La Ballad Des Amants Maudits

A jealous girl spies on her former lover as he sits with his new girlfriend. She goes to her room and concocts a steaming poison, the alchemical essence of their past relationship. At night she creeps into the lover’s room and injects the poison through the man’s ear and the girl’s abdomen: the couple wake up transformed into hideous beasts. The poisoner is, however, destroyed by the vampires she has created.’A collection of ROLAND LETHEM horror shorts…are of such a nature as to make the blood run hot and cold. The heat is turned on by lashings of sex, and the afterchill is achieved by methods related to Grand Guignol.” Sight and Sound (?) “… the images in Lethem’s films are anarchic, powerful and bizarre. But they aren’t another indulgent wallowing in a set of private macabre fantasies. There’s a kind of black humour in them, his use of symbolism is controlled and effective and there’s a definite link between the amoral sado-masochistic world of his films and the political/social realities existing outside the cinema.”-‘Jerome’, Frendz, May 1971.