Two girls dressed as clowns escapes from reform school (or from a robbery, no one seem to know) in a car. They crash the car by the side of the road, burn the body of the killed driver, and escapes into the woods now dressed as schoolgirls. Soon they stumble across a remote cemetary where one of the girls is nearly buried alive as she tries to hide from two gravediggers by jumping into an open grave. But she's resqued by her friend and together they next run across a mysterious but seemingly abandoned castle in which they spend the night naked. Next morning they are chased around by an odd vampire who calls himself "the Last Vampire" (and who looks like Graham Chapman with fangs) and he now is eager to bite the girls because he know they are virgins (he can tell) and he want their blood to keep his sorry bloodline going. Then there's some nude running around the castle, some lesbian hanky panky and someone playing the piano in the backyard.

No further plot needed. No plot seem to have been written actually. According to the Rollin legends (of which there are many) the director just improvised around the settings, letting one scene lead to the next as it felt right at the moment. The result is short on logic but long on chunks of mesmerizing dialogue-free images of people just walking around naked or disoriented. Some parts work brilliantly because of the length of the takes (especially in the first half of the film), some parts maybe doesn't. But then there's always the surreal sequence with naked and tortured women chained to a dungeon wall somewhere in the middle to catch the attention of the bored (and to please the producers seemingly). Requiem For a Vampire may not be the greatest Jean Rollin movie there is, I never liked it as much as some of his later movies, but it's all very archetypical stuff and beautifully done. Newcomers could probably start with this film and Fascination and then work from there.

© The Inzomniac's Movie Madness Review.