VAMPYROS LESBOS (1970) Oh no...it's Franco again! With a title like Vampyros Lesbos, a movie's sure setting itself up for some audience expectations, even mine. Yes, I hate the whole sexy-vampire thing, I hate it like I hate the psychic link, like I hate the prophesied chosen one who will save us all - but if they're sexy lesbian vampires, well, maybe I'm interested after all. It was only after it was over that I did a little looking around and noted that the director was none other than Jess Franco, who is said to be the most prolifically incompetent director of all time. I've only seen one other movie of his, and came away with the impression that my life would not be any less rich if I never saw a second. Vampyros Lesbos was that second - and I'm even more confident now that I won't be missing out if I never see a third. I'm sure this movie is seen by some as a parable of a woman's realization that she is a lesbian - there's the initial resistance to the urges, the awful men around her who think she needs treatment and say "We'd better give her an injection", the other awful man who warns that the path she treads leads to madness and death (the same guy who later on blames all of his problems on his wife), the lesbian vampire hates and is disgusted by men, and I guess her hypno-power is kinda like the call of one's true sexuality, or something. So this lesbian vampire chick - who is never much demonstrated to be a vampire, other than occasionally biting a neck and mentioning some relative she calls "Count Dracula" - works as a performance artist in some club in Istanbul, where she does some sort of mime performance with some other half-naked woman who's supposed to be a mannequin, or something. The viewer must endure this tedious display (which goes on for some time) not once but twice, 'cuz I guess we just can't get enough of it. The score, which alternates between a sitar, some backmasked spoken-word stuff, and what I can only think of as Austin Powers-type shit, fades haphazardly in and out of the mix throughout the film. Maybe that's part of the "dreamlike atmosphere" which people keep saying is what all that really awful filmmaking really is. Lots of "is it real or is it a hallucination" stuff, which I hate in just about any movie. Strange how the magic words which work on a "vampire" have no power coming from the unbeliever...but if that same unbeliever then uses Latin-sounding presumably Judeo-Christian utterances, somehow, the faith of a guy who just tried to join the vampire club but got turned down is enough. But why am I harping on the plot? You don't see a movie called Vampyros Lesbos for plot, do ya? Let me burst your balloon in regards to all that lesbian lust - you won't see anything here that hasn't been tried at least once by your average fifteen-year-old girl at a slumber party. Well, minus the bloodsucking. This one is hailed as something of a classic in some quarters, but then, isn't everything? Goes under at least ten other titles, a Franco trademark I guess. That's ten times as many movies (and there's like 160 of them) for me to avoid in the future. I guess there's an upside to having a hard time finding relatively obscure horror movies after all. BACK TO THE V's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE