Jean Rollin's DEMONIACS (aka LES DÉMONIAQUES) DVD Review

Once again I review a DVD of a Jean Rollin movie. By now I thought I had seen what there was to be seen from his films, but to my surprise the sleazy supernatural revenge thriller "Demoniacs" had quite some meat on its bones.

The general trademarks of Rollin's his work are all there: the strange mix of talent and shoddiness, the at times excruciating dialogue and acting, the rampant gratuitous nudity.
But this time something unexpected happened: during the film I suddenly got called away on some important business and I felt... annoyed!

That's a very good sign actually, because that means I was reluctant to stop watching the film.
Surely it couldn't be the case that I was...

...shock, gasp...

...ENJOYING myself ??


Read on after the break, and yes, there is some NSFW content.

Still here and older than 18 (or 16, or 12, or 21 depending on country)?
Good!

The Story:

At the end of the 19th century, a group of wreckers lure a ship on the rocks so they can plunder its cargo. When two beautiful young girls emerge from the wreckage the villains rape, torture and murder them.

Well... at least it LOOKED like they murdered them, but afterwards people from a nearby harbor town keep seeing the two girls walking around the landscape. Meanwhile, the wreckers themselves are plagued by guilt and what seem to be ghosts. Fearing the girls to be alive and able to testify as witnesses, the wreckers desperately search the countryside to kill them for sure.

But it seems that, alive or dead, the two girls are moving towards an abandoned monastery where a demon is being kept prisoner. If they set him free and surrender their bodies to him, he might help them get their revenge on the wreckers...


The Movie:

The opening credits end with "Un film expressioniste de JEAN ROLLIN", just so we know this is a work of art we're about to see, not some regular Eurotrash softporn flick. Whether it's meant as a baffling statement or as the film's first unintentional joke is not certain, but it sure as hell is pretentious.

Thing is, with Jean Rollin at the helm the statement automatically becomes true. He often shoots scenes that do not make sense if you try to discern a normal narrative, and inserts oddities to create either more beautiful images or a weird feeling.
Watching his films you might at first get the impression these oddities are all mistakes, but suddenly you'll come across a sequence which clearly shows that the man actually knows how to shoot some damn fine cinema.

It adds up to Rollin being a bit of a puzzle. Everything in his movies is set dressing, including the actors who have obviously been picked for their looks rather than their acting chops. But just as you think it will look fine, you start noticing some surprising sloppiness, like a tracking shot spoiled by a certain shudder halfway through, like someone bumped into the cameraman.

And this brings us back to "Les Démoniaques", which actually features that tracking shot during the opening credits. The movie was made in the early seventies and looks it, from the use of ultrabright colors to the over-clean look of the actors (not to mention the over-use of make-up). Not for a moment is the audience fooled into thinking we are really looking at a scene from 1890s.
But Jean Rollin is not concerned with reality (hence his claim to expressionism), he just goes for providing a string of pretty pictures which hopefully convey a story of sorts.

And surprisingly, for "Les Démoniaques" it works.

Because I can keep badmouthing this movie all day, for not being scary, for being sloppy in parts, for being trashy and exploitative in parts, yet I can't deny that it entertained me. I wasn't bored for a minute and was actually intrigued at how things would resolve.

The story doesn't get TOO convoluted, yet it doesn't go the standard route and didn't play out like I expected. Revenge stories do not need to be too intricate so they leave the director lots of space to play around with. And Jean Rollin does play around, introducing a fairytale subplot concerning a very camp-looking devil and inventing reasons for the actors to fight, or for the pretty actresses to get undressed.
Because DAMN, this film features nudity by the exploitative bucketful. So if that is your reason for wanting to see this movie rest assured: it's here.

Rollin also makes good use of his sets and locations. He must have been delighted to play around with a real church ruin, or a wicked-looking coastline. A graveyard for wrecked ships looks stunning, especially once the wrecks are set on fire.

As for acting, everyone plays his role so much over the top that their intentions might just as well have been tattooed on their foreheads. They are all a set of models, like "untrustworthy sailor", "innocent waif", "clairvoyant brothel madam"... (OK, that last one is sort-of original).
Jean Rollin has these people sleepwalking through his movie, doing some line-reading on occasion, but it's all very theatrical.

Except for one person, who utterly dominates this movie.

I'm talking about Joëlle Coeur who plays Tina, the sadistic female wrecker. She is worth the price of admission (or, rather, the DVD) by herself. Her character is so over-the-top depraved and shamelessly evil that it should have become stupid and silly. But Joëlle plays this bitch with so much glee and abandon that she seems to disappear in the role. And not only does she look good while naked, she seems to relish it. Jean Rollin uses her to put color in a lot of places (bright red, often) and she is a sight to behold. There is one scene in which she cows the whole gang of wreckers by cursing them into the ground, while naked. And it never looks like she is not in control of them all.
In fact, she's so impressive that one of the movie's re-releases in France got a new title: "Tina, la Naufrageuse Perverse" ("Tina, the Perverse Wrecker"), making her the lead!


Conclusion:

This was the fourth Rollin movie I've seen. And maybe it's a case of lowered expectations on my part, but I wasn't disappointed at all. I wouldn't go as far as to say this was "a good film" or recommend it to non-geek friends, for it's silly and not scary at all, but it's not boring either. I certainly know some people I WOULD recommend this to, for instance people who have a taste for horror movies from Hammer Studios or (other) exploitative fare.


On to the DVD:

This regionfree NTSC-release is by Redemption, who seem to be doing some redeeming themselves here. This is not the best DVD of "Les Démoniaques" out there (some of the out-of-print special editions offer more extras) but this is nowhere near as disastrous a release as some others from their catalogue.

Bad news first: the image is combed. The good news though is that the rest looks fine. It's an old movie, but the colors look right, there is no lack of detail except during some of the darkest scenes, the aspect ratio seems to be correct, blacks are black and there are no cables or blemishes to speak of.

Soundwise, we have the original French sound with good, removable subtitles.
Well done, Redemption!

As for the extras, Redemption left out many of the extras the other editions had, but they kept a couple of good ones.
For starters we have the trailer (which is nice), and a stills gallery (which is worthless).

But the real meat (haha) here will be the deleted scenes. These are all of a sexual nature and were added into the movie for some countries to make it more of a softcore sexfilm, against Jean Rollin's wishes (the cut of the film shown on this disc is actually his preferred one).
Mind you, some of these deleted scenes are VERY explicit, with one of them even allowing you to look ehm... at least in inch or so inside Joëlle Coeur.

The other extras are not related to the movie. There are some trailers for Redemption films including (of course) the ubiquitous "Satanic sluts" title.

All in all, not a bad release: the movie itself looks fine enough and the deleted scenes were probably the single extra most collectors would want with this film.