Vampyres (aka Blood Hunger/Daughters Of Dracula/Satan’s Daughters/Vampyres: Daughters of Darkness)

(1974, UK, 87m)
d José Ramón Larraz p Brian Smedley-Aston sc D. Daubeney, José Ramón Larraz ph Harry Waxman ed Geoff R. Brown pd Ken Bridgeman m James Kenelm Clark cast Marianne Morris, Anulka (Dziubinska), Murray Brown, Brian Deacon, Sally Faulkner, Michael Byrne, Karl Lanchbury

Deep in Rollin/Franco territory, two nubile young women live in a decaying country pile, luring male motorists from the main road, killing them, and then showering the gore off each other in soft-core ecstasy. The prologue sets the tone: lesbianism, blood, and no explanation of what is going on (until the perfunctory epilogue). Superior within the context of the seventies erotic euro-horror cycle, its appeal lies largely in the autumnal atmosphere and the charms of the attractively strange leads, but predictably scant attention is paid to anything other than the sex and violence, and the numerous deficiencies of internal logic and almost wholesale jettisoning of traditional vampire mythology become tiresome. Mildly suspenseful, slightly titillating and bloody enough to incur the 1974 censor’s scissors, but the crumbling Hartfield Lodge location is the real star.

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