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The Worst Film Ever

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

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

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

"Lips of Blood" is Rollin on auto pilot. It has all his usual calling cards: vampires wandering around in see-through night gowns, Gothic castles filmed outdoors, "dreamlike" (read: nonsensical and lazy) plotting. It has none of the striking imagery that he could pull off in movies like The Nude Vampire.One misstep is the guy who plays the main character. He looks like a Victorian-era Ken doll, but with less charisma. I don't really know if I can blame the actor for doing such a bad job. Rollin himself may have assumed that to have a "dreamlike" movie, you need actors who act like they're asleep. Unfortunately it doesn't leave the audience much to work with. Someone should have told Rollin that you can have a "dreamlike" atmosphere and at least allow the main character to show some kind of emotion. Hell, he could have cast someone who was actually capable of showing emotion. From what we see, the main guy wasn't.He is also creepy, but not in a scary way. More of a "I don't want to watch this guy anymore" kind of way.You can't even begin to care about whatever's going on in this movie when you have to watch him all the time, but this is Jean Rollin, so it's not like there's much going on anyway. This movie really suffers from its low budget. You get tired of all the outdoor shots, and the apparition of the short haired vampire just becomes a bore.

"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.

A photograph of a castle, ominously overlooking the ocean, waves crashing onto the rocks beneath brings back long buried memories of first love, and the castle itself, in one rather dull man's childhood.Compelled to find the castle, and a girl from the same time of his youth who protected him. The nude girls at the photographer's might have been tossed in at the last minute just to add more nudity and pad out the run time, but it has a bit of a surreal, trashy, "Where the hell did that come from?" feel to it. As do the bats in coffins in underground chambers beneath a Gothic cemetery.Vampire girls, wearing flowing, nearly transparent wraps, almost sleepwalking through the cemetery late at night is another surreal touch; the tall blonde in purple (who is this actress?) is remarkably beautiful.Here is another film, like Rollin's Le viol du vampire, in which is almost best to not concern oneself with the plot or acting in this erotic Euro horror, but just sit back and enjoy the visually striking, colour-saturated photography in cemeteries and fountains, and nearly nude girls slowly walking through the cliff-side castle.

The films of Jean Rollin will be an enigma to many who have not experiencing his work, yet for those who allow themselves to be taken elsewhere by his cinema it can prove a highly rewarding experience. The viewer is often taken to places that invoke bewilderment, unease, and sexual desire. By no means Rollin's best film, Levres De Sang (aka. Lips of Blood) is a beautifully lyrical, slow burner that has the uncanny ability to take the viewer into an ethereal, dream like world, where the erotic and the neurotic are intertwined.The story of a photographer, upon seeing a poster, is reminded of his childhood where a mysterious female vampire. However, this being Rollin, do not expect a traditional vampire movie (although his vampire films are arguably the most faithful to the Gothic aura and mythology of the vampire). Mostly dialogue free, with the acting catatonic, this only adds a surreal edge to the proceedings. And no vampire films have a greater sense of eroticism; it is easily to succumb to female vampires whenever they are on screen. For the uninitiated, approach with caution. But this is a fine example of the originality and unique approach which is to be found in 1970s European sex and horror cinema. Of which, Jean Rollin was undoubtedly the master.