Vampyros Lesbos (1971)

Title: Vampyros Lesbos (1971)

Director: Jesus Franco

Cast: Soledad Miranda, Ewa Stromberg, Dennis Price, Heidrun Kussin, Jose Martinez Blanco, Jesus Franco

You could say I started off on the wrong foot as I explored Jesus Franco’s body of work. My first impression of his films was the dreadfully boring Oasis of the Zombies (1983), a tough watch if there ever was any, I just couldn’t find anything good about it. Personally, Oasis of the Zombies felt like a cheap rip off! And not in the sense that it was ripping off other movies, but in the sense that it ripped me off! I followed that with Franco’s Count Dracula (1970), which while not a terrible film, was a dull take on Bram Stoker’s legendary book. But I kept hearing good things about Vampyros Lesbos, so I decided to give it a chance, and I’m glad I did! Now this was a Jesus Franco film I thoroughly enjoyed! It’s surreal, dreamlike and sexy, elements that I find alluring on any film. In a way, it was appropriate that I saw Franco’s Count Dracula first because it became obvious to me while watching it that Franco was completely inspired by Bram Stoker’s book while making Vampyros Lesbos. It is in many ways  a modern retelling of the Dracula legend. For every character in Vampyros Lesbos, you can find a counter part in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. We get a Lucy, we get a Reinfeld, we even get a Van Helsing, but all siphoned through Franco’s twisted, yet artistic point of view, now aint that an interesting premise!

On Vampyros Lesbos we meet Lucy Westinghouse, a lawyer who has to travel to a mysterious island to meet a woman named Nadine Oskudar so she can finish signing some legal papers, you see, this Nadine Oskudar has just inherited a piece of real estate from someone named Count Dracula, wonder who that coulde be? Anyway, Lucy ends up skinny dipping in the beach with Nadine. Nadine tells her “you don’t have to be shy with me!” as she runs naked towards the water. Lucy, a sexually frustrated woman, likes what she sees and feels so she agrees and jumps in the water with Nadine; then they bathe naked in the sun. One thing leads to another until Nadine finally seduces Lucy! After this, Lucy ends up forgetting all about what happened to her! She can’t even remember who she is, or how she ended up in an insane asylum. Will she ever meet Nadine again? What really happened on that mysterious island?

So out of all the lesbian vampire flicks I have seen, my favorite one so far has been Harry Kumel’s Daughters of Darkness (1971), to me that one was a classy vampire flick, so beautiful to look at, so sultry. The other one I enjoyed was Hammer Films The Vampire Lovers (1970), starring the ultra sexy Ingrid Pitt. But out of all those, it’s Vampyros Lesbos that in my opinion engulfs the whole Lesbian theme to the max. Not only is it the most sexual of the three, containing the most amount of nudity and sexual situations, but this being a Jesus Franco film, he isn’t afraid to embrace the lurid themes the film touches upon; it displays them in an unabashed manner. It’s as if with his visuals he was saying “this is a film about lesbian vampires in love, and don’t you forget it!” As an added bonus it is the most surreal and dreamlike of these films. Franco decided to infuse his story with these dream sequences that act as a strange, subconscious call, as if Lucy’s repressed sexual desires where calling her out. Loved that about the film. These dream sequences have a theatricality to them, they brought to mind the sexy vampire dances seen in films like Vamp (1986) and From Dusk Till Dawn (1994), I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the film that inspired those.

The film isn’t perfect technically, sometimes it shows its low budget nature, which is the way Franco almost always worked, but to his credit I will say the film does look a hell of a lot better than it has a right to, this is something only a true artist can achieve. This is why I compare Franco a bit with Rollin, they both did a lot with very little. They both took advantage of existing locales to make their low budget films look beautiful; ultimately, this is something that benefits us as an audience, as voyeurs of the worlds they’ve created. The way Franco constructed some of the scenes in the film is just alluring, you feel like you are being hypnotized. A lot of that has to do with the score for the film which by the way is pretty memorable, I believe it’s actually one of the things that stands out the most about the film. Once you hear this soundtrack, you’ll probably want to own it, I know I did.

Another stand out element of the film is Soledad Miranda’s performance as the Countess Nadine Oskudar. She plays it silent for the most part, but there’s this scene in which she confronts the Van Helsing of this film that is just awesome, she has this commanding voice! She is definitely a domineering presence on this film and I might add in the relationship that develops between her and Lucy. Thematically speaking, the film shows a lesbian seducing a “straight” woman who harbors homosexual desires. She has a man in her life, but she’s not satisfied, so she looks elsewhere. It just so happens that that elsewhere is a woman, and a vampire! Sexuality has always been an important element in the vampire formula; the Dracula legend has always served as an allegory for men seducing women, the tricks of the trade so to speak. You ask Dracula and he’ll tell ya, hypnotic looks and the right words can get you far with a woman! What Vampyros Lesbos does is deal with that same subject manner but from a lesbians point of view. All in all a very sexy film filled with haunting, dream like imagery and lots and lots of sensuality. So far, the best Jesus Franco film I have seen and one of the best Lesbian Vampire movies I’ve seen. I’ve yet to see Vampyres (1974), so we’ll see how that one fares, but so far, Vampyros Lesbos gets high marks from me. It's not a perfect film, especially when it comes to its slow pace and its sometimes amateurish "script" which I have a feeling didn't go past a few pages, but even through its imperfection, a strange sort of beauty shines through, well worth a watch.

Rating:  3 out of 5   

Jesus Franco's Count Dracula (1970)

Title: Jesus Franco’s Count Dracula (1970)

Director: Jesus Franco

Cast: Christopher Lee, Klaus Kinski, Herbert Lom, Soledad Miranda

When you read about Christopher Lee’s work on the Hammer Dracula films, you get the idea that he didn’t really like working on them, from his comments and reactions, you get the impression that he was never really happy with the final product. Lee’s main concern was that none of the films he made with Hammer were faithful adaptations of Bram Stokers book. He’s also gone down as saying that the dialog written for him was so atrocious that he refused to say the lines. Still, he went on to play the character on countless occasions for Hammer films. But for all his bitchin’ and moaning about these films, I think he is the best Dracula ever and I also think most of those Hammer films were excellent horror films; save for Dracula 1972 A.D. (1972) which I think was a failed attempt to bring Dracula to the modern age; but all other Hammer Dracula films? Pretty much exquisite for me, I love the old school atmosphere in them.

Out of all those Hammer Dracula films, the only one to attempt an adaptation of Stoker’s book was the first one they ever made: Horror of Dracula (1958), starring Christopher Lee as Dracula and Peter Cushing as Dr. Van Helsing. For all its twists and turns with Stokers story, Horror of Dracula ended up being a decent adaptation of the book, it hits all the important moments and the resulting film was a truly effective horror film, with some really memorable images.  All other Hammer Dracula films played within the universe that Stoker created, but never tried to be an adaptation of the book, they were kind of like sequels that played with the idea of Dracula coming back from the dead, in every single film! But  what Christopher Lee always wanted was to be a part of a truly faithful adaptation of Dracula, so when Spaniard filmmaker Jesus Franco proposed the idea of making a Dracula film that was faithful to the book, Lee accepted. How did it turn out? Was it as faithful as Franco promised?

In my opinion, this Jesus Franco version of Dracula deviates just as much as any other version of Dracula, but with one added ingredient: boredom. I don’t know what it is about Jesus Franco’s style of filmmaking, but I just find his films to be incredibly dull. This was my main problem with this film, and by the way, many other Jesus Franco films suffer from this ailment; check out Oasis of the Zombies (1983) if you don’t believe me. I mean, here are films with premises that beg for something interesting to be made yet end up being boring anyways, and I chalk it all up to Jesus Franco’s style of storytelling. Here’s an example. The good guys open up a coffin to kill Dracula’s vampire brides, the brides see the good guys holding a stake and a hammer up in the air and what do they do? Do they fight their way out of the coffin? Do they fight for their lives? I mean, can’t they see that someone is about to put a wooden stake through their hearts? Apparently not, because all they do is lay there in the most peaceful manner, waiting to be hammered to death. I mean, Franco just didn’t bother doing something exciting or interesting. Now, I can take a slow paced movie, for example, I enjoy Jean Rollin’s vampire films because even though they are slow paced, they compensate with the beautiful imagery, the composition of the shots, the visual poetry or the shocking proceedings. But not so with a Jesus Franco film, well, at least this particular one which crawled at a snail’s pace.

I compare Jesus Franco to Jean Rollin because they both have a similar ways of making films: they both shoot in real locations, they very rarely use sets, they’ve both dabbled in porn and they are used to working with modest budgets. Actually, they even worked together on some films, but where Rollin surpasses Franco is in the sheer artistry he infuses his films with, he can make a low budget film look better simply because of the way he composes a shot. Franco is just dull, dull, dull. I’ve yet to see more Jesus Franco films, but so far, he hasn’t impressed me much. This is not to say that this Dracula film is a total waste of your time. I did like the fact that they shot a lot of the film in real castles, the cast is actually pretty impressive. What kept me watching this one till the end was my interest in seeing what twists and turns Franco would bring to his version of Dracula because this is the one delight of watching the same tale told by a different director, each gives their film their own flavor. Sadly, one of the things that distinguishes this version is how cheap it looks. For example, there is this one set they built in which Reinfeld is held captive, that is supposed to look like a padded cell in a looney bin, but I swear to god it looks like they made it with cardboard paper; completely unconvincing. You can have Klaus Kinski giving it his all as a silent version of Reinfeld, but the fake padded cell takes you out of the movie! Sorry!

On the dvd features Jesus Franco says he doesn’t like the Hammer Draculas because “they didn’t take the subject matter seriously” but how can he say that when his film is filled with paper cut outs of bats hanging from strings to give us the “illusion” of flying vampire bats? I truly hate this about old vampire films, when they use the fake bat hanging from the strings trick, it just looks too freaking  fake! Even for a low budget movie, this is inexcusable for me! Arrrgh! And Franco uses that cheap trick so much on this film. It’s so lazy, so unconvincing, this was yet another element that completely took me out of the movie. Sure Christopher Lee can deliver a good performance as Count Dracula, he plays it really serious for the most part, but then that seriousness fades away when he transforms into a fake bat hanging from strings. It’s kind of insulting to have these actors delivering their lines with such candor, and then having cheap sets or cheap props. Here’s another example: there’s this scene where the good guys throw this giant bolder at Dracula’s coffin, when it hits the ground you can just tell the rock is made of paper mache or something! It’s actually kind of hilarious, unfortunately, it breaks the illusion.

On to the cast which is good. Too bad they couldn’t be in a better production! Christopher Lee has got his Dracula performance down flat, by the time he did this one; he’d already played Dracula around three times for Hammer! The one thing that is different about this Dracula is that he speaks a whole lot more than on any Hammer film. I’m guessing he agreed to say the lines because they are taken mostly directly from the book, a luxury he never had with the Hammer films. Klaus Kinski plays Reinfeld, which is kind of appropriate considering Kinski was apparently, according to Franco and also according to German director Werner Herzog, truly insane. So it was fitting he played the bloodthirsty, and demented Reinfeld. The strange thing about this version of Reinfeld is that he played it completely silent! So on this film we get a talkative Christopher Lee but a silent Reinfeld! How ‘bout that! Finally, the other stand out performance was Herbert Lom as Professor Van Helsing, he delivers, what is in my opinion the most solid performance in the whole movie. Too bad they are all in such a dull movie, there’s no tension on this thing! And save for a few minutes in the opening where Dracula picks up Jonathan Harker at Burgo Pass, there’s not much atmosphere on this one! It’s a Dracula movie sans atmosphere! Sans horror! Sans all the things that matter in a Dracula movie; so I guess now I know why this film is not as popular as all the other Dracula adaptations. It’s just not very engaging. It hits all the important beats required of a Dracula adaptation, only in a really dull manner, so if you want to venture into this particular version of Dracula, just be ready for a slow paced film.

Rating: 3 out of 5