Vampyros Lesbos, 1971.
Directed by Jesús Franco.
Starring Soledad Miranda, Dennis Price, Paul Muller, Ewa Strömberg, Jesús Franco, Heidrun Kussin, Andrea Montchal.
SYNOPSIS:
A female vampire lures a lawyer to her private island by way of an erotic nightclub performance.
Jesús ‘Jess’ Franco was one of the most prolific filmmakers of the latter half of the 20th century, with over 200 official directing credits (and likely several unofficial ones) to his name. But with such a body of work you can guarantee that quality was stretched quite thin at times (White Cannibal Queen anybody?), although there were several gems in amongst the trash that are worth celebrating, and Vampyros Lesbos certainly ranks as one of the more notable.
With a title like that you should know what to expect, but in reality Vampyros Lesbos is a retelling of Bram Stoker’s Dracula with Franco and his co-writers inverting certain details to bring the story up to date. The movie begins with an erotic dance sequence in a dark nightclub, where Linda Westinghouse (Ewa Strömberg) is with her boyfriend Omar (Andrea Montchal) watching Countess Nadine Corody (Soledad Miranda) entwine herself with another female. Afterwards, Linda cannot get the image of the Countess out of her head and hears her psychically calling her name, a foretelling that comes to fruition when the law firm that Linda works for sends her to an island off the coast of Turkey to oversee the transition of Count Dracula’s estate to Countess Corody.
Once on the island Linda falls under Corody’s spell, becoming obsessed with the beautiful countess and falling victim to an attack, but when she wakes up in an asylum run by Dr. Seward (Dennis Price) and is suffering from amnesia, she undergoes treatment that makes her remember what happened and decides to return to the island. It turns out Linda isn’t the only patient in the asylum obsessed with the countess so Dr. Seward also decides to investigate, leading to a final confrontation on Corody’s island.
So, as you can tell, there is more than a whiff of Stoker’s original novel – even down to the inclusion of a character called Dr. Seward, although he is more like Van Helsing in this setting – with Linda replacing Jonathan Harker, Countess Corody in place of Dracula (although the Count himself is mentioned as a character in the film) and the warm and sunny Turkish islands in place of the misty mountains of Transylvania. With that in mind you could argue that Jess Franco was being progressive, swapping the male characters for females and giving them high powered jobs and elevated social positions, with the men in the movie shown up as being ineffective against the stronger women.
Or – as is more likely the case – Franco wanted as much naked female flesh onscreen as he could get away with, and getting his lead actresses to strip off and frolic in the sea within a minute of first meeting serves no other purpose than titillation. Nothing wrong with that, and Franco never wastes an opportunity to have his leads be in a partial state of undress at any given opportunity, but when put up against his other movies Vampyros Lesbos feels less sleazy, mainly thanks to the surreal and dreamlike way he presents the images, forgoing a straightforward narrative and letting the visuals tell the story.
Yes, the bones of the plot – or what there is of one – come from Dracula and once you see that you know who is going to face off with who in the final scenes and any sense of tension is gone, but Franco uses the motifs of a drowning scorpion and a trapped moth to represent his two lead characters in cutaway shots that let you know danger is imminent. Backing up the visuals, the filmmaker employs a thumping psychedelic funk rock jazz score that adds a vibrancy to the proceedings, letting the music carry the images so you aren’t just left with pretty pictures with nothing to move it along.
Soledad Miranda plays the sultry Countess Corody as if she were trying to seduce everybody watching the movie, her presence so magnetic she is felt in scenes she isn’t even in, and you can see why she was a favourite of Franco’s. Sadly, she died in a car accident in 1970 before this movie was released, but for a brief period of time the Spanish actress showed enormous promise as a genre star with genuine charisma.
Elsewhere, Ewa Strömberg gives a sympathetic performance as Linda, who is under Corody’s spell for most of the movie and spends it in bit of a daze, turning on the panic when she has to. Jess Franco himself pops up in a creepy cameo – as he was wont to do in his movies – and Dennis Price is a familiar face to anyone who watched any British horror movies from the 1970s, although the German dubbing does him no favours.
The 4K UHD upgrade looks fantastic, especially as red is a frequent colour used in many scenes, from the flowing scarves and sashes of the nightclub scenes to the drops of blood on glass that Franco frequently cuts to when indicating vampiric action is about to happen, as well as the obvious bloodletting when Countess Corody gets her way. For a cheap Jess Franco movie from the early ‘70s the overall transfer brings a vibrancy and warmth that makes it feel fresh, and Severin haven’t been shy with the extras either, offering up one of Jess Franco’s final interviews, a detailed analysis on the movie by Franco expert Stephen Thrower, two audio commentaries, a featurette about Jess Franco’s career by filmmaker Sean Baker, an interview with Soledad Miranda historian Amy Brown and trailers, all in all coming in at over five hours’ worth of contextual material.
There is a lot to be said about the career and output of Jess Franco, some of it great and some of it not so great, but Vampyros Lesbos remains one of his finest moments, from a technical and artistic point of view. It does feel like slow going at times, but if approached with the idea of letting the visuals and soundtrack wash over you like a post-Gothic shower and allowing your senses to retune to a 1970s inversion of Dracula, Vampyros Lesbos is as mesmerising as Harry Kümel’s Daughters of Darkness and sexier than Hammer’s Countess Dracula.
Flickering Myth Rating –Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Chris Ward
