A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Sunday, October 19, 2025

Lips of Blood (Jean Rollin, 1975)

Catherine Castel and Marie-Pierre Castel in Lips of Blood

Cast: Jean-Loup Philippe, Annie Bell, Natalie Perrey, Martine Grimaud, Catherine Castel, Marie-Pierre Castel, Hélène Maguin, Anita Berglund, Claudine Beccarie, Béatrice Harnois. Screenplay: Jean-Loup Philippe, Jean Rollin. Cinematography: Jean-François Robin. Production design: Alain Pitrel. Film editing: Olivier Grégoire. Music: Didier William Lepauw. 

Would Jean Rollin's Lips of Blood be as creepy if it had been made on a generous budget with capable actors? Or is it the very cheesiness -- the fake fangs, the clumsy continuity, the gratuitous nudity, the patchy editing -- that makes it more interesting and memorable than slicker Hollywood horror movies? Because even when I'm laughing at some of Rollin's dodges and exploitative moments or wondering why he paces the action so slowly, I find myself drawn into the movie. Rollin is a master at finding and using real settings, from the crumbling Château Gaillard in Normandy to the Métro, the Trocadero gardens, and the Montmartre cemetery in Paris, which provide the right atmosphere and give the preposterous vampire love story an actuality that it doesn't deserve.   

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