Review of Lips of Blood

Jean Rollin's typically outré, dreamy, and deliberately paced film deserves appraisal for attempting a fresh and lyrical spin on the usual bloodsucker premise, but the occasionally too draggy and meandering narrative and a bland central performance by Jean-Loup Philippe as the obsessive Frederic who's determined to figure out his dark family past prevent this movie from completely working. Fortunately, Nathalie Perrey's stand-out portrayal of Frederic's protective mother compensates for Philippe's insipidness in the lead. The beautiful Annie Belle is properly bewitching as Jennifer, the lovely and mysterious lady who haunts Frederic's memories. Comely blonde real life twin sisters Catherine and Marie-Pierre Castel are quite sexy and stunning as a couple of vampires Frederic accidentally unleashes into Paris. Moreover, Rollin makes good use of natural locations (the ruins setting in particular is very creepy), does his usual ace job of creating and sustaining a pleasingly surreal and spooky midnight-in-the-graveyard misty atmosphere, and pulls off a strangely poetic and surprising final scene that's both haunting and touching in equal measure. Jean-Francois Robin's rather plain and grainy cinematography offers a handful of strikingly eerie images. However, the opening third is much too padded and poky and the more trashy explicit elements like gratuitous distaff nudity are jarringly at odds with the overall artiness and offbeat fairytale-like quality of the picture (for example, a sequence with a lady photographer and her nude model is simply tossed in for the sake of cheap titillation and adds nothing to the story). Imperfect, but still a praiseworthy entry in the vampire horror sub-genre.