Reviewed By:Sean Patrick Dolan

Director:  Jean Rollin
Cast:  Franoise Blanchard, Marina Pierro, Mike Marshall, Carina Barone

This is a tragedy, perhaps not in the Greek or Shakespearean tradition, but a tragedy nonetheless.  It is about the close love and friendship of two young French girls which could not be broken even by the most bizarre and grisly turn of events.  A woman, Catherine Valmont (Franoise Blanchard), dies (the cause is never revealed) and is brought back to life by contamination of her crypt by toxic chemical waste.  She slays the men that defiled her crypt and were so bold as to attempt the theft of her jewelry as her corpse lay prone in its coffin.  Without will or consciousness she moves zombie-like across the countryside, more dead than alive, finding her way by instinct to her family's abandoned chateau.  An American couple, tourists, see and photograph the haunting visage of this beautiful young woman, shoeless and wearing only a white burial gown.

Blind luck or the mechanisms of fate, whichever you prefer, lead to Catherine's best friend, Helene's (Marina Pierro) discovery that Catherine may still be alive.  She goes to the chateau and discovers  the gruesome remains of Catherine's latest victims, a realtor and her lover whom Catherine fed upon in a fit of uncontrollable bloodlust.  Helene's loyalty to Catherine is unflagging, despite the fact that her friend is mute and unresponsive and cannot tell her what occurred, so she immediately hides the bodies in the crypts below the chateau.  Helene sees the empty coffin with Catherine's name on it, but refuses to believe that her friend has returned from death and is a vampire.  However, as she coaxes Catherine back into the world of the living, helping her to regain her memories and the ability to speak, there is no doubt as to what Catherine has become.  Still, bound by love, Helene is determined to help Catherine, even if that means procuring victims for her to feed on.  The first attempt is successful, but disastrous in its consequences.  After feasting on the blood of an innocent woman, Catherine has fully regained her consciousness and is disgusted by what she has done.  Realizing that she is undead and evil, she begs her friend to destroy her- Helene refuses.

The American woman, Barbara (Carina Barone), who took the pictures of Catherine in the countryside is haunted by her image, and ask villagers if they can identify the woman.  They all identify her as Catherine Valmont, who died two years ago.  She is determined to investigate and finds Catherine in a barn on the chateau grounds. Charlotte begs her for help, not wanting any part of the existence she is now doomed too.  But the effort nearly costs Barbara her life, as she narrowly escapes from Helene who catches her on the premises and tries to imprison her.  The encounter scares Helene to the extent that she is prepared to take her friend Catherine far away that very night, but Catherine refuses.  Catherine also refuses a second victim that Helene procures for her, despite the fact that she is not hungry but ravenous, and growing weak.  At that moment, Barbara and her boyfriend Greg (Mike Marshall) arrive in an attempt to save Catherine, who they believe is a prisoner with mental illnesses.  Helene slays both Barbara and Greg, but in the meantime Catherine has allowed the victim to go free and warn the villagers of what she witnessed, ensuring her doom.  Catherine attempts to drown herself in a body of water that flows across the property, but Helene rescues her.  Weak and hungry, she warns Helene to leave her to her fate, but Helene refuses, still bound by their adolescent pact of undying love.  Overcome by her unnatural hunger, Catherine rips Helene's throat out and feeds on her, sobbing uncontrollably all the while.

Jean Rollin is a French director who has almost exclusively made vampire films his entire career.  No two of his films that I have seen are alike, with Living Dead Girl being the most unique of all.  Abandoning the campy atmosphere of his two most widely known sixties films, La Vampire Nue and Le Viol du Vampire (The Naked Vampire and the Rape of the Vampire), he achieves instead a devastatingly stark and lonely one here.  The isolated French chateau in the countryside, a soundtrack minimalistic to the very point of nonexistence (the majority of this film takes place in dead silence), and Franoise's excellent performance in the first half of the film as a mute, wounded creature that Helene has to draw back into world of the living all contribute to this.  The exception is the insertion of the American couple, and the film suffers for it.  They are annoying, obnoxious stock characters whose only purpose is to provide external conflict for Catherine and Helene.  I don't believe that they were needed in this film at all, because the real conflict is internal- Catherine's revulsion and self-hatred when she has regained her consciousness and understands what she has become, and Helene's selfish refusal to let her friend go back to her now natural state-death.  The most dramatic scenes are the flashbacks of the two young girls playing together, becoming blood sisters and making their pact of eternal love, and even more so the conversations in which Catherine begs Helene to destroy her. Conversely, Barbara and Greg's attempted rescue and murders provided moments of unintentional and inappropriate humor.  It should be noted here that although there is a lot of nudity in this film, it is not a lesbian vampire movie.  There is no lesbian sex and you could easily argue that the love between Catherine and Helene is that of closest friends or sisters.  This is an exceedingly dark and depressing film, especially the ending. The requisite violence, quite graphic in parts and very bloody, also takes a back-seat to the emotional despair of the doomed friends Catherine and Helene.

I give this film 4 ½ Bitch Slaps, mostly due to the unfortunate American characters. The entire film is in French with English subtitles, which I definitely prefer to dubbed voices, with the exception of the American couple, who don't even have the decency to speak French.   I reviewed a version a friend copied for me on VHS a few years ago.  I believe it was a dubbing of the 1997 Copper Sky Films Laserdisc release. Image Entertainment has recently released a DVD version of this and several other Rollin films on their Redemption line, and they are available through Amazon.com and other sources.

Bitch Slap Rating: 4.5