'Living Dead Girl' (1982) – Jean Rollin.

Taking more of a conspicuously grand Guignol approach than usual, maestro Jean Rollin's exhilarating, eye-gougingly graphic 80s sapphic splatter classic 'Living Dead Girl' opens dramatically with a violent earthquake that disturbs the barrels of noxious toxic waste illegally stored inside the cavernous catacombs beneath the sprawling château Valmont. This caustic, lurid-looking ooze unleashing a noxious gas which rudely reanimates the pallid, eerily immaculate corpse of ravishing blond Catherine Valmont (Françoise Blanchard). Greatly disoriented by this harsh chemical revivification, poor mute Catherine can only barely articulate the basest, guttural sounds, this tragic, deathly pale figure disconsolately roaming the vast family estate grimly seeking the raw, bloody sustenance necessary to alleviate the relentlessly agonizing hunger pangs of her living death!

After savagely sating her obscene hungers upon the ruinous remains of an amorous couple, newly cannibalistic Christine is fatefully reunited with childhood companion Helene (Marina Pierro), and reeling from the shock that her beloved still lives, Rollin's deliciously perverse love story becomes an altogether more twisted affair, featuring some of Rollin's most outrageous set-pieces, but alongside the buckets of grue, and luridly spurting arterial blood, 'Living Dead Girl' is also a morbidly mesmerizing examination of forbidden love, Helene's obsessive, frequently murderous desire for Catherine transcends morality, perhaps, even being stronger than death! While explicitly violent, 'Living Dead Girl' is strangely beautiful, as Jean Rollin's gruesomely macabre images have a painterly, otherworldly quality that is starkly erotic, having the eerie hallucinatory vibrancy of an especially distressing nightmare! The fierce, unfiltered, full-bloodedly sensual performances of Françoise Blanchard and Marina Pierro have a transfixing intensity, these exquisitely beautiful women posses a feral energy that proves fatally fascinating to their victims, but is certainly no less hypnotic to the viewer!