'The Nude Vampire' aka 'La Vampire Nue' (1970) - Jean Rollin.   

Gallic genre iconoclast, Jean Rollin's exotic cinema was never more beautifully surreal and tantalizing wicked than his visually exquisite 'La Vampire Nue' which is a fascinating, even intoxicating glimpse of an illicit, twilight world of manifestly alien, mythologically marvellous entities and a deliciously heady, transgressive sensuality that remains wholly unique! 'La Vampire Nue' is arguably one of the more esoteric examples of, Rollin's mesmerizing midnight wyrd. He constructs an oblique and fantastically eerie epilogue, wherein, Pierre Radamante (Olivier Rollin), the svelte son of darkly brooding occult meddler, George Radamante (Maurice Lamaitre) meet-cutes the cutely corporeal, perhaps otherworldly figure of 'Vampire' (Caroline Cartier), the enticingly garbed, desperately scampering waif ominously observed by a grim-looking coven of satanically bemasked cultists, thereby provocatively heralding one of the most macabre,exquisitely unsettling, visually stimulating works of Vampire exotica by a master of convention warping weirdness!

To fully appreciate, Rollin's ecstatic cinema at his very best one must first dispense with anything quite so prosaic as plot, as 'La Vampire Nue' is luscious visual poetry, pure and simple, you simply let this elegiac, multicoloured, hyperbolic Gothic delirium wash pleasurably over your mind like a powerful jolt of THC, as explaining true beauty frequently diminishes it. The unutterable joy is to discover an exotic cinematic realm wholly unpolluted by soul-neutering Hollywood dogma, unrepentant sensualist Rollin wants us to 'feel' his full-blooded, open-mouthed movies, plunge unashamedly deeply into their velvet, voluptuous, blood-wet folds where having an active imagination is encouraged, and a censorious attitude to banal linearity isn't! Maestro, Jean Rollin, like fellow astral traveller, Jess Franco, frequently finds breathtaking beauty in death, sublime art in madness, and a livid, vibrant sexual luminescence in darkness!'

The infectiously exuberant masterpiece, 'La Vampire Nue' is everything genre cinema isn't today; bold, oblique, fiercely original, searingly sensual and audaciously bizarre, and I thank the diaphanous clad deities leading our handsome protagonist to some otherworldly, polymorphously stimulating Shangri-La that we now have these astonishing works of plush, exotic fantasy lovingly restored in glorious HD, as the witless, terminally thin, erotically undernourished horror gruel Hollywood serves up today wouldn't revivify an anaemic ant!

'Maestro, Jean Rollin, like fellow astral traveller, Jess Franco, frequently finds breathtaking beauty in death, sublime art in madness, and a livid, vibrant sexual luminescence in darkness!' - Weirdlingwolf.