Directed/Written by Jean Rollin.
Out of all of the Jean Rollin films I’ve looked over, I think I liked THE DEMONIACS the most. While I felt THE RAPE OF THE VAMPIRE was somewhat pretentious and obtuse in its surreal visuals and stream of consciousness storytelling and REQUIEM FOR THE VAMPIRE was little more than a vacant mix of S&M and hokey horror, with THE DEMONIACS, Rollin pays attention to both narrative and symbolism and handles both in a more cohesive/less heavy handed manner, resulting in a much more interesting experience.
Now, I don’t want to say that I wholeheartedly recommend THE DEMONIACS. Much of the stuff I found off-putting about the previous two films is there: extended scenes of the landscape set to moody or jazzy music, extended scenes of lovemaking which consist of people rolling on top of one another with their legs tightly squished together, and an excessive use of the woman solely as an object to strip, grope, and rape. All of this is present again in THE DEMONIACS, though here it’s shown with a more artistic hand.
Like Jodorowski, Rollin is dealing with a lot of archetypes here. He literally casts the devil as one of the players in this film about a pair of virgins known as the Demoniacs who wash up on shore to be raped and possibly killed by pirates then taken in by a clown and the devil who helps them enact revenge on their perpetrators. Characters are stripped down to the barest of roles with nary a personality or feeling. Most of the cast simply exist to represent things, as many artsy films tend to do. Sometimes this can be seen as genius, but occasionally I like some spice with my symbolism, and without names or personalities the roles are generally spice-free.
So you get characters that simply are like the devil, the clown, the exorcist—even the two nameless Demoniacs exist simply to be abused, deflowered, and defiled by the ugly pirates–which leaves the only actual characters as the four pirates, who at least get a narrative vignette at the beginning describing them. Today, if a film’s only characters who are given flesh are the villains, it’s entitled masochistic or sadistic or soulless. Here it’s done for the sake of art, but I think it still can be described as the easy way out. It also tells me that Rollin was most interested in the evil defilers and not the story of redemption of the innocent wronged.
But at least in the story itself, the Demoniacs do get their cold-served revenge, and though it might be looked at as a clichéd revenge story, I think this tried-and-true route of storytelling actually makes this the stronger of Rollin’s tales.
That said, some of the cast is actually quite good. John Rico plays the evil pirate captain, who grimaces in the camera and overacts, but still has a grandly wrinkled face that I couldn’t get tired of looking at. The other performance that stands out in this film is Joëlle Coeur’s deadly Tina, the female seductress pirate who is pants-tighteningly hot in every scene she frolics around in.
In the end, a lot of the trappings that I got stuck in with Rollin’s previous work are at play in THE DEMONIACS, but because he toned down the pretention a bit and stuck to a very simple story structure, somehow this film worked out to be the best in the bunch for me. If you are curious about Rollin, I say check out THE DEMONIACS. By far it is the most approachable of the ones I’ve seen and if you can’t take it, you know to stay away from the rest.
