Before we get into all that vampire blood, we will take a moment to comment upon Deb's blood. Her latest blood test shows continued improvement, and she seems to be feeling like her old self. She has been exercising for over a week now, and we both hope to be walking outdoors again any day now, weather permitting. We bought a new suitcase, and a new backpack for Deb. So we are definitely thinking of traveling again. However, airfares are not pretty. We shall see.
In other news, Sudbury officially received about 40 cm of snow last week (16"). It was the heavy stuff, not the fluffy stuff, and some ice pellets and freezing rain landed on top of it, making plowing nearly impossible. They are still digging out, and have had several more inches since then. No spring flowers for Sudbury for a while. The street where my family lives never did get plowed. My brother and three other neighbours with snowblowers had to clear a single lane by themselves. It hit on March Break for schools, but even so the school buses were cancelled in the city for two days this week. It's seldom that a major snowstorm gets the better of Sudbury, but it happened this year!
Turning to cinema, I have always been a fan of classic Hammer horror films. They influenced a generation of film makers, including Roger Corman. And Jean Rollin, it would appear. Criterion has six of the French director's horror films, all leaving this month. We are trying to watch at least five of them. So far, three have been viewed.
Requiem for a Vampire is the earliest, from 1972. Hammer Films were winding down by that point, and then along came Rollin. His films are pretty short and focus even more strongly on sex than Hammer ever did (different censorship rules in France compared to England). They all contain some great atmosphere and photography and feature many naked young women with mostly natural, unenhanced bodies. There are in colour, and there is often a lot of blood. Requiem opens with a car chase, one of the more unique ways to open a vampire film. The vehicles are shooting at one another, and the lead car has two females dressed in clown suits. There is no explanation. After one car crashes the two females head cross country on foot, soon arriving at a cemetery and an abandoned and ruined castle. The fun soon begins. Definitely worth catching for fans of earlier vampire films.
In Lips of Blood from 1975 a young boy has a close encounter with a beautiful young girl in the ruins of an old chateau. It is a brief affair, but it comes back to him in a flash 20 years later when he sees a poster showing the old chateau. Determined to find the place again and perhaps the girl, who was kind to him, he begins asking questions and looking for help. However, someone is out to stop him. He sees images of the girl and she seems to be asking for his help. Of course he finds her and discovers that she is a vampire, but this film goes into mostly unpredictable territory, and actually has a happy ending (for the vampire). The young girl playing the entrapped vampire (Annie Belle) is quite beautiful, with a face that would lure any man on (not me!) to his doom. Recommended.
The third film in our on-going Jean Rollin festival was Fascination from 1979. A group of robbers get mixed up with two women in a beautiful not ruined chateau. Too bad for them. The women are part of a clique of gals that drink not only ox blood (good for anemia), but eventually develop a taste for human blood. The two women from the beginning later become seven women, and the one poor male robber remaining doesn't have a chance. Oddly fascinating, the film is quite violent in places, including one scene where two women face off on a drawbridge, one with Death's scythe and the other with a tiny dagger. Guess who wins? The opening scene in a butcher's abattoir is suitably revolting. The time is the very early 1900s. Worth catching for blood drinking fans.
Mapman Mike
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