Vampyres

Rating:
Summary: Blue Underground Proves Once Again Why They're The Best
Review: Up until recently, Anchor Bay Entertainment used to be the undisputed king of releasing horror, exploitation, foreign, art house and cult cinema on DVD with all the bells and whistles that rabid collectors love. However, former Anchor Bay head honcho (not to mention notable genre director) Bill Lustig has since focused his talents on making Blue Underground the premiere distribution company amongst those who know their cult cinema...

Take their treatment of Jose Ramon Larraz's evocative vampire (make that vampyre) classic. Previously available on the format in a slightly censored print from Anchor Bay, Blue Underground have released what is likely to be the definite release of VAMPYRES on DVD and anyone who has even a passing interest in foreign horror films should already own this fantastic disc... The extras (including a commentary track and a featurette) are plentiful, the print is cleaned up and, most importantly, the film is UNCUT and UNCENSORED!

The movie itself is much like your standard vampire story, albeit done with a little more style that we're accustomed to seeing in this sort of film... European horror film directors always seem to have a better sense of atmosphere and visual direction than their American counterparts and it certainly shows here... Larraz makes full use of the autumnal settings and injects some real class in the film with some top-notch lighting at key moments... A scene where three characters share a drink in a wine cellar benefits greatly from this... you yourself feel as if you're down there with them by the candle-light. Outdoor scenes are particularly surreal in the way that they're shot...

Of course, this is a horror film so genre fans can expect an ample amount of blood to be shed over the course of the film. Much of it isn't very explicit but I found myself shocked at least once because I wasn't really expecting it... the deaths in VAMPYRES come quick and mercilessly, as I suppose they should. There's also quite a bit amount of nudity to be found here as well, a good portion of it softcore lesbian erotica (VERY softcore... don't expect the film to slip into Jess Franco territory at all).

In any case, they most certainly DON'T make them like this any more... If you even consider yourself a fan of vampire movies, or the 70s European exploitation scene in general, you should definitely have this minor classic in your collection... Not only does it provide fans with the lurid thrills that they're accustomed to seeing but it does so with just a bit of class, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Rating:
Summary: READ BEFORE ORDERING!!!
Review: Make no mistake this film is a cult classic along side the other female vampire film Vamyros Lesbos. It is bloody and sexy and fun.

Other reviews have done a great job of describing the film but one point about the DVD releases, while AnchorBay does a great job on plenty of Fulci titles they dropped the ball with their Vampyres DVD as it is actually slightly cut. Get the Blue Underground DVD as it is uncut and has some remakable special features.

Rating:
Summary: Watch for the sex not the story!
Review: If you watch this movie for anything other than the sexual content you are most likely to be disappointed. The plot is paper thin (hell, I could have written it!) and poses numerous questions without bothering to answer any of them. Even the film's title is a bit of a misnomer. But, let's face it...the whole point of the film is to set up situations that allow the two female "vampyres" to disrobe and display their bodies (no complaints here!). Getting to view the two stunning ladies repeatedly in nude scenes is enough to earn this film four stars in my book! Seriously though, this film does have a Hammeresque quality to it and the setting is very atmospheric (nice blend of mid-70's style with a touch of gothic). The acting is pretty good, too. But, the film loses a star due to it's lack of storyline and departure from classic vampire lore. Classic horror? No. Classic erotica? Yes.

Rating:
Summary: AESTHETIC, SATANIC, INDULGING
Review: YES, THIS IS A FLIM THAT RISES ABOVE THE REST IN THE VOLATILE TIME OF EROTIC VAMPIRE FILMS IN THE EARLY 1970'S. TWO VOLUMPTOUS, BEAUTIFUL VAMPIRES USE THEIR FEMININE TALENTS AND THE AGE OLD ONE NIGHT STAND AS A FACADE TO LURE OVER-ANXIOUS MEN TO THEIR BREATHTAKING, DECREPIT OLD COUNTRY HOME. THE MEN FALL ALL TOO EASILY FOR WHAT THEY THINK WILL BE A SEXUAL RENDEZVOUS WITH TWO STRANGE, DARK WOMEN. AFTER THEY ARE ENTERTAINED, THEY FALL VICTIM TO SAVAGE DEATHS, BLOODLETTING, AND HUMILIATION. THE BRITISH COUNTRYSIDE AND THE BREATHTAKING OLD HOME CREATES A SUPERIOR AMBIENCE THAT IS CONDUCIVE FOR AN UNFORGETTABLE, EROTIC, LURID FILM. THIS FILM WILL LEAVE YOU WANTING NEVER TO RETURN TO REALITY. DARK, EVIL, BEAUTIFUL, IMPERATIVE.

Rating:
Summary: Still the best erotic vampire movie ever.
Review: Where to begin.....
As far as an erotic vampire movie goes, look no further. As far as a savage and gory vampire movie goes, look no further. As far as an interesting story goes with great cinematography to boot, look no further.

This movie came out in 1974 and had to be edited by the censors for release in most countries. The footage that had been cut has been put back in for this excellent dvd release from Anchor Bay. It was directed by Spanish director Joseph Larraz and filmed in England on Hammer Studios sets.

The story goes something like this:
Two women are making love in a bed and someone walks in on them and shoots them. Next thing we know a man (Murray Brown) is driving through the countryside and picks up a woman (Marianne Morris) along the road. They go to her place which just happens to be a huge manor home in the middle of nowhere. They end up having sex and the next thing he know it is next morning. He feels weak and notices a nasty cut on his arm and the girl is nowhere to be found. He gets in his car a drives a little ways along the dirt road leading out of the estate when he runs across a couple who have picked this site to park their trailer and go camping. They help the man bandage his cut and after a little while he leaves. He runs across the strange woman he picked up the night before and they go back to the estate. Her friend (Anulka Dziubinska) has picked up another man and before too long the two couples have made their way to the bedrooms. The first man makes love to the woman but this time we see her sucking blood out of the cut on his arm. Her friend walks in and they go to the other bedroom where he lover is lying face up up on the bed covered in blood. They both start an orgiastic feast on the man and when they are done they drag him out of the room.

The next morning the first man wakes up and and makes his way to the highway in his car when he slows down for a car wreck along the road. The bloody body behind the wheel is the man he had seen at the house the prior evening. He drives back to the estate and starts wandering around and winds up getting locked in the cellar. The girls return, find and release him, and he goes back up to the bedroom.

Meanwhile, while all of this has been going on, the woman on vacation in the trailer has become terribly interested in the goings on at the estate and keeps trying to get her husband interested. He feels it is none of their business and is content to go fishing and wishes his wife would just be happy with her paintings that she has been working on.

That night, the girls at the estate bring home another man they picked up and they end up going down to the wine cellar. Before too long he is a bloody mess and the first man has now left and made his way to the trailer.

The couple in the trailer are horrified to see the condition that the man is in so the husband goes out to the car to go get help. Before he can take off the women attack him in the car and kill him. The wife goes out to check on him and starts screaming when she sees his bloody body in the car. The two women then attack the wife and she is dragged, kicking and screaming, back to the cellar where they strip her and then feast on her.

I have probably given away too much, but I won't give away the ending. I have read that some people thought the end was stupid and some people liked it. I happened to have liked it a lot. This is a pretty unique vampire movie and it is too bad it didn't do better at the box office, maybe then we would have had a sequel!

The dvd is presented in widescreen 1:85.1 and has a commentary on the disk by director Joseph Larraz and producer Brian Smedley-Aston. Larraz was 70 when the commentary was recorded a few years ago and is at times quite funny. At one point he yells "Eh, I can see Anulka's .... That's not on my video copy!" There are also a couple trailers, film bios and a stills gallery. The movie goes for around $17-20 and it is easily worth the money.

Rating:
Summary: Wasted Potential
Review: Some people might call this review a spoiler, but I don't.

Still here? OK. See, I don't call this a spoiler because a spoiler gives away the ending. My review, on the other hand, is a warning that VAMPYRES does not actually have an ending.

This movie gets off to an excellent start; but, as the filmmakers admit in their audio commentary, they ran out of money. Of course the film is low-budget, which is fine. But the additional problem with VAMPYRES is that they did not even end up having the modest sum of money they expected when production began. To make matters worse, the impossible-to-work-with director José Ramón Larraz kept changing the script while filming was taking place. The result is a movie with a great creepy atmosphere and talented, charismatic actresses but a screenplay that makes absolutely no sense. Side-plots keep getting introduced in irrelevant scenes and then never referred to again throughout the film. The first few scenes bring up an intriguing murder mystery, but the filmmakers ran out of money before they filmed the mystery being solved. It would have made more sense at that point to cut the plot-development scenes out of the movie entirely and just make a straight-forward nudity and gore flick, but they did not bother to edit out the scenes that script-changes and halted production had made irrelevant. The closing scenes clumsily restate what has been obvious all along without bringing together any of the loose plot elements.

It is really a shame that more time and money were not spent on this movie. The spooky atmosphere, early plot developments, and chemistry between the cast members could have led to a true masterpiece of horror.

Some reviewers have mentioned that this is the unedited version of the film. I don't know if the edited version just cuts out the sex and violence or if it also attempts to make the plot more coherent; but if any film ever needed editing, this is it.

Rating:
Summary: Erotic, bloody vampire flick
Review: Some time ago I made a statement to the effect that I avoided vampire films like the plague. What did I do immediately after making such a pronouncement? Why, I went right out and started watching vampire films! I am nothing if not a huge hypocrite, but at least this time there is a reason for my hypocrisy. You see, I am finally getting a chance to see all the great Eurohorror classics thanks to the advent of DVD. And it just so happens that some of these great classics employ the tried and true vampire theme. How could I pass up the joy that is "Daughters of Darkness" merely because I try to avoid vampire films? Or Jose Larraz's epic "Vampyres"? Actually, I never even heard of this last movie before DVD arrived on the scene. I was thumbing through the lists of supposed Eurohorror classics and stumbled over the title. The word on it was good, great in some instances, so I decided to give it a shot. I'm glad I did. In fact, if I had to cite one example of a movie that embodied the look and feel of 1970s Eurohorror, I would pick "Vampyres." The only thing missing from Larraz's film is an extremely high gore quotient (the film is quite bloody, though).

Fran (Marianne Morris) and her blonde partner Miriam (Anulka) are just your average, everyday dead spirits wandering through rain shrouded cemeteries, back roads, and dark forests somewhere in England. We learn at the beginning of the film that someone, presumably a male, expressed his disappointment at finding the two young women in a compromising position and thus shot them with a handgun. Flash forward some number of years to a creepy looking castle located out in the sticks, the same castle where the aforementioned crime took place. Miriam and Fran, clad in flowing robes, flit from their abode to the roadside where they entice young male drivers back to the castle for an evening of wine, fun, and other assorted activities. Later, we see the police prying these hapless wretches from their wrecked cars, drained of blood and with watches that mysteriously stopped. Hmmm. Looks like something decidedly supernatural is going on in the vicinity. Could the accidents have something to do with our two wayward spirits? It sure looks like it, especially considering the last time we see these blokes alive is in the company of Fran and Miriam.

Enter three people who will soon learn more than they ever wanted to know about young, gorgeous spirit vampires. There's a driver, Ted (Murray Brown), who accepts an invitation from Fran to return to the castle only to find himself imprisoned there as a sort of ongoing snack for the voracious cutie. Then we meet a couple of campers, John (Brian Deacon) and his girl Harriet (Sally Faulkner), who set up their little trailer on the grounds of the supposedly empty castle. Camping out on the site where a couple of vampires ply their trade isn't a good idea, and it isn't too long before both John and Harriet experience several frightening up close and personal encounters with Fran and Miriam. They even have a run in with Ted, without knowing he's an unwilling participant in the festivities going on in the house, but his sudden presence along with his ghostly pallor greatly alarms our campers. Meanwhile, Miriam warns Fran that her irrational love--for lack of a better term--for Ted endangers their presence in the castle and their highway activities. Fran persists in keeping Ted around, however, and will pay a price for doing so. Maybe. O.k., she doesn't pay as much of a price as John, Harriet, Ted, and a few other sorry souls do. Spending any time at all around these vampires is extraordinarily bad for one's health.

Forget about performances or the occasional bloodshed in "Vampyres." This is a movie where the atmosphere takes center stage. Every image reeks of doom and gloom, from the forbidding castle to the rain and fog shrouded environs to the massively haunting musical score. I mentioned earlier that "Vampyres" could serve as an archetype of the Eurohorror phenomenon of the 1970s, and one need look no further than the scenes where Miriam and Fran run soundlessly through a decrepit cemetery on their frequent jaunts to the road as proof of this assertion. Anyone writing a book about the prime years of European horror films should use a still taken from these scenes for the cover. "Vampyres" isn't all about atmosphere, though. There is also an enormous amount of erotic imagery in the movie, imagery made all the more impressive considering the beautiful visages of Marianne Morris and Anulka. These are two incredibly attractive women who, despite the atrocious dubbing in the case of Morris, really help propel the plot. When you've got a film about two beautiful young ladies turned into spiritual vampires, it helps to cast two beautiful young ladies in the respective parts. European horror films are known for casting attractive women (see Edwige Fenech, Uschi Digard, Christina Lindberg, etc.), but Larraz really went above and beyond the call of duty here.

Once again, Blue Underground went overboard on the extras for "Vampyres." Interviews with Marianne Morris and Anulka grace the disc, along with a commentary track with director Jose Larraz. Too, the disc throws in a few funky trailers as well as a reconstruction of a lost scene through still photographs. The picture and audio look and sound great. I heartily recommend "Vampyres" for anyone interested in learning about Eurohorror. I would think fans of vampire films already know about this one, but they should definitely check it out if they haven't heard about it.


Rating:
Summary: Finally saw it. -- So what's all the fuss about?
Review: Well, after literally decades of hearing tales of the notoriety of this film and seeing the most highly titillating stills from it prominently featured in my vampire movie books, I finally took the "daring" plunge and actually sought it out and watched it. -- And my opinion of it? Well I dunno, maybe I've been letting my naughty imagination get the best of me all these years or maybe my moral standards are especially low, but my reaction was kind of "oh, is that all there was to it?"

For all the hubbub, I was actually expecting there to be much more sex, violence and gore than there turned out to be. By today's standards, I actually found it quite tame. Yes, there is a lot of nudity in it, but none of it is of the full-frontal variety showing the genital area. What simulated coitus there is, is neither particularly graphic nor convincing. And the worst of the film's violence all occurs off-screen. Granted, if you find lots and lots of fake blood scary, you MAY get a chill or two. But heck, these vamps don't even have FANGS fer cryin' out loud!

Anulka doesn't really have to act much, just stand/lie there and look pretty. Marianne Morris does do a bit more and does make an adequate female vamp. And the much-hyped lesbian scenes are also quite limited and nothing particularly special by today's standards.

What I did like very much was the ambience that the wonderful locations of the manor house and the English countryside in autumn give to the film. I would say that it was this, and also the tasteful direction which shows a nice appreciation for the value of quiet and silence, which combine with the actors to create a film a bit better than adequate.

Overall I'd rate this movie a bit better than 3.5 stars, and thanks to the outstanding job they have done on this DVD I have no problems with bumping it up to a full 4 stars. Not only does the film look fabulously and immaculately restored, but the extras are also good. The best part was the 15-minute interview segment with the actresses today. I would say that Anulka Dziubinska looks even hotter today, some 30 years later. -- No small feat, and certainly a very rare occurrence!

You also get a commentary from the director and the producer of the film, as well as a still gallery of a missing scene, an Anulka modelling career still gallery, plus the usual trailer, and even a computer file version of the classic but out of print book on this film. All in all, a wonderful package. Blue Underground deserve to be very proud of the excellent job they have done on this DVD. It's great to see a classic B-movie like this given the proper respect it deserves.

As for me, well I guess I'm still in the market for a lesbian vampire flick which lives up to the expectations I've created in my head all these years. (Attention, filmmakers....!) What I'm looking for is something more extreme and graphic than this, but still without the yucky tackiness of porn and with the polished production values and great atmosphere of this film. (--Yeah I know about the Donald Glut videos, but I said WITH production values.) So the market is out here, folks. Now let's see what you can do.

Meanwhile, I'm gonna go run off my fave lesbian vampire film of all time, "The Vampire Lovers". Yeah nowhere near even as graphic as this one, but just brimming with delicious atmosphere, and ahhhh, Ingrid Pitt... (*swoons*)

Rating:
Summary: cool
Review: My favorite parts were when Fran & Miriam would run through the grave yard. Awesome.

Rating:
Summary: This Is The One
Review: Look no more. This is the erotic vampire flic ive been searching for. There are good vampire movies and erotic vampire movies. This one combines both to make a great viewing experience. Thick gothic atmosphere two beautiful vampire girls and plenty of victums. Very well done.