"You cannot be both virgin and vampire."

Your radio advertising has called to my attention to the fact that Valentine's Day is coming up. By the sound of things, a lot of you are planning to celebrate with your sweeties -- making reservations at fancy restaurants, taking out second mortgages to afford to give each other shiny pebbles that have been dug out of the earth by children. You will likely buy these trinkets from a guy who boasts about eliminating middlemen, so we can only assume he's taken to whipping the kids himself.

Honestly though, most of you are going to "Netflix and chill" and to you I offer an alternative called "Shudder and fuck."

This week's Thursday Thriller is Requiem for a Vampire.

This 1971 film is just one of a handful of films by French director Jean Rollin, who made a bunch of movies that could be best classified as vampire softcore porn. I picked this one because it's an especially strange work, even in its own niche. 

The dark sexual fantasy starts off as a car chase. Some men in one car seem keen on killing Marie and Michelle (Marie-Pierre Castel and Mireille Dargent, respectively), who are wearing clown costumes. People in both cars are shooting at each other, and the man driving the girls takes a bullet. Michelle manages to steer the car down a dirt road to evade the pursuers, and she and Marie set the car, along with their dead driver on fire and take flight on foot across the countryside. They wash their makeup off in a stream and find a busted-down, old house to change out of their costumes. They emerge from the house in tiny clothes and pigtails, which you'll no doubt enjoy if you're into the whole barely legal thing. They get on a motorcycle and drive til they find a food truck, at which point Marie teases the proprietor until he abandons his station to chase her through the woods and forces himself on her while Michelle steals lunch. 

Don't worry. Marie gets away.

Then when the girls are hiding out in a cemetery Michelle falls into an open grave and somehow gets buried alive by highly inattentive grave diggers. Marie pulls her out and they wander through a forest of giant bats before they find a castle. They don't find anyone at home and are obviously quite tired, so they lie down in the upstairs bedroom for some nude snuggling. 

I can hear you already: "But Devil, when does this movie get weird?" 

About the halfway point, after the girls discover the castle is home to vampires and their henchmen, they run away, then get caught and dragged back and shown around the sex dungeon. It will be a tough scene for you to get through if you're off turned off by simulated rape or women who don't shave their armpits. They don't shave their crotches either, but if you're put off by that, all I can tell you is grow up.

What happens after that? Who cares? You should be bumping uglies by that point.

Requiem for a Vampire streams on Shudder and YouTube.