Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		3.0
Overall		3.0

The Living Dead Girl Blu-ray Movie Review

Walking (dead) contradiction: a dreamy, melancholic gore movie.

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater August 27, 2012

Jean Rollin, low-budget maestro of le fantastique and one of the more under-appreciated Euro-trash auteurs, didn't typically yield to horror movie trends and staples. Many of his early films—The Rape of the Vampire, The Iron Rose, Lips of Blood—are convention- shucking mood pieces that rely more on atmosphere and quiet surrealism than body counts or gore effects. Sadly, Rollin's brand of dreamy/spooky gothicism—all crumbling French manors and mouldering, overgrown graveyards—grew progressively out of fashion during the 1970s. After getting a taste of blood and guts with George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, John Carpenter's Halloween, and other boundary-pushing, viscera- addled fright films, audiences clamored for ever-gorier kills and horror flicks that were more comic-bookish than literary.

Money follows commercial success, of course, so for 1982's The Living Dead Girl, Rollin was obligated to take a more explicitly violent approach. Still, over the course of his career, the director had a developed a keen talent for acquiescing to producers while still putting his own characteristically poetic spin on his work. The Living Dead Girl would become his biggest international hit, and though it's decidedly bloodier and more superficially shocking than many of his previous efforts, it's unmistakably a Jean Rollin film—haunting, sensual, and strange.

Best friend...forever.

That's not to say it's necessarily a good movie by most standards—like many Rollin films, The Living Dead Girl suffers considerably in the plot, dialogue, and acting departments—but we'll get to that in a second. The film opens with a trio of blue-collar workers illegally storing barrels of hazardous waste in the catacombs deep beneath the recently abandoned Chateau Valmont. Hoping to filch some family jewels off the bodies housed in the subterranean graveyard, the workers open the coffin of Catherine Valmont (Françoise Blanchard), a beautiful young blonde who's been dead for two years, but whose body is oddly preserved. At this moment, an earthquake topples one of the barrels, spilling toxic liquid and emitting a gas that resurrects our heroine, who immediately uses her talon-like fingernails to gouge the eyes of one worker and rip the throat out of another. The third gets half of his face burnt off by the chemical sludge.

The gory, Return of the Living Dead-style intro leaves no doubt that this will be a more over-the-top entry in Rollin's filmography, but Catherine isn't your usual movie zombie, and this isn't a typical zombie film. Unbeknownst to a real-estate agent showing the castle to some prospective buyers—a real estate agent who will meet a grim end with her boyfriend when they sneak back into the mansion for some hanky-panky later that night—Catherine wanders in a deathly stupor through her former home and has flashbacks to her youth, when she swore a blood oath with her brunette best friend, Hélène, that they would follow one another always, even to the grave. Codependent females occur often in Rollin's work, and here the trope is used to better effect than normal. Played by Marina Pierro—the wife and muse of polish director Walerian Borowczyk—Hélène discovers Catherine in the chateau and slowly comes to grips with the fact that her friend is a.) sort of alive and b.) actually undead, requiring human flesh and blood for sustenance.

In a very Rollin-esque twist on the horror movie routine, the real monster of The Living Dead Girl isn't the titular zombie, but actually Hélène, who goes to increasingly dastardly lengths to procure fresh flesh for her walking dead BFF, luring both a good Samaritan traveler and an unsuspecting village girl back to the castle for—or, more specifically, to be—supper. Meanwhile, Catherine, who has once again learned to talk and reason, grows tired of killing and realizes that she's an unnatural monstrosity that shouldn't be allowed to exist. The film builds to a gross-out, emotionally disturbing feeding frenzy, replete with arterial spurts of blood supplied by then-seventeen year old special effects supervisor Benoît Lestang, a wizard of gore who would later work on Brotherhood of the Wolf, The City of Lost Children, and Martyrs— amongst many others—before committing suicide in 2008.

To appease his longtime producer, Sam Selsky, Rollin was not only forced to up the gore quotient, but also—in a bid to make the film more lucrative outside of Europe—to include scenes featuring a vacationing American couple, George (Mike Marshall) and Barbara (Carina Barone). These sequences were shot by Gregory Heller, who was simultaneously directing an American version of the film using the same actors and camera setups, and they stand out jarringly from the rest of The Living Dead Girl. The couple's subplot is decent enough—Barbara takes a photo of Catherine and tries to convince the townsfolk that the presumedly dead girl is alive—but the couple's English dialogue is awful and, worse, Marshall and Barone perform it with an amateurish and cringe-inducing theatricality.

Of course, much of the acting in Rollin's films in general is atrocious, as he tended to cast unknowns and porn stars comfortable with baring all in front of the camera, but at least in the other films the stiltedness of the line readings is masked somewhat—for English-speaking audiences anyway—by the fact that they're spoken in French. Fortunately, the acting does fare better in the scenes that don't feature the camera-toting Americans. Marina Pierro and Françoise Blanchard are both quite good in their roles; the former is probably the most professional actress with whom Rollin ever got to work, and the latter—who looks uncannily like Gwyneth Paltrow at times—has a vacant, ghostly quality that's effectively eerie.

The Living Dead Girl Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

As we've seen from the other Jean Rollin Blu-ray releases, the director's films often have a grubby, budget-constrained look, so The Living Dead Girl's general cleanness and overall sharpness come as a bit of a surprise. The film's 35mm negative has been given a 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer that looks faithful and unhindered by compression problems or unnecessary digital tinkering like DNR or edge enhancement. As usual for Kino, the print is essentially presented as-is, so you will notice some white specks and small scratches on the footage, but these are rarely noticeable, let alone distracting. What you will notice is the level of clarity, which easily bests the film's now-ancient DVD edition, which was put out by Image Entertainment way back in 1999. An update was in order, then, and this Blu-ray obliges with newfound detail in facial features, clothing textures, and background details. Granted, the material isn't exactly sharp by today's standards, but any softness here is inherent to the way the film was shot. Color is satisfyingly dense too—neutrals are rich, skin tones consistent, blood reds vivid—and contrast is balanced, with deep but rarely oppressive blacks and highlights that are never blown out. One of the best-looking Rollin releases yet.

The Living Dead Girl Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Living Dead Girl is presented with an uncompressed Linear PCM 2.0 stereo track that occasionally shows its age, as well as the limitations of the low-budget 1980s recording techniques. That said, while the "true-to-source" elements of the vintage mix are apparent—a slight hiss in the background, flat dynamic response, peaking during some of the screams and louder noises—this is a solidly listenable experience, with no shrillness, thinness, or other major distractions. Everything sounds as it ought to sound, including Philippe D'Aram's unusual score, which features flute, timpani drums, and strange metallic sounds made by scraping a double bass bow agains the rims of cymbals. Dialogue, both French and English, is fairly cleanly recorded and always easy enough to understand. The disc includes optional English subtitles, but do note that the portions of the film in English are not subtitled.

The Living Dead Girl Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Introduction by Jean Rollin (1080p, 1:22): Rollin says a few words about the film and its production.
• Jean-Pierre Bouyxou Comments (1080p, 7:00): Rollin's former First AD discusses the making of the film and Rollin's attitude toward gore.
• The American Version (1080p, 6:56): An extension of the previous interview, where Bouyxou talks about the unique way the film was reshot simultaneously for an American audience.
• Music by Philippe D'Aram (1080p, 8:22): D'Aram discusses making the film's score on a budget.
• An Homage to Benoit Lestang (1080p, 11:57): A tribute to the late make-up effects wizard, who got his start on The Living Dead Girl.
• Jean Rollin at Fantasia (SD, 36:23): In 2007, Rollin attended Fantasia Festival in Montreal for a retrospective of his work; here, we get to see him speaking to the audience before and after a screening of Shiver of the Vampires.
• Interview Excerpt (SD, 2:56): A quick sit-down with Rollin at Fantasia Fest, discussing The Living Dead Girl.
• Jean Rollin Trailers: Includes the trailers for the all Rollin films released by Kino and Redemption thus far.

The Living Dead Girl Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Living Dead Girl might not be the archetypal Jean Rollin film—the director had to make some clear concessions to his producers that inherently diminished his vision—but it is one of his more accessible movies and a good entry point for those unfamiliar with Rollin's dreamy, slow-burning gothic stories. As with their other Rollin Blu-ray releases, Kino and Redemption have done a bang-up job with this disc, which features a surprisingly sharp high definition transfer and a wealth of special features. A must-buy for Rollin fans, a good bet for gothic horror enthusiasts, and a worthwhile rental for those new to the cult director.