DiscoSex--Jean Rollin and the Groovy Credits

Lots of sex and not nearly enough disco mark this Jean Rollin porn film--but the music and hand turned credits are GROOVY!!

Stained Glass and Wet Sheets - Schoolgirl Hitchhikers

With the passing of Jean Rollin this year (my tribute to him is here) I had to find something unique and interesting to watch from his filmography.  After Vibrations Sexuelles I wanted to look further at the Michel Gentil films, and thanks to the Jezebel DVD release of Schoolgirl Hitchhikers I found a great link between the hardcore penetrations and softcore rubbings of Rollin. No matter what , it is all erotic from the master...

 
Schoolgirl Hitchhikers is a wonderfully simple little romp at it's core.  Starting off with several extended sex sequences, both of which feature the amazingly sensual Joelle Coeur (whose entire body, from her hair to nose to toes is a wonder to me) doing it without getting to gooey if you get my meaning.  However, no matter who she is working with in these sequences, the first a lengthy lesbian undress and release and the second a long three way scene with her as the genital to genital facilitator (sigh..awesome)-she brings a certain verve that exceeds the eyes to the left, lips to the right softer work of her compatriots.  So, sex achieved, I'm just about tired enough to enjoy Rollin switch gears right in to a little crime story.  After the girls wander in to an "abondoned" house and then hook up with a shady character it comes to light that some diamonds that were in his care have gone missing.

 
His lady boss is gonna put the boot to him if he doesn't find them. The girls spend another night in the woods (and Joelle Coeur pulls the old jeans and no top on me...sigh)-and fall in to the clutches of the baddies.  But this IS Jean Rollin, so you can expect some sadistic behavior filmed in freaky colors and wailing tunes that sound like they fell off a shattered record found in his grandfathers attic. It sounds like his grandfather was programming library music for old time detective radio programs to boot! 

The girls are helped by the police who bumble, blunder and bring along a very hot, very oddly attired (Rollin seems to want to put her in clown make-up but just can't) lady assistant.  A Rollin gun battle ensues, leaving me to wonder why it always seems like in his films people are fighting with cap guns.  It is one of the most charming aspects, the "real" violence in Rollin films, because it shows that he worked well with style and strangeness and had little desire to go beyond a nostalgic realism for anything else.

And it ends. I'm exhausted from smiling and loosening my zipper between the fun crime story and the abundance of Joelle Coeur (and whoever plays the lady detective...zowie!).  Willy Braque is fun to see as well, this movie has some of that Demoniacs vibe to it in parts, when Coeur is hiding from the bad guy in the most obvious place it made me smile and think about the pulpy opening sequence of that great film. 

Even working outside the fantasy genre, well...fantasy of a sort, Rollin paints with his actors and found sets with the assured hand of the artist living between periods and places.  Villainous women masturbate to violence behind stained glass, thuggish louts torment with whip and penis, shocking schoolgirls expose desires both light and dark...sheets are rumpled and hyperextended orgasms fill the screen.  This is one film that any Rollin fan would appreciate-and for those that want a fun softcore sex film that isn't afraid to make you smile without trying to make you laugh, this is it! 

The DVD from Jezebel is very nice, I did have a weird stripe running down the right side of my screen throughout the full frame presentation. Not a distraction because I was too busy oogling the sights and tapping my feet to the sounds of this walk with some sexy Schoolgirl Hitchhikers!


'Schoolgirl Hitchhikers' trailer from Salvation Films on Vimeo.

Vibrations Sexuelles alternate titles

Here is an alternate title sequence for the Jean Rollin film Vibrations Sexuelles.  I noticed it was different than the one that is pictured at the excellent FASCINATION blog right here.  A fun porn film at best, it does have some Rollin styled shots, though very few...but it does have BRIGITTE LAHAIE as a brunette. 
Ask me why I watched, deep down though, you know the answer.

Thank you Jean Rollin.

Jean Rollin, Master of Erotic Terror.  1938-2010

I'm not good at eulogizing my favorite directors. At all.  On Wednesday Jean Rollin passed away and I have to say that I found the news very sad. There are many many great resources to see his work on DVD thankfully, and for those that have not I can't push you towards them enough.  Also, you can learn tons of interesting facts and luxuriate your brain in acres of gorgeous images by visiting some of the resources on the web, my favorite being FASCINATION: THE JEAN ROLLIN EXPERIENCE, which is a lovingly crafted blog on all things Rollin.
So I can only speak of what I know.  Jean Rollin had a fantastic impact on me, both as a film fan and as a moderately creative person.  After diving headfirst in to the Italian Horror and Trash cinema pool, I was hungry for something different. Rollin certainly provided me with that.  And much much more.

"The first vision I had was two clowns playing piano in a cemetery. I have never seen that in a film before and I wanted to see it, so I just wrote it in. Afterwards, I reused the image of the clowns in other films as some sort of quotation. I like that; I often make references to my earlier films. It connects dreams and stories like a construction system and the audience can make their own thing out of it." - Jean Rollin (taken from an interview here) 

Pony Castel - unforgettable.

Being deep in to the gore and splatter of Italy was most likely not the right place to begin with the cinema of Jean Rollin. Gorezone magazine couldn't prepare me, though I was lucky enough to be discovering Videooze and European Trash Cinema around this time as well. The copies of the few Rollin films I first encountered were usually poor dubs, without English dialog and touted as being violent masterworks by various catalogs. The films were frustrating and fascinating at the same time.  I never knew what to expect.  After my first viewing of an unsubtitled Night Of The Hunted I had no idea what I'd even watched.  But they were VERY different from what I'd been told.  Exciting, but I wasn't ready to really experience them they way I wanted to.  Video Search of Miami producing expensive gray market releases, with subtitles of perhaps dubious nature at best, was a bit of help...but the cost became prohibitive and I saw perhaps three of them before moving on.  But I never forgot the images, and women, of Requiem For a Vampire.  I just wasn't ready, because instead of insane thrills, easily attainable from the works of Dario Argento, Sergio Martino or Lucio Fulci...these films offered chills that poked at the brain and thrills that rubbed at the crotch with equal abandon.  Le frisson des vampires indeed.

I doubt he would like this much, but it was Jess Franco and his labyrinth of celluloid sins that brought me back to Rollin. The two don't do the same thing at all, but they are both outsiders when considered against the "mainstream" of horror and cult cinema. Smaller budgets, less interest in effects and stories and much more ambient energy.  Franco casts a strange spell of smoke and crash zoom pussy mania, regardless of genre as only he can.  Rollin weaves the same strange spell, but takes elements from a much different, perhaps more imaginative, inner ether. After exploring a lot of films and putting them in the context of Jess Franco's career, it just so happened that the Rollin catalog began to hit home video with gusto thanks to Redemption Films in the UK.  With proper translations and cleaner images than I'd encountered before things began to take shape.

The films begin, as he said in the above quote, as disconnected visual cues and weird images that you couldn't make up because they are from such a strange mind. And then, you realize you aren't watching a single film, but a page in an encyclopedia of strangeness.  A world at first alien and off putting becomes a dimension where beautiful women and traditional monsters meet in a hazy purple fog that sucks the right viewer in and leaves them feeling good to take a walk on the beach. Oh, that beach.  I knew that I was sprung for the Rollin when I started randomly jotting down not only plot elements to keep the films straight, but how it felt to hit the "fin" moment. Sometimes the same film could feel sad and depressing on one viewing, and wonderfully romantic on another. Sort of like how life can treat you.

I realized Rollin was providing the headspace, and I was letting his work affect me however it would at the given moment. I remember many viewings by where I was, what was happening, who I was with...even if I got laid! On the rarest occasion you too could score a fine nights fun thanks to Rollin.  Well, I'd like to think it was me, but I know that Jean Rollin flicks are made for the lovin' baby!
This destroys my ability to critique his films.  And that is fine by me because I am content to love them instead. 

So, I've followed the films through different paths and there are a few things that I've learned.  Vampires are cool. Twins are hot. Vampire twins are hot and cool.  Clowns rule, especially when they don't belong in the scene.  Bats love blood. Movies can open your mind to itself. I don't have a favorite Rollin film, they all inform the one just watched. Bats love pussy.  Childhood is a wonderful place. Never losing your imagination is important.  Zombie Lake, and Eurocine's strange idea of what is good, are never endingly entertaining for me.  Creating art is great, creating your own is better because it holds up better.  I never had dinner with Jean Rollin, I wish I had the opportunity. And yes...Jean Rollin could shoot a mean sex film.  He could also make films that were thrilling. Chilling. Romantic. Sad. Funny. Wild. Weird. Sexy.  Sexy Sexy Sexy. And most importantly of all, they will always entertain me.  Jean Rollin was a gift I found thanks to those cinema fanatics that gave me the signposts to begin to appreciate him.  I'm glad I opened the present and then made the films my own.
We all have the work of Jean Rollin now and I hope everyone that reads this has their own little vision of the place his movies came from, it is a rich wonderworld that will find you looking around every headstone hoping to find a naked clown, or at the least a long toothed vampire nurse.  You never know what hides behind a hood in a Jean Rollin film.

Thank you Jean Rollin, my imagination is that much brighter from your being here. I hope your family can take comfort in knowing how far and wide you were admired.  I know I'll be seeing you and your world for the rest of my days.  I hope everyone reading this will take a trip there, even for an hour.

"During one screening, I sat in the audience to listen to what the people said about it. Some just came because of the nudity, some came because it was a vampire film, and others came because they wanted to see something unusual and bizarre. There is no typical audience for my films, and this leaves me in a kind of vacuum. Do you know what I mean? I often had the impression that I did what I was doing solely for myself." Jean Rollin