The first feature film made by the late Jean Rollin was 1968's The Rape Of The Vampire, a bizarre black and white 'melodrama in two parts' (according to the on screen text that appears at the beginning of the movie - and it does have two distinct parts) that was originally intended to be nothing more than a collection of additional footage that producer Sam Selsky (credited on screen as $am $elsky) intended to splice into a film he had acquired entitled Vampire, Spawn Of The Devil. This was basically just the French dubbed version of 1943's Dead Men Walk, which starred George Zucco which was too short to hit the requisite ninety minute feature length running time Selsky knew would be required to get anything out of this picture at the French box office. Rollin was employed as an editor at the time and accepted Selsky's offer to pad out the American film, but this project soon took on a life of its own as it became increasingly bizarre and ultimately fairly surreal. When Selsky saw what Rollin had done, he was intrigued with what the first time feature director had turned in on such a low budget and he decided to give him the freedom to extend his thirty minutes of footage into an hour and a half long feature film independent of Vampire, Spawn Of The Devil - and thus was born The Rape Of The Vampire.

Why the history lesson? Well, knowing how the film came to be makes it a little easier to forgive its flaws and to appreciate its oddly disjointed narrative and bizarre atmosphere. Despite the fact that this was Rollin's first feature, it's got loads of ambience and tone, but the storyline is more than just a little bit surreal. The first part of the film follows a psychiatrist named Thomas (Bernard Letr) who heads out into rural France with two fellow doctors to investigate the claims of a quartet of beautiful women who reside out there who insist that they are centuries old vampires spawned by rape in the time of Louis XV. These four women, who are able to wander around in the sunlight unharmed but who do drink human blood, are at the beck and call of a man they refer to as the Lord of the Manor (Doc Moyle) and they worship a pagan statue placed oddly in the middle of a field. Shortly after Thomas and his companions arrive, a crowd of armed villagers decide to get rid of the four women and launch a small scale war against them, pinning them down inside their castle. Thomas figures they only way he can help make it out this situation alive is to have one of the women turn him into one of their own and after she obliges, they head to a familiar rocky beach for the showdown.

The second part of the film picks up where the first part left off with the arrival of the sexy and exotic Vampire Queen (Jacqueline Sieger) arriving in time to witness the aftermath, finding the four women she was looking for dead. Disheartened, she decides to force a doctor (Jean-Loup Philippe) to help her find a cure for vampirism while the dead are brought back to life and mad science runs amuck which all leads to a strange and macabre wedding inside Paris' infamous Theatre du Grand Guignol.

So when you consider that the film was shot in two parts, with the first part finished without much regard to any sort of follow up, you can understand why the second part of the movie makes due without the characters from the initial storyline. This doesn't mean that the second part will make any more sense, because it won't, but it does at least partially explain the environment which birthed this beautiful disaster of a film. Even when the film is making little to no sense, Rollin's expert command of imagery runs rampant throughout the film ensuring that the visuals do indeed go a long way towards making up for the improvised and very surreal storyline. Even when the narrative is going in a few different directions at once and never really finalizing any of them, we're treated to shot after shot of stark black and white imagery that really suits what little story there is. Gorgeous shots of run down cemeteries, strange laboratories, beautiful women and eerie settings are all wonderfully framed and lit and help to pull us in to this fever dream of a movie. Periodically pretentious and almost always disjointed, The Rape Of The Vampire isn't a 'good' movie as far as storytelling goes but it is a beautiful looking film that undoubtedly charts the course on which Rollin would travel in almost all of the pictures he made later on in his career. As frequently silly as it all is, you can't help but get pulled in...

Video:

The Rape Of The Vampire looks excellent on Blu-ray in AVC encoded 1080p high definition. Presented in 1.66.1 widescreen and mastered from the original 35mm negative, there are some minor specks here and there but no seriously distracting print damage. As seems to be the norm with these Kino releases of Redemption titles, there hasn't been a ton of cleanup work here so expect to see very minor print damage throughout, mainly just specks here and there. The elements used were obviously in great shape, however, and the healthy bit rate ensures that this movie looks excellent in high definition. The contrast looks very strong here, despite a few spots where the original photography lets the whites get a bit hot, while black levels are strong throughout. Detail is vastly improved from previous standard definition presentations as is texture and skin tones - the image is consistently sharp and shows good shadow detail in the darker scenes. All in all, this oddball little low budget oddity looks excellent on Blu-ray - Rollin's fans should be suitably impressed.