Girls who suck: Caged Virgins (1973)

“You cannot be both virgin and vampire!”


 Click… Click…Bang…Bang and that’s how the film opens up, with a female clown pointing a gun at you. Ok, you’ve got my attention. Two female clowns and a leather clad male driver speed down the highway exchanging gun fire with a second car. The clowns pull a quick maneuver and lose the pursuing car but not before their driver are fatally wounded. Being the professionals that they are, they burn their vehicle (with their poor friend inside) and head out on their merry way.

After a change of clothes, they commit a little more theft before running through a cemetery where one of the girls is almost buried alive. The brunette (Michelle) falls into an open grave and is dazed. Two gravediggers return and begin filling in the hole. Once they leave, the blonde (Marie) runs to her rescue and the finds the brunette, her arm out stretched from the grave like a rising member of the undead. 

     

They soon happen upon a castle and begin to explore it. After a short pseudo-erotic interlude (the two girls are lovers), they hear some load noises and go to investigate, guns in hand. What they find is a mangled corpse, hooded skeletons, and a female vampire that looks strangely like Lestat, who spares them from the brutality of her man servants.

    

What follows is a strange circle of events that unfold with the logic of a fairy tale. The lost little girls look no more than 16 (they were both 20 years old), wondering in a labyrinth of sexual and immortal discovery and depravity. Director Jean Rollin’s third vampire opus is nearly completely devoid of dialogue, so the visuals become all the more important, and set it apart from nearly all other films in the genre.

    


When our heroines are in control they are often dressed as clowns, as opposed to when they are vulnerable, dressed as school girls, complete with pony tails.  The head male vampire opens his cape to reveal two vampire bats that fly forth like agents of death and take control of the young girls by planting themselves on their necks. The girls experience both death and rebirth in a cemetery. A captive girl has a vampire bat bleed her from her “special place” giving her a rousing orgasm. When they go out to find men to sleep with, they go to the cemetery (well where would you go?)

  

Caged Virgins is unlike any other vampire film ever made. More exploitation than horror, part Grimm’s Fairy tale, part sexploitation, part gothic horror, it plays on all the senses like no film before or since. Though not a perfect film by any means, you can honestly say after you’ve seen it, that you have definitely never seen anything like it. Isn’t that what we’re all looking for?