stretching beyond film into novels and comic books on broadly similar themes. “Why??” is the inevitable question which springs to mind, and not one to which Rollin has ever bothered to provide an answer, but when he has produced movies as crazed and poetic as ‘Le Frission Des Vampires’, who cares?

First thing to note is that there’s an absolutely killer psychedelic rock soundtrack, second only to the legendary wig-outs accompanying 'Vampyros Lesbos', performed by the kind of whacked out, post-hippy musicians for whom any hope of finding a career NOT throwing together semi-improvised freak-beat mania for sexy vampire movies is clearly a distant memory (any chance of a CD release? – I’m looking to you, Johnny Trunk).

So anyway, in brief; honey-mooning couple arrive at remote chateau to visit aristocratic cousins, find them dead and in their graves, but are looked after by two hypnotised, nubile servants. The cousins, who turn out to be a pair of uproariously camp comedy vampire hunters rocking a stunning regency dandy / hippy cross-over look, return from the dead with evil schemes! A vampiric femme fatale emerges from the grandfather clock at the stroke of midnight and seduces our fair lady, dragging her off to freaky graveyard ceremonies! Her husband (“an electrical engineer!”, as he’s keen to remind everyone) is understandably perturbed! Characters spout garbled mouthfuls of sub-Anne Rice vampire talk! Everybody tries to get it on with everybody else! Breasts are ritually and unnecessarily revealed as if they were lost treasure maps! There are dozens of costume changes, with the outfits getting increasingly ludicrous as the film progresses! People emerge from nowhere and disappear in puffs of smoke! Fangs are bared, blood is shed and our heroine eventually drives her husband over the edge by casually chewing on a dead pigeon! There’s an intense showdown on a beach! Pretty much everybody dies!

And to think, some people still maintain the contemporary hollywood films are ‘good entertainment’... when will they learn? Needless to say, for anyone who considers themselves a fan of ‘this sort of thing’, ‘Le Frission..’ is fucking essential.