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VAMPYRES

A LOVE STORY BETWEEN VAMPIRES IS MIRED IN EXPLOITATION



★☆☆☆☆ (Kill It With Fire)

Director: José Ramón Larraz

1975



Vampyres is about two sexy vampire ladies teaming up to mate and feed, all while living as a couple in a remote English castle. This pitch sounds great, but unfortunately, there’s not much here to keep you interested outside the romantic bits.


The women have quite a system in order to get what they want. Fran (Marianne Morris) hitchhikes while Miriam (Anulka Dziubinska) watches from the woods, and the next morning, the drivers are found dead in their cars, victims of a horrible “auto accident.” When picking up a mark on the road, Fran doesn’t pussyfoot around. She immediately tells each driver to head to her castle for some adult entertainment, so there’s not much to figure out here except for why Miriam and Fran are even together. If the director had just laid off the exploitation angle, if he’d made the women’s relationship loving, we would feel something for them. The vampires walk without talking, canoodle without talking… Imagine an Interview with the Vampire where Louis and Lestat just spend their centuries in a room together, reading. The bi-sexual couple in Vampyres need heavier scenes where they discuss their past or express their love in order for us to see this as more than a glossy boner film—but that’s all this is.


Meanwhile, a vacationing young couple has set up their trailer next door, and for unknown reasons, these snacks are ignored by their strange neighbors. The girl in the couple seems to only exist to point out to the audience and her boyfriend how odd it is she keeps seeing the women with different men. The plot thickens when Fran brings home a victim (Ted, played by Murray Brown) she just can’t bring herself to kill. Ted is a humorless, average-looking man with as much charisma as your elementary school principal. Why on earth Fran finds him to be The One after all these years is a mystery to me. Ted is just a Mary Sue, a stand-in for the men sitting in the five-dollar theater, putting themselves in his shoes.


Complications arise when doe-eyed, practically mute Miriam takes issue with Fran’s attachment to this male mortal, but that doesn’t stop the women from engaging in softcore activities in a bathtub. There’s a slightly interesting twist at the end which explains some of the plot holes and why the ladies can’t quit one another, but it’s wasted here, which is a shame. José Ramón Larraz wanted Vampyres to simply be schlock relegated to seedy theaters—and he succeeded in his purpose—but the movie had all the ingredients to be so much more.





GENRES: LGBTQ+, Monster/Creature


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