Vampyros Lesbos

Las vampiras

A Telecine (Berlin) - Fenix Film (Madrid) Co-Production

Producer Artur Brauner (Telecine/Berlin) & Arturo Marcos (Fenix Films/Madrid)
Screenplay Jess Franco and Jaime Chavarri
Photography Manuel Merino
Music Manfred Hübler & Siegfried Schwab

Cast (German version credits)
Susann Korda [Soledad Miranda], Dennis Price, Paul Müller, Ewa Stroemberg, Heidrun Kussin, Michael Berling, Viktor Feldmann.

Cast (Spanish version credits)
Soledad Miranda, Ewa Stromberg [Ewa Stroemberg], Denis Price [Dennis Price], Heidrun Kussin, J. Martinez Blanco [José Martinez Blanco], Viktor Feliman [Viktor Feldmann], Paul Müller, Michael Berlin [Michael Berling], Jesús Franco.

Popular as much for it's psychedelic pseudo-jazz and funk score (released on CD and featuring briefly in Tarantino's Jackie Brown!) as for the feature itself, Vampyros Lesbos is a surreal tour de force and undoubtedly one of Franco's best. Featuring some brilliantly conceived (although not exactly subtle) editing techniques and eerie symbolism, it also showcases another erotically charged performance from the stunning Soledad Miranda as the titular, sapphic entity.

Set in Istanbul, Ewa Stromberg plays Linda Westinghouse, an estate agent sent on an assignment to a nearby island to visit the Countess Nadine Carody (Miranda). Unaware that Carody is a direct descendant of the family Dracula (she inherited her stunning island villa from the Count himself!) Linda is soon under her spell, becoming a slave when the Countess sinks her fangs in.

Back on the mainland Linda and another mysterious woman, Agra (Kussin) are under the care of Dr Seward (Price), who attempts to discover what is behind the women's confused mental states, slowly revealing though, that he has a more sinister agenda involving the Countess herself.

Franco takes the timeless tale of Dracula (including the character of Dr Seward, plucked from Stoker's original novel) and adds his own unique erotic spin and some surreally shot and very erotic floor show sequences in a night club (better even than similar efforts in Succubus a year earlier) to compose an eerie, abstract and sombre effort that feels like a mixture between David Lynch and Nicolas Roeg. The prosaic and abstract editing that runs throughout constructs some wonderful moments of foreshadowing (and immediately bring to mind similar moments in Roeg's Don't Look Now five years down the line). Reccurring shots of a scorpion, a kite and a trickle of blood on a window combine in ghostly fashion to imaginatively propel elements of the story and characters. This is first rate filmmaking from the man who would somehow slide to the other end of the scale and later make atrocities like Oasis of the Zombies (1981). Unfathomable!

Virtually all elements of Vampyros Lesbos work in perfect harmony. Hübler and Schwab's score is far more mellow than that of She Killed in Ecstasy (1970), enveloping the soundtrack with a more ethnic feel, full of organ and sitar strains; its almost laid back feel is in perfect keeping with the pace of the film itself which can be seen as mirroring the longitude and ennui of the Countess' eternal vampiric life force. What is slightly disappointing is Miranda's performance which doesn't really require much of her. Presence she certainly has, and the night club acts she performs with the help of a live female mannequin are beautiful as well as being erotically charged. Otherwise though, she is not required to be much more than an ethereal beauty, whose mystique comes merely from her mystery.

A resounding success, that expertly showcases the arthouse aesthetic present in the better of Franco's work, as well as proving him to be a definite talent and not merely a hack as many have accused him of over the years. Admittedly, some segments of his output have warranted such a criticism, but Vampyros Lesbos is the kind of film he should be remembered by.

Review by Dave Wood