Two Orphan Vampires (1997)

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

So many French film makers hide behind the term "surrealism", when what they are making is just garbage. Film is a total art form using motion, sound and text..not just one of the three elements. With Jean Rollins you get nowhere near the full package. What you do get is a very interesting series of photographs, exceptionally lighted, and edited together. Because of the photography-- I will say it is a beautiful film---what makes it even more beautiful, to watch, is the two leading actresses: Alexandra Pic (Louise) and Isabelle Teboul (Henriette). It is obvious that these two actresses are young and inexperienced, they do, nevertheless, a reasonably good job; even if they come across as walking right out of acting class. That is alright, however, since everyone has to start somewhere.The plot is nothing more than an outline and I have to admit that I would be interested in reading the books to see how well the subject matter is covered. The dialogue is overblown and comes off as being an exercise in amateurism, not surrealism; although the actresses do their best. A plus is that the gore is minimal and looks unrealistic and the director also gets points for the absurdness of some of the "supernatural" characters the two orphan girls come across during the course of the action.Jean Rollin passed away last year and we will not be seeing another new film by him. I think he had a wonderful eye for finding a hole in the world. By that I would consider him a true surrealist. This particular film, or any of his films for that matter, are not for everyone. He often said he did not make straight horror films, rather fantasy films. He also said he never wanted all the sex, but that is how the distributors wanted to market it. In this film there is one scene where the two embrace naked. The actresses looked uncomfortable which made me feel the same. It is a shame that a film maker has to market something in such a way that changes his vision...but that's show business; I am sure that there are many fifteen year old boys out there that a glad that it is so.

"We are sublime disorder. We're from before their god. They made him say 'Let there be light' to cut our night in half. But, their order is chaos. Our disorder is mad poetry. Our existence awakens and our night is clarity. The two orphan girls roar alone in the night, like flames. And so, no one can touch them. All others are puppets for our game."Louise & Henriette(Alexandra Pic & Isabelle Teboul)are supposedly blind teenage girls living in a Catholic orphanage. In fact, they are female vampires who must feed from the blood of whatever is available, sneaking out at night to find fresh victims(..like an unfortunate dog roaming a nearby cemetery). Their convent mothers love them, believing these two are angelic lambs, sweet innocents when in fact they are cunning blood-drinkers who relish the taste as it enters their bodies, providing the nourishment they need to survive. They often ponder their identities and where they came from, likening themselves to Aztec goddesses, since they found them in a book within their Mother Superior's library. Once they are adopted by a kind eye-specialist, Dr. Dennary(Bernard Charnacé), Louise and Henriette find freedom to pursue interests in Paris, finding suitable victims to drain at night when their guardian is asleep. An ailment that plagues the girls is daytime blindness, but at night they can see well enough. Night to them is shaded in blue(..which is why Rollin's nighttime scenes are colored blueberry)and they thoroughly enjoy the sights they see. Most of the film displays Louise and Henriette's adventures, finding victims to drain, pondering their past and fates, worrying about potential threats that might lie ahead, and tiring of their predicament regarding the blindness they face and the lack of freedom due to their male guardian who likes to keep them from venturing too far from home.Not much of a plot which shouldn't be news to the Rollin faithful. This is different in that the female leads aren't lesbian lovers always fondling each other or walking around naked all the time. Their both 17 years old which removes certain aspects Rollin fans are accustomed to. He does shoot in a vast cemetery and we are introduced to a few "creatures of the night" like a She-wolf who recently escaped an asylum resting within a train station, a "midnight lady" cemetery vampire with giant wings, and a vampire who feasts on cadavers who the girls meet along the way. Like in a lot of vampire films, the feeding habits of the teenage vamps eventually catches up to them. Their facade of innocence is shown as quite a tool for the girls to use when they need to feed from potential victims(..like guest-starring Brigitte Lahaie). The dialogue mostly spoken by the girls seems like verse you'd read from a book of melancholic poetry. Rarely are the girls anything other than theatrical in their speech and point-of-view regarding their existence and life in general. The film offers a possibility that these girls are incarnations of others from past lives, returning to live on earth over and over, but it seems that this could merely be created stories from the girls who often let their imaginations run rampant. I think the rub of Rollin's film is just how much the girls enjoy killing and feeding. They do not look like the sort who'd speak so unemotionally about slitting a throat and draining a victim's blood. A riot of a scene has Louise and Henriette pondering just how to kill Dennary. The nuns are often presented as idiots to scorn, but in this film, they're merely naive as to how the girls really are. They cherish the two blind girls, feeling pity for them. Which makes the private scenes between Louise and Henriette so eye-opening and often funny. But, as always, Rollin brings to the screen images that form in his mind..how to frame his girls using their surroundings as a way to paint a unique canvas. This is such the case when they enter the Paris cemetery or when they flee from their orphanage entering a wilderness path, Rollin visualizes how he desires to shoot his characters in the way they come to his mind as he writes the screenplay. The opening montage using postcards, photos & paintings set to such a moody score really sets up the nature of the film and it's characters. Understanding that the film is from the literary work of two books from Rollin makes sense considering how the girls go through a series of vignettes, meeting various characters before returning to the only real home they've ever known only to succumb to their bloodlust banishing them to eternal unrest knowing that the authorities would be after them for biting other innocent orphans. I thought the leads were lovely and handled the unusual dialogue rather well. They were of course a bit theatrical in their presentation but the words they spoke entitled them to be.

This movie is a contender for being one of the worst films I've ever seen. Only the fact that the performances of some of the actors are not that bad keeps it from that most dubious of descriptions.Why is it bad? Let me count the ways: Parts of the script could be easily suited for a radio/tape/disc presentation. Talk, talk, talk and in these sections, no motion, motion, motion. Much of the direction makes me have a fantasy that a real nun, cloistered to the point of idiocy, 'directed' many of the sub-amateurish performances.A staple in vampire stories, going back to Mr. Stoker, is that daylight is a killer to a vampire. They exist at night. In this movie, multiple times (too many to count), we literally see daylight and yet see the vampires functioning. Couldn't this have been easily been handled when the film was being timed?What's with the two scenes being shot in NYC? Since the doctor moved the vampires to Paris from the countryside, where they were seen by a rural man and his wife in a large cemetery, how could the man, back in the countryside, happen upon them again? That scene in the urban cemetery; the country guy is looking at them in one direction, and when set upon by the young murder victim's boyfriend, turns around and pointing in a different direction says something like, "look what they're doing to your girlfriend!"Much of the dialog between the vampires, while meant to be 'simple' comes out simpleminded: the Manson girls and their mental diarrhea. One of the vampires is shot in the back with a shotgun but when her back is seen, no sign of an entry wound.What, by the way, did the young farm girl have happen to her in a few minutes time, that made her want to help and shield the two murderers?And on and on and on.

Many Jean Rollins fans didn't like this movie because it didn't have the kinky sex and rampant nudity of his earlier films, but I'm of the opinion that European cult directors like Rollins and Jesus Franco have actually done their best work when they didn't lazily rely on these elements (although with Franco you'd have to go back to late 60's to find evidence of this). Like with most Rollins movies the plot of this one is pretty incidental (something about blind, orphan, twin vampires trapped in a world that doesn't understand them) and the dialogue is downright laughable (if you have a choice watch it in French with English subtitles, or even turn off the English subtitles--it won't matter much). What makes the movie is the music, the atmosphere, and the startling visuals that at times approach the sublime surrealism of Jodorowsky (that's a compliment by the way). The leads are both very good. I was under the impression that this movie was so tame because Rollins had cast children in the lead roles. The actresses instead look to be in their late teens or early twenties (and they do have one brief nude scene). And if you miss the old Rollins standbys, Tina Aumont and Brigitte Lahaie both put in brief but interesting cameos (which is perfect because I never thought Lahaie especially could act her way out of a crisp paper sack). Maybe this isn't as good as many of Rollin's classic 70's films, but it's a lot better than all his recent SOV and hardcore porn efforts.