VAMPYRES

(1974)


Summary and commentary below by Cory Hanaway (2006).


Notes: 88 minutes.
Starring Marianne Morris, Anulka, Murray Brown, Brian Deacon, Sally Faulkner.
Directed: Jose Ramon Larraz


Summary: An English couple, John and Harriet, are taking a trip in their RV stop by a seemingly abandoned estate that was the murder scene of two young women years earlier. At the same time an unrelated man named Ted is driving down the same road and stops to pickup a hitchhiker named Fran. He drives her home and proceeds to have relations with her. Over the next three nights Ted stays with Fran and her friend Miriam while other men who have stopped to pickup the two women on the street are all mysteriously killed in car crashes. The women are nowhere to be found during the daylight hours and only appear at night when they brutally lure and kill there victims. After killing John and Harriet to fill their bloodlust they make a mad dash to outrun the rising sun.


Commentary:
This racy film follows Ted with uncoordinated jumps to others characters whom we all wonder why they are even there at all. The married couple of John and Harriet are minding their own business and are not relevant to the plot at all. They see and are seen by the vampires on several occasions but these meetings are of no consequence then they are brutally murdered. The vampires do not have any of the superhuman powers that we have come to expect from vampires. They are seen dragging there victims away from the house, but it takes both of them to do so. The only real power that they possess is to make the watches stop of their victims. This is a useless power and inconsequential to the movie.

Furthermore, the attention of the first two thirds of the movie on Ted and Fran, for the last third of the move they play secondary roles to Miriam and the married couple. This complete change in cinematic style leaves one wondering if that was done solely for the reason of giving Miriam more screen time. The movie also makes very poor attempts to link it to Dracula. This is manly done with two allusions, first the vampires seduce there victims most of the time prior to killing them, and the second is that the only animals seen in the film are bats. The vampires don't even bite neatly on the neck; they lap up the messy blood like dogs.

At no point in this movie is there a call to arms to fight these vampires, or any indication that the police find it odd that most every night there is a car crash on the same road in cars driven by naked men. Ted is bitten on three consecutive nights, but does not turn into a vampire so no cure is ever sought. There is not even a fight scene with the vampires in an attempt to kill them. The vampires always have the element of surprise and kill their victims with a knife. The only weakness that they appear to have is sunlight and they manage to outrun that. All in all, this movie was an excuse to put a lot of nudity into a film with a lot of blood.


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