I will start with an admission: I have seen quite a few of his movies, but I remember them in a weird haze where I’m not sure what is from what movie, so I won’t discuss specific movies very much.

Jean Rollin made a lot of movies in his lifetime. To make this more complicated, he sometimes co-directed movies, sometimes he was left uncredited and about half of his movies he made under one pseudonym or other (which include Michel Gentil, Robert Xavier, Rene Xavier, and AJ Laser). It appears he had many reasons to use pseudonyms, but one of them was that he made a lot of adult content under those names. In fact, instead of just listing his work, the Wikipedia article has three different lists, under main work, other work and works under pseudonyms.

However, it appears that he made this adult content with one goal in mind: He obviously had a fetish and he needed money to make those films, so he would make that adult material to pay for his own movies… which were full of nudity. I’ll let you guess what he liked from a selection of his early movies (his first four, actually): The Rape of the Vampire, The Nude Vampire, The Shiver of the Vampires and Requiem for a Vampire. Yes, he was really into gardening.

Not all of his main works were about vampires. He would regularly dip into other types of horror, but I don’t recall a single movie of his I’ve seen that doesn’t have nudity in it. However, he was not simply making cheap exploitation. He did have a vision and while his movies were both cheap and exploitative, they were also unique.

Now, I don’t want to mislead anyone here. His movies are not good, but I don’t want to dismiss them either. Of course, in these days of widely available adult material, simple nudity or softcore doesn’t work for most people, but what makes his movies interesting is not really about that. Instead, they are very much wonderful in their own way.

Take for example this sequence (which I believe is from Lips of Blood): Two women dressed as clowns rob a bank. Their getaway driver is shot and dies, crashing their car, so they have to continue on foot. At some point they decide to ditch their clown outfits in favor of something more regular, but a few moments later they, for unknown reasons, put those clown outfits back on again. Then they find a castle. Despite their situation, they just walk in, find a mattress and decide to take a nap. In the nude, of course. Then they find out that the castle is actually inhabited.

That’s the start of the movie. This sequence takes a quite a bit of time, but it’s all so absurd. In this case, Rollin himself admitted that he just started to write and didn’t really edit himself in any way (which seems like a common thread in his work, script just appear in a day or so and he just shoots them – actually, during the shoot of his very first movie, he lost the script and apparently there were no copies, so he just winged the rest of it). It’s just that while this movie feels even more absurd than most of his work, the margin isn’t very wide. They are all like that: surreal with very little in the way of logic within the story, but that doesn’t really matter. It’s more about the weird experience.

While there are similarities in his movies, they are also all different enough that seeing one doesn’t mean you’ve seen them all.

However, I have never seen any of his movies made under pseudonyms and it appears the quality of his movies began to dip in the early 80s, so if you are interested, I would suggest staying in this part of his career. There is a recent campaign to rerelease much of his work on physical media, so they should be relatively easy to find. Also, those releases are not cheap. There’s plenty of extras and some of the BluRays I have even have a booklet in them. Why? That I don’t know, but it is interesting in itself that the companies producing these products believe there is demand for that. This is quite a change considering that his movies were once seen as so uncommercial that no one really seems to know whether his movie, The Escapees, was ever even released in theaters and this was in an era when that was the primary way of making money with a movie (1982). (Since a lot of people from that period are still alive, I would assume that you could just ask around, but apparently not.)