Finally, a Rollin flick that lives up to its promise

Yet another Jean Rollin lesbian vampire flick - but this one's actually pretty good! His movies always (a) look fantastic, and (b) feature some of the most amazing-looking women on the planet (I mean, how does he find them?) - but here there's also a genuinely unsettling atmosphere. Marc - a criminal - double-crosses the rest of his gang and hides out in a chateau, taking two chambermaids - Eva and Elizabeth - hostage. The women are in a sexual relationship, but both flirt freely with him. The gang tracks Marc to the chateau, but Eva and Elizabeth help him and kill several of them. However, as night falls a group of mysterious aristocratic women arrive, and Marc realises the women are hiding a sinister secret. No prizes for guessing what it is...

Brigitte Lahaie and the late Franca Maï give very good performances as Eva and Elizabeth. The story revolves around them, and they have the looks and the presence to carry it off. You feel for the two girls (although they're not exactly sympathetic characters), and the whole thing really pulls you in. There's some fantastic imagery (most striking for me was Lahaie striding around the chateau's misty grounds, dressed in a hooded cloak - and nothing else - wielding a scythe at anyone unlucky enough to get close, like an insanely hot Grim Reaper). The film is slow-moving - like much of Rollin's work - but it doesn't drag, and its score (by Philippe D'Aram) is by turn dreamlike and rousingly epic. There's a fair amount of female nudity, but unusually for Rollin it doesn't feel gratuitous. And the poignant ending really hits. 7/10