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Vampyres
Anchor
Bay Edition
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6
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7 |
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10
= Highest Rating |
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A
surprisingly effective blend of in-your-face sex
and violence, this dreamlike "modern gothic"
packs heavy doses of nudity and blood — other
lesbian undead flicks made during the period (Vampyros
Lesbos, The Vampire
Lovers, Lust For
a Vampire) seem positively coquettish in comparison.
It certainly holds up in the titillation department,
still capable of invoking a few shudders almost
30 years on.
Vampyres
really doesn't have much of a plot. It opens with
a bang, however, not wasting a moment before getting
straight to the exploitation elements. In a huge,
rambling manor house two naked women, a sultry
brunette (Marianne Morris) and a gorgeous blonde
(May 1973 Playboy Playmate of the Month Anulka
Dziubinska, here billed only by her first name),
are making love on a bed. An unseen person enters
the room, surprising them, unloading a pistol
into the couple as they scream in terror. A shot
of the dead lesbians segues to the credits, which
run over scenes of bats flapping about to a psychedelic,
rock guitar-driven theme. (The bat motif is somewhat
misleading. The only time the critters are encountered
in the movie is briefly in the manor house cellar.
The blood drinkers in Vampyres
are not shape-shifters.) The women shot
to death in the prologue are next seen dressed
in dark cloaks, haunting the woodlands surrounding
the castle-like house where they were murdered.
(It's the same English estate used in The
Rocky Horror Picture Show, a great location
used to good effect by director Larraz.) While
the blonde girl hides in the woods the brunette
stands by a country lane and
flags down male motorists traveling alone, asking
for a lift. The men are
invited to the manor house, plied with wine and
seduced — prelude to their savage murder at the
hands of the conniving women. Hotter for hemoglobin
than a John Thomas, these lesbian nosferatu don't
have fangs... They use a dagger to slice up their
victims while rapaciously lapping up the blood,
fastening their red-stained lips hungrily on the
gushing wounds. Men are just food to be tricked,
using feminine wiles, onto the dinner plate. Their
erotic desires are only truly expressed with each
other.
But one of the duo's victims
isn't killed right away. Middle-aged Ted (Murray
Brown) thinks he's hit the jackpot when he picks
up the hitchhiking brunette. The sexy, mysterious
woman introduces herself as Fran and soon has
Ted parking his car at the manor. He's a bit unsettled
by the decrepit, cobwebbed interior of the house
but the smaller head, of course, always triumphs
over the larger. After sampling one of the fine
vintages from the cellar Fran strips down and
the two get it on. For some inexplicable reason
Fran chooses not to kill him. (Why she'd take
a shine to this guy is a mystery.) Ted
awakens alone in the morning, disoriented and
with a deep cut on his arm. A broken wine bottle
would seem to explain the injury. There's no sign
of Fran or any other soul about.
Instead of driving to the nearest
village Ted asks for help at a travel trailer
he spots parked at the edge of estate. It's owned
by John (Brian Deacon) and Harriet (Sally Faulkner),
a young couple vacationing in the countryside.
While bandaging his wound Harriet inquires about
strange lights and noises she's seen and heard
coming from the direction of the supposedly abandoned
house. But Ted is evasive, and after parting he
heads back to the house to get answers of his
own. He falls asleep in his car only to be awakened
hours later when Fran and her blonde companion
Miriam arrive with Rupert (Karl Lanchbury), the
next fly to voluntarily enter the spider's web.
Ted puts his questions on the
backburner once Fran slips out of her dress; Rupert
pairs off with Miriam.
Weakened by shagging and blood loss (and likely
drugged), Ted passes out. He doesn't see Rupert
again until the next morning when, whilst driving
away from the house, he comes upon the police
pulling the man's bloody corpse from his
car. Fran evidently rocked Ted's world, because
instead of telling the cops
what he knows he turns around and drives back
to the manor. (Having gone without a shower for
two days, Ted should be getting fairly ripe by
now...
With his lank hair and pasty complexion he certainly
looks it.) He can't find Fran, however, and accidentally
gets himself locked in the cellar. With the coming
of evening Fran and Miriam appear and let him
out. Questions to Fran are again brushed aside
as she seduces him into bed; Ted is so weak that
he passes out before he can get any. Fran contents
herself with drinking blood from the cut on his
arm. Miriam sheds her clothes and joins her —
in a rather stimulating (and at one time heavily
edited) scene the two women have sex, licking
the blood from each other's mouths while Ted lays
prostrate in a stupor. (Poor chap!) The next day
finds Ted almost too weak to move. Barely able
to stand, only with great effort is he able to
pull on some clothes and stagger out of the house.
Perhaps the nice couple in the trailer can help
him...
Vampyres
can be slow going at times, as director Larraz
is much more concerned with atmosphere than storytelling.
(Or even logic. Fran and Miriam supposedly sleep
during daylight hours but are seen in the sun
a number of times. It doesn't look that
cloudy outside...) There are a number of long
walking sequences with the vampire women making
their way through the woods to the roadside (and
back) and both Ted and Harriet taking turns exploring
the house. This can get tedious. Basically, the
entire film consists of Fran and Miriam entrapping
and killing their victims, Ted wandering about
looking for Fran, and Harriet snooping about like
the proverbial curious cat while good-natured
John pooh poohs her mounting suspicions. That
the whole thing could just be a dream — usually
a major cop-out in our book — is reinforced by
the ambiguous, Twilight Zone-style ending.
Larraz certainly
structured the film that way; there's no way to
really know whether the events of the pre-credits
prologue actually occur before or after (a flashback?)
the main story. No matter. The acting is generally
quite good, especially Faulkner as Harriet and
Michael Byrne (Tomorrow
Never Dies) as the doomed wine connoisseur.
As mentioned Larraz makes terrific use of his
main location and creates a suitably spooky atmosphere
of gothic decadence. As helmed by the Spanish
director, the movie plays much more like a Continental
sex/horror film than the similarly themed stuff
Hammer was cranking out at the time. Vampyres
is an unapologetic exploitation flick to be sure.
But it's a high class one.
If you're looking for a horror
film with some genuinely erotic imagery, or a
sex film with a liberal dash of horror, Vampyres
should fit the bill. It delivers plenty of sex
and nudity — Morris and Dziubinska have glorious,
non-surgically enhanced bodies and we get to see
a lot of 'em. That the film works on an erotic
level only makes the horror elements that much
more disturbing. Some of the killings are surprisingly
brutal... not for any explicit gore per se, but
by the utter rapaciousness of Fran and Miriam
in their animalistic bloodthirst.
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Anchor
Bay's DVD edition of Vampyres
is in keeping with the company's usual high standards.
This is the best print of the film ever to make
it to home video to date. It's letterboxed; grain
is evident in darker scenes. The Digital Mono audio
track is fine. Extras include the European and U.S
theatrical trailers (interesting that the American
one is far more lurid than the Euro version), a
photo gallery slideshow, and an audio commentary
by director Larraz and producer Brian Smedley-Aston.
The commentary was one of the
best I've heard in a while. Smedley-Aston provides
a number of pithy, witty asides; Larraz amusingly
holds forth on the film, its problems with censors,
and his approach to the material. He's apparently
not a big fan of horror films in general but genuinely
enjoys seeing female nudity on screen. The commentary
recording session was the first time in many years
he'd seen the film; at times it's like listening
to some dirty old grandpa watching a skin flick:
"Jesus Christ! I can see the pussy of Anulka!"
Larraz exclaims in his thick, expletive-peppered
Spanish accent. Moments like these are quite funny.
The disc's animated navigation
screens are appropriately psychedelic. The bulk
of James Clark's groovy theme plays over the Main
and Extras menus. A nice touch. 6/20/01 |
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