Schoolgirl Hitchhikers (1973)

Directed by Jean Rollin
Starring Gilda Arancio, Joëlle Coeur
Rated R
France

“Let's go to bed. You want me to help you get undressed?”

It seems improbable that French auteur Jean Rollin, best known for his downbeat, nearly-wordless eroti-horror mood-pieces, would make a straight-up sexploitation flick. He just doesn't seem like the type. But then again, most of his vampire movies consist of two hot teenage girls wandering around some creaky old house, and that's exactly what happens in Schoolgirl Hitchhikers. The only difference is that this time, they don't meet up with a depressed, middle-aged Dracula or his flouncy gay cousins. They meet up with  a “petty, low-level gangster” named Fred.

Two dough-eyed, wispy schoolgirls, Monica and Jackie (Gilda Arancio & Joëlle Coeur), wander around in the woods together, foot-loosing and freewheeling their way through a school break. Like all of Rollin's heroines, they don't say much, preferring to just stare at things like confused barnyard animals. Also like most of Rollin's ladies, they also prefer each other's company, so it's important that they find the nearest bed to frolic in. Luckily, they happen upon an abandoned house. They gingerly scale the crumbling stone walls and let themselves in.

Although no one appears to be around, the joint is fully furnished, complete  with a comfy bed for the girls to nuzzle in.

Their playful cuddling soon turns into a delightful full-on girl-on-girl sex romp.

Their post-coital bliss is interrupted, however, when the girls find out that the house isn't exactly empty. While out on the balcony enjoying a smoke, Monica notices a light turned on downstairs. She investigates, and finds Fred, a skinny, mustachioed thug, reading a book. On a duvet, no less. Pretty dainty for a bad guy.

Anyway, after a little playful peek-a-boo, Fred and Monica get it on.

Jackie wakes up and wanders downstairs. When she sees what's up, she joins in. Hey man, it's the 70's!

The next morning, the girls split.

They set up camp in the woods. Fred, meanwhile, is visited by his riding crop-wielding boss lady, who's looking for the “junk” that's supposed to be in the safe that Fred is supposed to be watching. Of course, said junk is now missing, and Fred blames the sex-kittens.

Boss lady sends Fred and her driver/flunky off to find the girls and get back her stuff. Fred chloroforms 'em and drags them back to the house.

Poor Jackie is strung up and whipped by evil boss-lady!

She even jabs at her with a hot poker, twists her nipples, and cuts off a few hunks of hair with a scissors. She actually looks better afterward though, so that worked out ok.

Plucky Monica, unwilling to endure such vile treatment, uses her feminine wiles to seduce the stone-faced driver. His guard down, Monica bashes him in the head with a candlestick and scrams. She runs all the way to town, where she hires Harry,  a goofy comic-relief detective – complete with a pig-tailed, mimi-skirted Girl Friday – to help her retrieve her kidnapped bed-buddy.

They search the house, but it's empty. Harry, assuming that she made the whole story up, threatens so spank her. But then the bad guys show up again, and everybody gets into an awesomely inept gunfight.

It's all for naught, though. Fred and boss lady manage to snatch Monica. They leave Jackie and Harry and Girl Friday behind and head off to parts-unknown, presumably to torture Monica into talking about the stolen jewels. That's what it's supposed to be about, I think. Diamonds or some-such. By the way, the change of scenery allows boss-lady to change into a purple dress and prowl around in a room with swirly psychedelic lights.

Of course, Monica doesn't know anything, so they really don't get anywhere with all the threats.

So he tries to fuck it out of her instead, while boss lady watches and masturbates in the next room. Why not?

After that tactic fails, they leave Monica hogtied in the car, and go back to the house to fuck/torture everybody else until their loot shows up.

But then, Harry sets a trap to nab the real culprit. And  also, some mysterious idiot in a red turtleneck shows up. Much face-slapping and back-stabbing ensues. What a tangled web you've weaved, Mr. Rollin!

Around the point when hippy gumshoe Harry shows up, it becomes obvious that Schoolgirl Hitchhikers is supposed to be a comedy. Up until that point, some kind of pale-faced ghoul could've burst in to molest the girls and guzzle their lifeblood, and it would have been Rollin-esque business as usual. This twist on the old formula, if not actually effective – Schoolgirl Hitchhikers is many things, but funny isn't one of them – is still pretty endearing. Imagine, the perpetually dour Jean Rollin, trying to make us laugh with silent film-era antics clumsily interspersed with sado-masochistic torture scenes. So it's got that.

It's also got plenty of Rollin's greatest gift to worldwide cinema: endless shots of two hot girls wandering around, starting at things and not saying anything. Nobody in this or any other world does that better than our man JR, and as always, he nails it here. Also, the dixieland jazz soundtrack is amusingly incongruous, and the camerawork, in places, rivals Argento in its low-budget sumptuousness. It may not be Rollin's best, but Schoolgirl Hitchhikers still has a lot to offer for the adventurous sexploitation fan.



- Ken McIntyre

Requiem for a Vampire (1971)

AKA Caged Vampires, Caged Virgins, Crazed Virgins, Dungeon of Terror,
Sex Vampires, The Crazed Vampire, Virgins and Vampires, Virgins and the Vampire
Rated R
France

"Why must you make me go on whipping?"

There's this loony Halloween attraction in Tucson, Arizona called Valley of the Moon. It basically consists of a dirt lot splattered with primitive, folk-arty paper-mache castles and mushroom shaped fairy houses. Half of it was built in the 1920's by mad visionary George Phar Legler, who planned an entire theme park built around the concept of relaxation and introspection. Since these are not the sort of themes that make for family fun and frolic, Leglar was forced to abandon his dream, and so the park fell into disrepair, becoming perhaps the most surreal homeless hangout ever. Many years later, it was bought by a coalition of historically-minded citizens and given a low-budget makeover. Leglar's original attractions were scrubbed clean and painted, and just to make things even weirder, a bunch of old props from a shut-down mini-golf course, The Magic Carpet, were added to the mix.
Now, every October, the Valley of the Moon hosts guided tours through the joint. During said tours, the park is populated by enthusiastic non-actors dressed in Halloween Store outfits who act out a nonsensical tale about demons and ghosts and the enduring spirit of...I dunno, Leglar, maybe. Visitors stumble around in the dark, led by a stoned teenager armed only with a madly bouncing flashlight, as community theater castoffs mumble through their half-remembered lines and hit each other in the head with plastic axes. There's witches and ogres, cowgirls and genies, and even a spider-lady who makes Youtube jokes.

It all ends with a stand-off between the dazed visitors and "The Evil One", portrayed either by a chirpy girl in 80's go-go boots or a metal kid in a plastic skull mask and a Burger King crown.
It's a truly remarkable experience, both ponderous and enthralling, and there is nothing in the world quite like it.

Nothing, that is, besides Requiem for a Vampire. If you are lucky enough to experience both, you'll marvel at the similarities: the remote, off-putting location, the seemingly random bits of set decoration, the laughable special effects, the dimestore costumes, the gorgeous-but-perpetually-out-of-it protagonists, and the nonsensical storyline. It's all there, and exactly like Valley, Requiem is the work of one starry-eyed dreamer with a startling vision. The film was conceived and executed by one Jean Rollin, a French horror auteur who has carved out a very long and strange career making, for the most part, films exactly like this: moody, fuzzy, lesbian vampire romps with sparse dialogue, shoddy production values, and a bizarre and unshakable atmosphere of free-flowing weirdness and anxiety. Much like a trip to the Valley of the Moon, his films can often seem endless, but they stick with the viewer for a long time afterward, haunting the edge of your dreams for weeks and months and possibly forever. Jean Rollin's films may, in fact, be magical, and Requiem for a Vampire is one of his most potent concoctions.

Two girls dressed as clowns and a wild-eyed driver zip through the French countryside with another car in hot pursuit. A high-speed gunfight erupts. The clown car gets away, but the driver is fatally wounded. The clowns douse him in gasoline and set him ablaze (you can clearly see the dude blink during this scene, but whatever). Then they tromp slowly and silently through a field. Then they steal a motorcycle and zip around the people-less countryside.

After awhile, they get hungry. Marie, (Marie-Pierre Castel) the big-eyed blonde one, lets the food truck guy chase her around in the woods, while Michelle (Michelle Dargent), the big-eyed brown-haired girl steals some grub. Works perfectly. Later on, the girls sense that they're being followed, so they hide in a graveyard. A couple of drunken gravediggers show up and they run for it. Michelle, however, falls face-first into a grave, and accidentally gets buried alive. Marie waits until the coast is clear and then yanks her out.

The girls wander into a spooky castle. They find a bed with a purple furry blanket, so they strip down to make sweet 70's love in it, but they are thwarted by a bunch of barbarians and a vampire girl, who chase them around until Dracula shows up. He has two bats that fly out of his armpits and attach themselves to the girls' chests.

They end up back at the castle where a mini-orgy goes down - hairy barbarian dudes mauling chained-up naked chicks and such. One of the vampire ladies asks the two girls what they're up to, and they tell her they broke out of school during a field trip.
"We're lost," they tell her.
"Yes," she agrees. "Eternally lost."
And then she chomps 'em both.

The next morning, they wake up on the purple bed, and assume it was all just a crazy dream. But when they try to escape from the creepy castle, every road just leads them back. Marie tries to stake Dracula, but she gets nabbed by Erica, Dracula's second-in-command. The girls are given their orders: it's now their job to go out during the day and lure victims back to the castle.

Given that both girls are gorgeous - if a tad undercooked- this proves to be remarkably easy work. Michelle doffs her top and snags a local doofus for her efforts; Marie finds a handsome young stud, but decides she wants to lose her virginity with him before leaving him to the monsters inside. They fuck in the dirt. Seems uncomfortable to me, but she seems to dig it. And then she lets the dude go. Michelle, on the other hand, chomps the doofus but good.

That night, both girls are taken to their initiation ceremony. It mostly involves a piano. Then Dracula has a heart to heart talk with Marie. He tells her that he's the last of a dying breed, and that the rest of these clowns are delusional; they'll never become vampires no matter how hard they try.

Dracula allows her to hide the stud. The rest of the vamp wannabes try to find him. Michelle even strips her best friend/lover naked and whips her to get the info, but she won't budge. They decide to just let her go and see what happens.

And that's pretty much it. Dracula decides to die (can he do that?), and he lets the girls split. The end.
Jean Rollin is often accused of making torturously slow films, and while it's true that Requiem's pace is glacial, it is virtually impossible to stop looking at. There is something entirely otherworldly about it, from the clown-suited Lolitas to the tired, frumpled Dracula. It makes no sense in this world, but in some downer-addicted parallel dimension one lost weekend away from this one, it's probably dead-on accurate.

Much like a trip to the Valley of the Moon, after watching Requiem, you will find yourself in a pitch-black parking lot, scratching your heard, wondering if the last hour or so was just some strange, disquieting dream. And then, when you find out that yes, this did just happen, you'll plan on visiting again next year. And that's why Jean Rollin, much like George Phar Legler, is a genius. Not an Albert Einstein type genius, mind you, but at least on the level of the guy who invented the pet rock.

Clips:

Valley of the Moon!

Requiem For a Vampire Trailer

- Ken McIntyre