The Nude Vampire

For this ghost and goblin season, I planned a Netflix festival of the films of Jean Rollin, who made several nudie horror films, mostly in the '70s. However, the first one was so jaw-droppingly awful that I may cut the festival short.

The Nude Vampire, made in 1970, is the kind of movie that defies description. It is incompetently acted, photographed, edited, written, and directed. It is the kind of movie that is best enjoyed with the company of Crow T. Robot and Tom Servo, or at least under the influence of hallucinogenics, which it appears to have been made under.

It's hard to know where to start listing all the bizarre things about this film. It starts with a bunch of people in masks taking a blood sample from a naked woman, also wearing a mask (we get one shot of just her boob, as if to tell us--"this is the most important part of the scene"). Then we cut to a young woman, wearing nothing but orange lingerie, escaping from a mansion and wandering the streets. She is chased by men in animal masks (one of them is wearing a chicken mask, and let me tell you, try as one might, one can't make a person wearing a chicken mask look scary). A young man attempts to rescue her, but she is shot and the masked men take her back.

This young lady is the vampire in question, though she is never nude. The lingerie is see-through, though, so there's nothing left to the imagination. She is played by a young lady named Christine Francois, and she never says a word during the entire film. Apparently she has a rare disorder where she can only feed on human blood, and she is immortal (shooting her has no effect).

The young man's father is in league with scientists who are trying to replicate her disorder, so they can be immortal. To feed her, they are in cahoots with a suicide cult, which the young man spies on. We see a young woman, chosen at random, who smilingly puts a gun to her head and pulls the trigger (it is the most bloodless point-blank head shot in the history of movies). Francois then drinks her blood.

Eventually we meet a man in a white cape, which looks like a tablecloth, who reminds me of that cult leader Marshall Applewhite. The young man tries to rescue the girl, with the help of the cape guy, and a pair of twins who are employed by the father, sort of like pets.

During this time period, before porn was so readily available, there were a lot of films made with gratuitous nudity that were dressed up to resemble legitimate cinema, but were usually god-awful. This is one of them. There are lots of bare breasts, or barely concealed breasts (I don't think a bra is worn during the whole film). The twins wear matching costumes I will attempt to describe--they are tops that look like Alexander Calder mobiles, and the father moves around the dangling pieces like beads on an abacus.

The Nude Vampire, despite all the tits, is almost completely free of eroticism. Except for a scene with a painter and his nude model, there is no hint of sex. There all isn't much blood, and no frights. Still, I can't say that it was ever boring. It may have more WTF moments per minute than any movie I've ever seen.