Horrible, fascist and poorly acted

It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

The second Jean Rollin movie is a lot better than the first one, "Rape of the Vampire". It also has a misleading title: just as there was no rape that I could see in that movie, in this one I am not sure if there is even any vampires, and nor does the one the title presumably refers to ever get naked, though she does spend the whole movie in a see- through orange gown.There is also more story this time, more unsettling images, and more eroticism. These things add up to a better movie in my opinion.This one is something about a rich man who believes he has found a vampire and is trying to learn the secret of her condition. There is also a suicide cult who are apparently after the woman as well, though no great attempt seems to be ongoing to prevent them from getting their hands on her, nor do they seem that keen anyway.Even the "suicide cult" part of that is questionable. When we see a young woman supposedly commit suicide with the group, she does so with the most unconvincing gun shot I have ever seen. There is a sound effect, yes, but no attempt to make it seem that the gun has actually fired besides that. She doesn't even aim it at her head particularly well: the gun is angled upwards so that if it did fire, it would probably miss her brain.Aside from that, the movie benefits from its visual style more than anything. There are some beautiful babes in this one, particularly a black lady and two pig tailed sisters (whose hairstyles keep changing). The bits at the beginning with the girl wandering around and the guys in horse masks creeping up on her were generally scary and could have been great in a better movie. The ending is disappointing. We find out that no one in the movie is a vampire, but rather they're all mutants, and one day humanity will be immortal? What?Is that supposed to be scary?

Men in folky animal masks pursue, imprison and monitor a young lady (Christine François). The imagery is at once bizarre and unsettling, but it doesn't stop there. We see Cathy and Pony Tricot next, French Director Jean Rollin's Castel twins as maids, dressed in extraordinary metal and spike-adorned fetish gear. They don't speak initially, just observe in a detached fashion and tend to the members of the house. Their presence is sprinkled throughout the film; always they are resigned looking, forlorn and fascinating.Olivier Martin (actually Rollin's brother) is Pierre Radamante the hero of the piece, typically rather fey nevertheless provides a welcome wholesomeness in the face of so much apparent evil and strangeness. His father Georges (Maurice Lemaitre) is the head of the organisation that has enslaved the young girl, and his secretary Solange (Ursule Pauly) is his nefarious subordinate.The young girl is being enticed as a form of spectacle for the mask-wearing guests of the house, tempted by blood. It seems as if she is a vampire and they are a secret suicide cult hiding under a veneer of respectability. There are long periods where there is no dialogue, and this at the film's beginning, revealing no compromise to the telling of the story. It is there, but you need to pay close attention. It is a good half hour before any explanations are forthcoming.At times this can be ponderous: scenes are inserted for their own sake that appear to have no bearing on anything else. The ending could almost be seen as a tribute to the Universal films of old (watching 'House of Dracula' is cited as one of Rollin's formative horror experiences) with masses of people (lead by Michael Delahay nicely underplaying the Grandmaster, a role he would repeat in the following year's 'Le Frisson des Vampires/Shiver of the Vampires') with fiery torches descending en masse.The apparent death of the evil Solange is accompanied not by strident music, but simply by the guttural shrieking and bleating of night animals, making her demise an isolated, detached affair. Solange is responsible for the unforgivable act of injuring, or possibly killing, the twin maids in one of the film's most notorious sequences. Knocking them both down with an iron candelabra one twin falls all the way to the bottom of the lengthy flight of stairs, in actuality knocking herself out in the process! Luckily, they both appear later, bloodied but alive, and it is due to them that Solange meets her fate.The Castels appear sporadically throughout Rollin's films (though sadly not in his retrospective 'La Nuit des Horloges' (2007) – at least not outside the archive footage used to represent them). They are more effective than ever here, the stars of the show. Dark haired, dressed in a variety of eccentric costumes, they are mainly unspeaking.Inexperienced as actors they may have been, but their twin presence is extraordinary. Even an uneventful scene of them going about the business of changing clothes or procuring refreshments for their masters or slowly descending stone stairs with their crackling fiery torches, is enlivened by their other-worldly silence, their silent observation of each other's actions. 'The Nude Vampire' is their greatest achievement, and the overall alien atmosphere would have been far lessened without their contribution.The end of the film, customarily filmed on 'Rollin's beach' in Dieppe, provides the platform to reveal the imprisoned young girl was never a vampire, indeed there have never been such things as vampires (!) – rather, she is a mutant. The nature of her condition is unspecified, but it seems to be impervious to bullets and display distinct vampiric tendencies. Indeed, these mutants are what the human race will become.

French director Jean Rollin isn't exactly known for great films, and this confusing mess is one of the reasons why. One of the most confusing things about this production is the title. For a director who is well known for directing erotic films about lesbian vampires; you would expect a film with the word 'nude' in the title to be a particularly bare-breasted one; but in fact, there's not a lot of nudity here at all. Instead of erotic lesbian vampires with no clothes on; we've got a cumbersome plot about a man who wants to unlock the secret to immortality, a young woman whose affliction might hold the key and a suicide cult, who don't get to do much. The film starts off promisingly with a sequence that sees a young girl carried off by a mysterious bunch of people in masks under the watchful eye of a young French man, who also happens to be the son of a man of importance. Through his investigation, he soon discovers that this woman is not just a normal lady, and as he delves deeper into the cult; he discovers that cannot be killed by bullets, drinks blood and can't go out in daylight...sounds like a clear cut case of vampirism to me.Jean Rollin keeps the fantasy atmosphere going throughout the film, but it fails to be interesting because the plot is so badly executed. It is possible to keep up with what's going on, but only because there's so many other films that follow similar plots to this one. The director seems to know that he's messed up the plotting too, as the climax is basically an excuse to explain the film to the audience. There is a twist thrown in at the end also; but the film would have been better without it. I guess this was Jean Rollin's attempt to be a little original, but it comes off as a ham-fisted attempt at such, rather than a logical continuation of the story. The cinematography is fairly neat, with lots of the plot taking place in suitably Gothic locations. The girls on board complete what is a pretty picture, and what Rollin's film lacks in logic and consistency, it somewhat makes up for in style. In the film's defence, it was made in 1969; which somewhat explains the lack of shocks but I can't recommend this movie as it doesn't have much about it that is worth taking note of.

from the start of this movie you soon become aware that the name of the film has nothing to do with the movie itself from watching a naked woman being chased by people in very silly masks to servants running round in the worst clothing I've ever seen and all this in subtitles makes this the kind of movie you should think twice about seeing and as the film slowly moves along you soon realise that the vampire is not a vampire you got to wonder where the title came from some parts of the film made a bit of sense with Pierre and is father but as the film gets to its really silly ending you have got to think why end a film this way and surly they had a better ending if only in there heads this is not a film to watch basically