DRACULA'S FIANCÉE (2002)/LOST IN NEW YORK (1989) Blu-ray
Director: Jean Rollin
Redemption Films/Kino Lorber

Jean Rollin's third-to-last feature film DRACULA'S FIANCÉE makes a surprisingly fitting double bill with his earlier video feature LOST IN NEW YORK on Redemption Films' Blu-ray.

Parallels are those who worship an otherworldly master and quest to find a means of bringing him into the human dimension. The Professor (porn director Jacques Orth, CEYLON MY LOVE) and his protégé Eric (Denis Tallaron) threaten the dwarf jester Triboulet (Thomas Smith, MASK OF THE MEDUSA) with exposing his love The Vampire (Sandrine Thoquet) to daylight to give up the whereabouts of his master. He feigns ignorance but directs them to the "madwoman of the tower" (Magalie Madison) who reveals that the only person who can find the master is the Queen of Shadows infected with madness by psychic contact with the master. She directs them to Paris and a mansion where orphaned Isabelle (Cyrille Iste, THE ESCAPEES) lives in the care of the Sisters of the Order of the White Virgin. The Mother Superior (Marie-Laurence, TWO ORPHAN VAMPIES) attributes Isabelle's madness to sharing genes with Count Dracula, and that all of the nuns have also been infected with madness by their proximity to her. The Professor sees Isabelle as a means of leading them to Dracula (Thomas Desfossé) – who she can only tell them is in "The Clock Room" – while Eric finds himself falling in love with the girl who is destined to be the vampire's bride. When a sorcerer and sorceress (BELLE DE JOUR's Bernard Musson and LIPS OF BLOOD's Natalie Perrey) show up to claim the girl, the Mother Superior banishes them from the mansion; however, she does not realize that there are others within the order who are not mad but in league with the parallels to further the goal of using Isabelle to bridge the two worlds and bring Count Dracula back.

A return to form after TWO ORPHAN VAMPIRES which with which it shares some thematic connections while the former's execution was hampered by Rollin's illness, DRACULA'S FIANCÉE is also lacking in Rollin's trademark eroticism but better conveys here a world where humans and Parallels coexist, with imaginations excited by pulp literature susceptible to contact with the beyond. The Madwoman of the Tower may be either be The Ogress in disguise or the village idiot overtaken by that entity. Like the madwoman, Isabelle speaks in quotations from pulp novels and fantastique literature. Those who resist or try to repress or suppress the imaginations of others – from the vampire hunters to the nuns – are doomed to madness or death. While Rollin's films are generally female-focused, a handful of them like THE NUDE VAMPIRE and LIPS OF BLOOD have somewhat passive male protagonists awakened to the other world through vampire women; however, here, Eric as a romantic rival to Dracula is too stodgily rooted to the real world in spite of all he has seen, and it is indeed Isabelle who is the film's real protagonist, and her parting words to Eric are that he will never find her until/unless he understands the significance of a particular exchange from Gaston Leroux's "The Mystery of the Yellow Room" consigning him to limbo and eventual madness or death unless he can open up his imagination. Upon first viewing, Dracula himself is a rather uncharismatic nonentity, but it is perhaps fitting since he is a character onto which Isabelle and the parallels project upon and pin their fates. A far more compelling figure is Brigitte Lahaie (FASCINATION) as "The She-Wolf" – played by Nathalie Karsenty as an asylum escapee in TWO ORPHAN VAMPIRES – while longtime Rollin nude vampire collaborator Catherine Castel (ONCE UPON A VIRGIN) appears as one of the nun and Rollin crew still photographer Véronique Djaouti, who played the bat-winged "Midnight Lady" in TWO ORPHAN VAMPIRES, here plays a violinist who emerges from a coffin to serenade Isabelle. The film is also better-scored by Philippe D'Aram (THE IRON ROSE) and photographed by Norbert Morfang-Sintes in locations that are either revisited from his earlier films or at least more in keeping with them, and the macabre art direction often plays out like a wonderful series of elegantly-arranged tableaux as if sets were designed solely for certain camera angles. The film's special make-up effects are rather crude despite being the work of France's answer to Tom Savini in the late Benoit Lestang (WAX MASK) who got his start on Rollin's LIVING DEAD GIRL and moved up towards more mainstream French assignments like TELL NO ONE and MARTYRS.

Not released stateside until 2004 on DVD from Shriek Show at the same time as their disc of TWO ORPHAN VAMPIRES, and reissued in 2009 by Redemption when they were distributed by Ryko Distribution, DRACULA'S FIANCÉE comes to 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.66:1 widescreen Blu-ray in a much-improved presentation over the PAL-converted DVDs where motion artifacts gave the film a video-like appearance, the female vampire's pale skin and white gown looked washed out (obscuring nudity) and the shadows were crushed and blocky. The cinematography here comes closer than TWO ORPHAN VAMPIRES to looking like classic Rollin. The original French stereo soundtrack is provided here in a LPCM 2.0 with a literate English subtitles translation. The English dub created by Eurocine included on the Shriek Show release is not carried over here, which is not a big loss although it was nowhere near as bad as the other contemporary Eurocine dubs created for TWO ORPHAN VAMPIRES and Jess Franco's NIGHTMARES COME AT NIGHT.

The sole extra is an audio commentary by Diabolique Magazine's Samm Deighan, editor of the book “Lost Girls: The Phantasmagorical Cinema of Jean Rollin.” While it is likely that she would have rather been doing a commentary track on one of Rollin's classic works, Deighan is able to mine this late Rollin work for plenty of stimulating content. She discusses the film along with TWO ORPHAN VAMPIRES, MASK OF THE MEDUSA, and Rollin's final film THE NIGHT OF THE HOURGLASS as a "collective swan song" for his filmography as well as the fantastique in French cinema. She provides some context for some of the film's literary (pulp) references, the film's visuals – including Clovis Trouille whose paintings appear here onscreen but whose work has informed Rollin's past films indirectly – while puzzling on the use of the figure of Dracula in a world consisting primarily of female monsters.

The disc's co-feature is long short Rollin's LOST IN NEW YORK (1987) in which Michèle (Natalie Perrey) recalls her past as a young girl meeting lonely Marie in a churchyard. They weave together a world of adventure based around a book of fantastic adventure stories through which they can travel with the aid of a statue of The Moon Goddess, including a vignette as older schoolgirls who lose each other in New York and encounter various intrigues. At first, the film would at first seem more appropriate a supporting feature to TWO ORPHAN VAMPIRES – especially with the latter's second unit trip to New York – but it is actually fitting support to DRACULA'S FIANCÉE and some earlier Rollins built around the shared imaginary worlds of two female characters like NIGHT OF THE HUNTED and LIVING DEAD GIRL. The world of the book is "where the young girls from PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK disappeared, where Errol Flynn takes Micheline Presle in THE ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN FABIAN […] where the doves in EYES WITHOUT A FACE guide Edith Scob" or "where the lovers in DARK PASSAGE dance at the end of the road." It is also, for Rollin, inside the music box of THE LIVING DEAD GIRL, on the disused viaduct where the brainless lovers in THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTED wander, hidden in the clock of THE SHIVER OF THE VAMPIRES which opens at the stroke of midnight, behind the theatre curtain THE NUDE VAMPIRE." Based around footage shot during a visit to New York by Rollin and two actresses, the film would also make a fitting double bill with Fernando Arrabal's FAREWELL BABYLON in which Arrabal and an actress wove a story around a series of video interviews he conducted with various New York cultural figures including Spike Lee. Shot on film but finished on video, LOST IN NEW YORK has been transferred from film in 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.66:1 widescreen with the title sequences upscaled from 4:3 non-anamorphic video and also framed at 1.66:1. The film footage has wear but likely has not had much handling since the original video transfer while the edges of the lettering on the credits is noisy as expected. The LPCM 2.0 mono audio is fairly clean while the optional subtitles are free of any obvious errors. There are no extras. (Eric Cotenas)

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