Absolutely the worst movie.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

"Lips of Blood" has a great narrative hook. Frederic vaguely remembers a dreamy encounter he had as a child. While staying at an old castle (Of course), he spent the night sleeping in the arms of a beautiful woman. Upon spying a photograph of the castle, the memory comes rushing back. He becomes obsessed with finding the girl, especially since she starts appearing to him in visions. A trip to an old tomb doesn't yield anything but coffins full of bats… Or so it would appear. Vampire girls, dressed in colorful see-through shawls (Of course!), emerge from the crypt and begin to feed across France. A man attempts to assassinate Frederic. It becomes obvious there's a conspiracy preventing him from finding the old building and reuniting with the girl of his dreams.Narratively, the film is more focused then usual. Pacing-wise, it's still a mess. Scenes drag into each other. The long opening sequence is so soft that the next scene, a fairly explicit nude modeling session, throws you off. Moments of the vampires attacking people seem unrelated to Fredric's quest. A scene of a woman leading him into a room with promises of revealing the castle's location doesn't have much to do with the story. The vamps help him out at least once but we never find out why. I like the mustachioed assassin, even if it's a bit out of place in this horror love story, but that storyline isn't resolved either. Generally speaking, the subplot about the legion of vampire girls never meshes with the main storyline. It seems like a blatant excuse for Rollin to insert his fetishes into the film. I mean, more so then usual.The worst part? There aren't that many memorable visuals. A shadow of a statue of a bull is the only striking pure image I can remember. Some memorable scenes arise. A pair of nurses pulling down their surgical masks to reveal fangs is darkly funny. The vampire girls weigh a victim down in chains before kicking her up a flight of stairs. Hilariously, during a particularly windy night, a purple dress billows up into a girl's face. I doubt that was intentional.When the focus is on the love story and the conspiracy, that's when it works. Jean-Loup Phillippe gives an excellent performance as Frederic, especially in a scene where he pleads with the girl's spectre to prove she's real. Annie Briand is enchantingly beautiful as the strange girl at the story's center. It's easy to see why she would inspire such obsession. Natalie Perrey as Frederic's mother delivers exposition but her performance makes it go down easy. The scene of the arrant vampire girls being exterminated is nicely brutal, such as two girls being impaled on the same stake, but also obviously elegiac. Rollin loves his monsters and hates to see them slaughtered.That monster love shines through in the lengthy epilogue. Following an obvious slight-of-hand, the protagonist is reunited with his love. They frolic on the director's favorite beach (Of course!!) and make love, before she bites him, turning him into a vampire. The nude lovers float off, where they live in vampirey bliss happily ever after. Aww. "Lips of Blood" is a muddled affair even if Rollin's strength for romantic sincerity and some strong actors keep it afloat.

Not every filmmaker can work from emptiness, it's one of the toughest lines to toe the thread between sleep and lucid dreaming. It's all the difference in the world.Tarkovsky accomplished several times, Resnais in Marienbad, Herzog in Heart of Glass. Lately Lynch and perhaps Weeresethakul. Not to set the bar of comparisons inordinately high of course, but precisely because Rollin does not at all compare, say, with Hammer, even though they've worked from similarly disreputable material, or Bava who looked to simply paint with light, whereas Rollin aims to dream; so exactly because he's a little farther out from what he's often grouped together with, I feel that even when he fails he fails where most horror filmmakers haven't dared to.Rollin has repeatedly tried and been only moderately successful, when he structures with a single-pointed concentration around a sense of place, but the effort alone places him higher than most horror filmmakers in my estimation. He dares to play dumb enough so that we can perhaps dream for a while; so his plots fail to make sense when we'd like them to, where the storytelling coherence we have devised to chronicle our world would demand it, but it's a strategy of deliberate abstraction. He breaks logic so that we may flow on subconscious winds. From our end as viewers, we need to stay lucid enough to make it work.The story here is about the quest for a subconscious image from childhood; it involves a seaside castle and a young woman, a repressed memory about these. For most of the film we wander towards it, starting with a scene inside a movie theater where our protagonist gets up and follows the woman through a door. The door is by the stage, giving the impression that he disappears inside the screen. But that is the thing about emptiness, why Rollin cannot seem to sustain what he sets out to do. It is not a matter of stillness or immobility, but concentrated mind. It is a vital process. It needs to flow from a center.So far only Fascination has really worked for me, where he weaved a story about nonsense that we could safely discard around a sense of place we couldn't. The result was a captivating aura, itself a simple thing but hard to accomplish. This is equally dreamy but scattershot. Just the same, Rollin means what he does. Look at the ending here and tell me the man is just not truly, hopelessly romantic in his morbid way. He means well, you should watch him in spite of everything that works against him.

This erotic vampire film features a young man on a strange quest after recognizing a castle on a poster. He seems to remember the castle from his childhood and eventually finds it with the aid of a strange woman dressed in white.Where does Jean Rollin get his locations? Because I am pretty sure he used the same fence in the water from a previously film. Is this his own private shooting set? Or what? Also, for those of you who have seen the many naked women in his films and were asking where the naked men were, this might be the film for you. I mean, there is only one, and you have to squint, but he is there.

When I received my DVD copy of Lips of Blood, it took me half a year before working up the courage to block off 90 minutes for viewing. The DVD cover had me intrigued all right with a naked dead woman sitting on some kind of rock wall by the water, but being a vampire film released in 1975, I knew I had to be in the mood. Nearly six months later, the mood hit and I plopped Lips of Blood into the Blu-Ray player on a cold Friday night.As the film starts, I was beginning to envision the experience to something more like a Mystery Science Theatre viewing. There was dry dialogue at a cocktail party and the opening scene where two men bring two covered bodies down to some kind of cellar seemed more laughable than anything worthy of attention.But then Lips of Blood began to grow on me, and by it's conclusion I was thankful for this unique and atmospheric work.Lips of Blood centers on Fredric (Jean-Loup Philippe), a man who is both obsessed and beset by a picture of a landscape that reminds him of his youth. Frederic can remember the castle in the picture and he begins to have other memories of the location such as a woman for which he will spend most of the film searching.Frederic's obsession leads him to a cemetery where he opens multiple coffins unleashing female vampires onto the streets of Paris. It also leads him to being taken away by doctors and forced into a straightjacket – that is, until two of the female vampires come to his assistance.Frederic's obsession with female and the photo bring him to the brink of insanity and he finds himself hospitalized and put into a straightjacket for a short period of time until rescued by two female vampires that he unleashed unknowingly the night before Most of Lips of Blood has Frederic running around the streets of Paris tracking down his childhood memory while naked women parade across the big screen biting unsuspecting victims (God Bless you, director Jean Rollin). In fact, at a very brisk 87 minutes, Lips of Blood has enough full frontal nudity to do two or three of today's standard Hollywood horror flicks (again, God Bless you, director Jean Rollin) To enjoy Lips of Blood as much as one should, you really must have an appreciation for 1970's cinema. Set design was only a suggestion and the wardrobe is downright embarrassing (Frederic runs around with a padded shoulder and elbow sweater). But that doesn't stop Lips of Blood from being both impressive and erotic. It is distinctive and moody and it transported me back to when I used to sit in front of an old RCA television on Saturday afternoon trying to get ariel feeds on channel 24. It is a simple vampire film that tries to be nothing more. And sometimes, this is the best approach to providing the viewing public with some worthy entertainment.www.robertsreviews.com