1st June 2009

Bonjour. Combien de fenêtres y a-t-il dans la salle de bains? Unfortunately that's about the limit of my grasp of French since scraping a B at O-Level and, perhaps surprisingly, the intervening 28 years have afforded me few opportunities to say "Hello. How many windows are there in the bathroom?". In any language.

I just mention this because a hatful of French titles have dropped through the door recently. Not the confrontational, uncomfortable, blood-and-screaming brand of excessive and extreme genre entertainment they've recently specialised in, like festival favourites Switchblade Romance, Frontier(s), Inside and Martyrs, however: a little more subtle than that.

Of course, when looking at French genre movies it's not long before you get round to Jean Rollin, and a trio of his movies have clanged into my mailbox recently. Many of his films have been amiable bits of dreamlike softcore nonsense in which naked nubiles wander round the battlements of ancient castles and encounter vampires, although I rather liked The Grapes Of Death, a very small-scale rural zombie movie in which the outbreak is caused by something polluting the local vineyard. The Night Of The Hunted (which has nothing to do with Robert Mitchum) dates all the way back to 1980 and is a semi-departure from the nudie vampire theme, in that there are no vampires (but there's still an awful lot of nudity): much of it takes place in a mysterious clinic in a huge Paris tower block caring for people with extreme amnesia. It's still got that dreamlike atmosphere about it and some brief bursts of gore, and I did enjoy it. Considerably duller is 1972's The Iron Rose, consisting almost exclusively of a couple wandering around a derelict graveyard and unable to get out. Meanwhile, Lips Of Blood from 1975 is much more interesting: it occasionally rustles up the old dreamlike ambience, a lot of it takes place around the castle ruins and it has a quartet of mute vampiresses wandering around in nothing but the flimsiest of see-through negligees. But its plot - a man tries to fill in the gaps in his childhood memories of a mysterious girl in a castle - is (perhaps surprisingly) quite involving.

To much more recent times: we can dispense with Eden Log fairly swiftly on the grounds that it's not any good: it hurts to look at the high-contrast black and white photography (the word chiaroscuro leaps to mind, probably wrongly) and it takes way too long about its generally uninteresting business. A man wakes up in a derelict underground wasteland and spends the rest of the movie trying to figure out who and where he is. There are a couple of moments where it almost comes to life, and I like the very final shot, but the somewhat muted reaction it reportedly got at FrightFest Glasgow 2008 isn't that hard to understand.

Not bad at all is Dante 01, a science fiction epic that looks great (and is in colour) but unfortunately doesn't really hang together. Orbiting the titular planet is a space asylum containing just seven patients, largely left to their own devices until a mysterious mute stranger with supernatural powers enters their midst along with a bald lady doctor proposing radical new techniques. But it's all weighed down with significance: the character names include Persephone, Charon and a pair of guards called Cer & Berus, the planet is called Dante and the ending goes into religious/Messianic territory via 2001. I usually like this sort of thing but I have to confess I'm not entirely sure what the point of it all was.

Better by far is Chrysalis, an absorbing and very nicely designed futuristic SF thriller centring on another mysterious clinic, which not only boasts the capacity to perform virtual surgery remotely through a computer linkup, but also has a machine that can rewrite memories. Generally entertaining and stylish, with a cold look to it and a clever plot twist that I, at least, didn't see coming. It's also nice to know that even in the future there'll still be maverick cops on personal crusades who don't mind bending the rules to get the job done.

Until the next time.

Richard.