L.A. Connection wrote:
I understand that there may be some who didn't care for VAMPYRES, but did it really go over as badly as IamJacks seems to indicate? It has a decent rating on imdB, pretty good history in the genre books on Vampires in the movies, was well-received when it came out on DVD etc. I got a chance to see it on the big screen at the American Cinematheque a few years back, and it played well. Heck, I think it's one of the most underrated of all Vampire films - not necessarily a "great film", but an overlooked one.
IamJacksUserID wrote:
Well, every marathon has it's good points, but the marathon I was most miserable during was the final Night of the Living Drexel in 1994. I give you exhibit A:
THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES
THE TINGLER
A CHINESE GHOST STORY 2
PUMPINHEAD 2
DAWN OF THE DEAD
MOSQUITO
HAUNTED SYMPHONY
VAMPYRES: DAUGHTERS OF DRACULA
SCARS OF DRACULA
SPIDER BABY
IT'S ALIVE
THE FOG
You're saying "Are you crazy? What about Dawn of the Dead?" Yeah, what about it? To keep the analogy going, it was like a good slice of tomato on an otherwise crappy burger. I was so angry with the so-called "premeires" that I still to this day consider Vampyres: Daughters of Dracula my least favorite film of all time. At least I was awake enough to appreciate the other good slice of tomato in the lineup of Spider Baby. If you haven't seen that one, check it out. it's available on DVD.
Whooooa Nellie! A
massive time-delayed bump on this thread! Yep, after many years of harboring only half-formed, sleep-deprived memories of the mammaries, tonight I finally revisited the much mooted (at least in the ongoing L.A. Connection/JacksUserID love-hate relationship)
Vampyres for the first time since that wee hours screening at the final Night of the Living Drexel.
My verdict? Uhhh....it's not as bad as I remembered. But it's also still not very good. In the grand scheme of lesbian/erotic vampire flicks, it certainly delivers more of the nudity and explicit boffing than something like
The Vampire Lovers (which promised much for its R-rating, but is pretty tame by today's standards.) But those bits of erotica feel like padding for a film that seems to be trying for creepy and deliberate, but which only achieves plodding and meandering. In contrast, a contemporaneous film like
Daughters of Darkness treads similar territory, but enhances its eroticism with a cool, elegant sense of stylized decadence, its dreamlike atmosphere aided by some excellent cinematography (while
Vampyres plays as people walking around, waiting for another sex scene to happen.) Or take
The Hunger, a personal favorite. Its emphasis on the tragic undertones of the vampiric existence lend the proceedings a melancholy, elegaic tone, so that when the famous Sarandon/Deneuve seduction occurs, it plays as both payoff and pleasant tonal shift.
So yeah, if you have 88 minutes to kill, check out
Vampyres, which is featured on an excellent, feature-stacked DVD from Blue Underground. But don't expect miracles.