Directed by Jean Rollin
Written by Jacques Ralf and Jean Rollin
Starring Marina Pierro, Francoise Blanchard, Mike Marshall, Carina Barone, Fanny Magieri, Patricia Besnard-Rousseau and Sam Selsky
France, 1982
A recently deceased heiress (Francoise Blanchard) to a large manor house rises from the grave when a couple criminals spill toxic waste in a robbery gone wrong. Her childhood friend (Marina Pierro) is shocked to find her alive – and even more shocked to find she has an insatiable appetite for blood. What’s a loyal friend to do? Become this vampire’s familiar, that’s what.
The first half of this film is slow and dreamy and started to lose me as I began to wonder if it was just an attempt at art for art’s sake – an exploitation flick masked by pretentions. But, as things began to flip and Pierro as the friend took more and more drastic measures to keep the blood flowing for her living dead friend, things got more interesting. At a certain point, the living dead girl regrets her bloodlust and just wants to be put back in the grave. But Pierro won’t have it.
There’s a subplot with a bickering tourist couple (Carina Barone and Mike Marshall) who starts to figure out what’s going on, but it doesn’t ultimately amount to much and ends up just being filler. I guess a lot of the movie is filler, dead space hoping to come across as thoughtful or suspenseful. Maybe I’m not doing it justice.
In any case, it was nice to see Marina Pierro in a second movie this month – she was Dr. Jekyll’s fiancé in THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MISS OSBOURNE. Reading about her for that movie, I learned she’s a bit of a cult movie star for these types of movies, and I can see why.
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