France's horror output has been more erratic and difficult to define than those of its continental neighbors like Italy or Spain, often veering more into the hazy territory of the fantastique with supernatural elements used to beguile and unsettle rather than outright terrify. Though many of Rollin's films were profitable, he was only a modest success outside of France and never a critical favorite; anyone working purely in the horror genre was considered disreputable, and on top of the commercial indifference to his more adventurous gothics like The Iron Rose, Rollin also had to deal with the French public's growing demand for explicit sex. The advent of porno chic in the wake of Deep Throat had unleashed a new market whose boundaries had yet to be defined, and by 1975, Rollin would make his last formal vampire film for over two decades, Lips of Blood (Lèvres de sang).
Perhaps more than any other filmmaker, Rollin had a thing for vampires - especially female ones. The combination of eternal life, predatory sexuality, and an odd naiveté that comes with never being able to grow old resulted in a string of fanged creatures in most of his early films, beginning with his riot-causing debut feature, 1968's The Rape of the Vampire. He made three subsequent films with the word "vampire" in the title, all featuring loose narratives involving human interlopers in remote castles and chateaux stumbling upon enclaves of the living dead. However, Lips of Blood finds him departing from the formula a bit; there's no "vampire" in the title this time, and the story takes place in a distinctly modern nocturnal Paris before transitioning back to his beloved crypts and beaches. The film also presents the first variation on a recurring theme of a childhood bond having ripple effects on the lives of his adult protagonists, which would later reach its most thorough execution in his 1982 masterpiece, The Living Dead Girl.
While attending a party with friends, a man named Frédéric (played by co-writer Jean-Loup Philippe) notices a poster depicting an ancient castle. The sight triggers a childhood memory at the same location where he met a mysterious woman (Annie Brilland, aka Annie Belle from House on the Edge of the Park) with whom he fell in love, promising to return someday. His family kept him from coming back, and as seen in the film's mysterious opening, his mother (Rollin regular Nathalie Perry) might have more than a little to do with this decades-long mystery. Our hero seeks out the photographer of the shot (Marine Grimaud), but when they meet at a late-night cinema screening, she turns up dead... and as he soon learns, beautiful vampires are wandering the streets and holding the key to his boyhood memory.
Both this film and the previous year's The Demoniacs found Rollin tightening his filmic narratives a bit, using themes like loss, revenge, unrequired love, and nostalgia to forge stories of destinies extending beyond the grave. Lips of Blood also offers several showcases for the surrealistic flourishes upon which Rollin founded his career, including the standout cinema sequence (at which attendees are watching a film his fans will find oddly familiar) and the poetic finale involving a sea-swept coffin. Also noteworthy is perhaps his most impressive array of vampiric femmes fatales in transparent gowns, including his blonde twin discoveries, Cathy and Marie-Pierre Castel, who had earlier graced The Nude Vampire in one of his most outrageous costume conceptions.
Unfortunately, Rollin's delicate balance of eroticism and gothic mystery proved to be a waning force at the box office in France. The film was never theatrically released in any English-speaking territories, and in Parisian theaters it died a quick death despite featuring one of Rollin's most striking poster designs. The following year saw the release of a film called Suce Moi Vampire, a hardcore composite of sequences from this film with new footage featuring some completely different actors as well as a few participants from the original. Strangely, Philippe returned to film an additional softcore scene for the version, but a body double was also used to place him in some unsimulated scenarios as well. This approach was also repeated for his starring role in another 1975 film, Claude Mulot's Le sexe qui parle, which soon became one of France's most successful sex films, Pussy Talk, whose co-star, Sylvia Bourdon, appears in Souce Moi Vampire was well.
Despite tantalizing descriptions in such tomes as Phil Hardy's horror edition of The Overlook Film Encyclopedia, Lips of Blood remained out of reach for most horror fans until well into the 1990s. A deal with Video Search of Miami resulted in an English-subtitled VHS edition, albeit taken from a very smudgy SECAM source that did little to convey the look of the original film. A superior DVD edition followed soon after from Redemption under a distribution deal with Image Entertainment; the non-anamorphic 1.66:1 presentation was a major step up at the time, and coupled with optional English subtitles, it marked the beginning of the film's critical reassessment. The Dutch label Encore subsequently released a limited triple-DVD edition contained a misframed 1.78:1 anamorphic transfer, but it featured by far the largest bounty of extras to date including a Rollin video intro, Philippe and Perrey video interviews along with Cathy Castel and Serge Rollin, a video location tour, and the Rollin short "Les amour jaunes." Some of these were carried over to the film's U.S. reissue from Redemption under its solo banner along with the same transfer.
All of this finally brings us to Kino's Blu-Ray edition, again with the Redemption brand. The transfer is easily the best of them all and is the only one both accurately framed at 1.66:1 and anamorphic. Though the film will never look as crisp and vibrant as many of its American peers, the presentation here is quite impressive with rich colors and a beautiful filmic texture. Like the Encore release, the opening sequence plays out textless as opposed to the opening titles which are present on the initial American release. The extras here are definitely slimmed down in comparison, but you do get a quick Rollin video intro, a 9-minute Perrey interview, trailers for this film and the four additional Rollins debuting with it on Blu-Ray (Shiver of the Vampires, The Iron Rose, Fascination, and The Nude Vampire), and an insightful booklet of liner notes for the same quintet of titles by Video Watchdog's Tim Lucas.
For more information about Lips of Blood, visit Kino Lorber. To order Lips of Blood, go to TCM Shopping.
by Nathaniel Thompson
