French Frights: Revenge of the Living Dead Girls
Imagine a horror movie made by a porn director trying to make a quick buck.
The 80s are coming to a close and Pierre B. Reinhard’s profits have been divided in half. This is thanks to a law by France’s then-president, Mitterand. The new legislation prevents pornographic pictures to benefit from the CNC, the French organism that helps in funding movies. See, before this, porn as well as independent producers used to make two versions of the same movie. One would be porn and showed after midnight, the other one being a “tamed” version, with an M rating that could be screened during the day.
This switcharoo between porn and regular fiction enabled producers for quite a long time to juggle between porn and eroticism and make a quick buck. But this era is now over. Porn movies that used to take a week to be made, now have to be shot in three days or less, in order to turn a profit. And this may explain why Pierre B Reinhad is gonna to accept Jean-Claude Roy’s new offer.
It might be weird for you, but I feel that thanks to this intro, you got that the frontier between the porn and the independant movie industry, in France, used to be real thin for a bunch of years.
Zombie movies are the new craze, and Jean-Claude Roy, a French tv producer, hopes to jump on the bandwagon. Not because he likes it, but because, according to Benoît Lestang, Roy would go towards anything that might seem profitable.
Roy, in the interview presented on the French DVD, states that he wrote this weird story of a trio of zombie girls killing off different people in the countryside of France, because of his love for the Grand-Guignol. I already wrote about this, but the Grand-Guignol theater was a theater in France that used to present plays that featured gore and violence. Think of it as the predecessor of horror movies but in a theater form. Yet, to me, a French producer trying to tie is little B-movie flick to the grand heritage of French Culture is as common as breathing fucking air.
Truth is, the director Roy was gonna hire, Pierre B Reinhard, possesses the same contempt towards the genre. Reinhard studied art in Les Beaux Arts before turning to the movie industry thanks to a set designer who gave him his entry in the busness. From there, he would do location management, bunch of other stuff, climbing every step towards becoming a director.
In due time, Reinhard would learn to edit and akin to Joe Lynch, find himself editing porn film in an industry that never dies. Porous frontier and all that, the aspiring filmmaker would go on to direct a lot of porn movies before a move from one office to another, made him meet Roy.
By this time, seven years in the porn industry, Reinhard was sort of tired, in an interview with a porn mag, he goes on to state he wishes someone would give him a real flick to shoot. Either a horror film or a crime story.
Roy overhears this and proposes the weird scenario he’s been working on for some time. Roy is a man full of resources but he needs a director who’ll shoot on a budget and porn trains filmmakers in doing so.
As for the cast, they both hire actresses from former shoots or people who wouldn’t ask to be paid big money. Reinhard says that he specifically hired the lead because he had shot with her in through his porn days and thought she deserved a regular career. Kudos to him for she very might well be the sole credible person in the whole flick.
Movie would be shot through five weeks, in the Sarthe department of France, in a small village named La Ferté Bernard (Fun fact: I lived right next to it for a good chunk of my life and I also shot a zombie movie there but that’s another story). It seems some scenes also were shot near Paris, in Coulomiers to be honest. (Fun fact number 2: My mom used to work in Coulomiers, it’s like me and this movie share an origin story).
According to Reinhard, the weather wasn’t on the team’s side, what with snowfall happening midway through the shoot. This is what forced him to make the night shots of the cemetery in low-angle while the actresses were freezing to death. Amused, the filmmaker remembers the cast had to hear instructions from their caravan since it was too cold to make them wait outside. So cold in fact, one night the oil in the camera film mechanism froze and prevented the film from turning well. The director of photography had to shoot with three heaters surrounding him in order to prevent another failure.
For the SFX, Roy hired Benoît Lestang who would go on to become a legend and make the SFX in the cult classic Martyrs. Nowadays it’s funny to see how much the modern-day promotion focuses on it being Lestang’s third film when, in interviews, you can see the veteran SFX designer he became wasn’t really pleased with his work. Mainly because of budget constraints, only one mask existed per actress. This meant it had to be reused throughout the entire film. Production also enabled Lestang to make only one glove, which seems a bit ridiculous when watching the final product.
Lestang complains a lot about the lead actress never trying to hide the fact she only got one zombie hand.
Maybe thanks to sex scenes sprinkled throughout, the movie would nonetheless go on to sell 200,000 tickts which for the time and the scale of the production was a success. As of now, The Revenge of the Living Dead Girls has been released at least two times on DVD. The latter edition proved very useful for one obscure reason.
See, during the test screenings of the movie, horror fans claimed the regular ending in which they had to learn the zombies never existed and it was all a machination was stupid. Without any reshoot, the production simply cut the ending short which led to the whole movie making even less sense.
I opened this paper by stating Roy claims he liked the Grand Guignol and tried to pay homage to it by making “the first gore French film.” What’s interesting to me is that this ending where the writers somehow states “the supernatural don’t exist” is a really French approach.
Because there’s nothing more French than feeling contempt towards horror.
Plot: In a small village, a trio of teenagers dies because of chemical products. This leads to an investigation that’ll uncover the machination of the local power plant
