Demoniacs (4 Stars)

I'm watching a lot of Jean Rollin's films lately. It's not intended to be a film marathon. I'm just in the mood to watch them again. I've watched most of them before, though some of them were last watched before I started my blog. I last watched "Demoniacs" in 2011, which is long enough to justify it being pulled off my shelf again.

In an interview on the disc Jean Rollin says that this is the first film for which he had a large budget. He doesn't say how large or where the money came from. What he does say is that he used the money to film on location in Belgium instead of France. I'm not sure why. The scenes take place on similar deserted beaches to his other films. The ruined castle in the film is similar to the ruins we see in his other films. The tavern scenes take place in a type of building that could be found anywhere on the French coast. Maybe Jean just wanted a holiday. He deserved it.

The Wikipedia summary of the film is so incorrect that I can't resist quoting it:.

"Demoniacs is a 1974 film directed by Jean Rollin, about a group of shipwrecked sailors who rape two young women, who re-emerge and make a pact with the Devil to get their revenge".

What idiots wrote that? Didn't they take the trouble to watch the film, or was it too difficult for them to understand it? The rapists were never shipwrecked, they grew up in the village. There's a person in the ruins that the villagers call a devil, indefinite article, but he's definitely not the Devil. He's actually not such a bad guy when we get to know him. But let's give a brief summary of the plot. This description contains some spoilers, so stop here if you intend to watch the film yourself.

The unnamed village has been used for centuries by "wreckers". These are a type of pirate who operate from dry land. They use lighting to lure ships close to the beach, where they run onto the rocks and sink. Then they kill the survivors and plunder the loot. This practice has now been outlawed, but there's still a group of four people who perform this trade, unknown to the others in the village.

The film begins with the wrecking of a ship. The only survivors who emerge from the ship are two women in white nightgowns. The wreckers rape them and kill them. End of story. Or so they think.

The next morning the wreckers are sitting in the village tavern, which doubles as a brothel. The leader of the wreckers has visions of the two girls. He sees them, even though nobody else can. Louise, the brothel's madame, is gifted with supernatural abilities. She says that she can see two women in white wandering on the beach. The following night the wreckers return to the beach and find the girls alive. They try to kill them again, but they flee to the ruins of a haunted castle, where the wreckers are afraid to follow them.

Three people live in the castle. There's a man locked in a dungeon who has been trapped for hundreds of years. He has two servants on the outside, a bishop and a clown. They have been waiting for someone to free their master. The dungeon can only be unlocked by innocent girls who have been the victims of a great crime.

After sleeping all day the girls strip naked and unlock the dungeon at midnight. The unnamed man -- who definitely isn't the Devil -- rewards the girls by giving them his power so that they can get revenge on the wreckers, but they only have until dawn. Then they have to give the power back. That would be plenty of time, but the wreckers come to the castle and kill the bishop and the clown. The man says that he wants to bring them back to life, but he can only do it if the girls give him back his power and renounce their wish for revenge. The girls really are innocent. Their love for the two servants is stronger than their hatred for the wreckers.

There are seeming inconsistencies in the story. If the girls had the mystery man's powers they could have revived the servants themselves. As well as that, the mystery man could have carried out revenge himself on the girls' behalf. For me the explanation is simple. The man wanted to test the purity of the girls' hearts by asking them to give up the selfish wish that they wanted most.

One thing that strikes me about "Demoniacs" is that it's more similar to the Hammer Horror films than any of Jean Rollin's other films. It's as if the extra money encouraged Rollin to go conventional. Almost, but not quite.