THE LIVING DEAD GIRL (1982)

 

(a.k.a. ZOMBIE QUEEN; director/screenwriter: Jean Rollin, who cameos as an uncredited “Salesman.” French dialogue by Jean Rollin and Jacques Ralf.)

Storyline

A twenty-year-old woman, two years dead and remarkably well-preserved in her coffin in the burial vaults beneath her family’s empty château, is accidentally resurrected when an earthquake knocks over a barrel of nuclear waste stored nearby, creating a strange gas that wafts through the vaults. Initially catatonic, she encounters the living, with often bloody and horrific results.

 

Review

WARNING: POSSIBLE SPOILERS IN THIS REVIEW.

LIVING, a French-language film, is one of Rollin’s most tightly written and planned productions in his oeuvre─the writer/director, famous for sometimes shooting without a script, had one for this 1982 cinematic offering, and it shows.

The film opens with scenes of industrial sites and chemical plants, before cutting to Rollin’s recurrent blue skies, open bucolic settings and gothic buildings─this last visual aspect, this time out, is the arresting Valmont family château, with its twelfth-century architectonics and burial vaults beneath its centuries-spanning stonework. Cinematographer Max Monteillet (ZOMBIE LAKE, 1981; OASIS OF THE ZOMBIES, 1982) captures, with striking clarity, the often-lit and, prior to Catherine Valmont’s resurrection, quiet atmosphere of this seemingly isolated country house (though it’s within easy driving distance of a town).

As with earlier Rollin films (notably THE GRAPES OF DEATH, 1978, and THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTED, 1980), mankind, wasteful and self-destructive, botches it again by storing clumsily stacked toxic waste drums in the underground tunnels beneath Valmont Château, near the coffin-encapsulated, familial deceased. Two lowlife movers (who are also part-time grave robbers) make quick work of their day job and are stealing Catherine Valmont and her mother’s jewelry when an earthquake knocks one of the toxic barrels to the ground─a liquid spill and a poisonous, chamber-drifting gas is the result, as well as dissolving flesh and a woken-from-the-dead Catherine, hungry for blood and walking catatonic. Caught between a stunned sort-of zombie-vampire and immediate contamination, the movers don’t stand a chance.

A few minutes later, Catherine (well-played by Françoise Blanchard) wanders through the spacious house. Phillipe d’Aram’s evocative score highlights Catherine’s upon-waking walk, flavoring it with flute play to add to the melancholic and haunting feel of the scenes. It’s clear that the twenty-year-old undead woman is mourning even as she reels with shock. She later encounters random characters who come into the house (a realtor, her beau, three burglars), who are summarily killed, drunk and gnawed on, with bright red vivid blood on display. Catherine is more vampire than zombie, an unspecified creature who is unique in her representation of undeath in film.

The scenes where Catherine attacks and eats her victims are elegant and horrific. This is not the grand guignol of George A. Romero’s DEAD films, but a woman chewing at small holes in their guts. Monteillet’s cinematography maintains that Old World European feel of the film, even as the violent and gory contrasts of Catherine’s aggression are shown.

Catherine’s childhood and blood-oath friend, Hélène (shown in early flashbacks), enters the picture. Also well-played by Marina Pierro (SUSPIRIA, 1977), she is at first shocked by Catherine’s reappearance, then dedicated to protecting her. Hélène makes it her mission to supply her cognizant friend with food. Hélène insists that Catherine did not die, but was sick and misdiagnosed. Catherine tells her otherwise, but Hélène, who is slowly going obsessively mad and edging toward murder, does not believe her.

Catherine becomes more distressed. She does not want to be alive; she does not want to kill, drink, and eat people. When two American photographers, shown here and there in LIVING, cross paths with Catherine and Hélène, things come to a darkly funny and clever fake-out head, forcing a conversation that Catherine obviously knew was coming, and Hélène was trying not to think about.

The intimate finish, like many of violence and gore scenes, is not for the weak of stomach. Its inevitability is logical, given their character arcs and their blood vows.

The only thing I don’t like about the all-around excellent flick is the dumb toxic waste subplot. Rollin, in other films, has deftly not provided explanations, supernatural or otherwise, to key events, so why now, in LIVING─unless to show, on a global level, one of its inherent themes (destruction, self-directed or otherwise)?

Viewers who are used to faster-paced films may be put off by relatively languid, mood-marinating tone of Rollin’s work. And this being a Rollin movie, there’s a lot of nudity─little of it explicitly sexual─per his producers’ mandate: we’ll fund your melancholic art films if you put naked women in them. Men are shown naked, too, though there’s little or no frontal nudity on their part.

 According to IMDb, Gregory Heller wrote and directed an American, English-language version of the film “with the same cast and crew.” He’d “shoot his scenes right after Jean Rollin.” This English version has not been released and is now considered lost.