Female Vampire
(aka The Bare-Breasted Countess, aka Les Avaleuses,
 aka Erotikill aka The Loves of Irina)
Region 2 Arrow DVD
(1973)
review by Suspiriorium

Countess Iriana of Karlstein (Lina Romay) returns to the island of Madeira, where it is alleged many years earlier her forebears committed many acts of Vampirism. At the same time, a poet who has been having strange dreams of love & destiny is staying in the same hotel, & a number of horrific Vampiristic crimes have started occurring in the area.

There are two key influences on the genesis of Jess Franco’s classic existential sexploitation horror classic. One is the then-new legalisation of pornography in France, & Franco was keen to push the boat out & show people things that they had previously not been allowed to see. The other is the recent death of his leading lady of choice, Soledad Miranda (Vampyros Lesbos, She Killed in Ecstasy, amongst others), for there is an almost overwhelming sense of isolation & grief running throughout Female Vampire that is not often acknowledged. I can think of few other films that contain such a longing for death.

Gone is the funkadelic groove-some music of Vampyros Lesbos & She Killed in Ecstasy. Instead Daniel White, a regular Franco collaborator, contributes a beautiful, melodic score. There is only one theme, but it gets some great variations from the heartbreaking sweeping orchestral version heard in the opening titles, to some great Morricone-style cues with solo female voice. There are also some purely 70’s beat/easy cues, which do date the film quite a bit (particularly during the sex scenes), but I really enjoyed these pieces too.

Iriana longs for nothing more than love & peace, but she is incapable of loving man or woman without killing them. Indeed, in some of the films most startling & affecting moments, Iriana continues sex after killing her partner, slowly rubbing her body against the corpse in futile & lonely desperation. This raises some familiar topics & ideas – how can we love, when anyone we get close to is going to die? Is it better to sacrifice your life for love, or to stay alive alone? Is a life alone a life at all? In this film, death is not something to be feared, for it is a release, a vision of ecstasy that we are unwilling to embrace because our prejudices have closed our eyes to its possibilities. Ultimately, death becomes the greatest expression of love.

Other than this obsession with & longing for death, there is of course the sex, which is much more plentiful & explicit than in Franco’s earlier more famous Vampyros Lesbos. Make no mistake about this factor – Female Vampire is a film that would be just as at home playing at a blue movie festival as it would at a horror fest – indeed there’s barely a drop of blood in the film. But whilst the nudity is prolific & explicit, the sex itself gets no further than nipple kissing, with Romay’s long black hair covering what she is (or more likely isn’t) doing in the nether regions of her co-stars. The sex does take up the majority of the running time, though.

Franco prepared a number of different cuts of this film, with one exaggerating the horror (with traditional neck-biting & blood), & one version apparently even including hardcore footage. The version released here seems to be Franco’s preferred version which is somewhere in between. What’s notable about this version is the manner in which Iriana drains the blood from her prey. Here she takes the life-force from her victims at the moment of orgasm whilst performing oral sex. Getting sucked to death, if you will.

Lina Romay made her starring debut in this film, & comes on like the offspring of Barbara Steele & Sylvia Kristel (is such a thing were possible), giving a remarkably unrestrained, uninhibited & naturalistic performance. She has a great body & is entirely unafraid to show off every inch of it to the harsh gaze of the camera. She became a regular in Franco’s subsequent films (indeed his wife), & it’s not too hard to see what Franco saw in her. Franco himself also puts in an appearance, as the rather sleazy vampire hunter Dr Robert, who does everything he can to help anyone in need, & has some amusing little scenes with a comedy policeman.

Franco’s films are all something of an acquired taste, & Female Vampire is no exception. Mainstream audiences will doubtless find this unusual, haunting, dreamy film a leaden-paced & frequently laughable bore. In fact, I have to admit I have not yet managed to make it all the way through the film with a straight face (my favourite is Iriana’s mute assistant played by Luis Barboo). Of course, this is also very much a product of its time, so much fun can be had enjoying the dodgy fashions, & astonishing porn-star moustaches on display. But the deliberateness of the pace means that, like so many Eurohorrors, this film slowly creeps under your skin & becomes weirdly hypnotic. I have to say that the film never bored me.

There are other weaknesses too – notably in Iriana’s meeting with a lesbian bondage couple, which seems weirdly out of place & interrupts the main flow once Iriana has met the poet. This is also the only sequence in this version to contain any blood, as the pair tie Iriana up & whip her. And of course a lot of people will be really put off by the sex & nudity levels (& their sometimes quite sleazily graphic nature) – but that’s their loss as Franco has managed to sneak a lot of interesting stuff around the edges of this film.

Many will also be put off by Franco’s trademark stylisations – virtually every shot here seems to involve a zoom in or out (or both). Again, I have no problems with this & find it all adds to the unique atmosphere & feel of Franco’s films. I really love the way he shoots some of the scenes here – for example the poolside meeting between Iriana & a female journalist, which is audaciously staged in a single long shot from the top of the hotel. And there are plenty of other great images – including the misty wood which Iriana leads her victims through in symbolic dreams representing the transition from life to death, the climactic (literal) bloodbath, & the almost Herzog-like sequence on the wooded hilltop. Much of the film is silent, with just the visuals & score telling the story. Like Godard for example, Franco gives the narrative only cursory treatment, & expands small moments to breaking point, giving the smallest things the biggest significance. This is a purely cinematic film, & for all its low budget, commercial obligations & technical limitations, Franco’s vision (he wrote, directed, photographed, produced & edited) shines through.

Female Vampire is most definitely not a film for everyone, but for Franco fans & anyone with a taste for Eurohorror who can get past the nudity quota, it should be considered essential viewing. Those merely curious about Franco’s films may however be best advised to try out The Awful Dr Orloff, Virgin Among The Living Dead, or Vampyros Lesbos first.

I’ve been watching the recent UK PAL release from Arrow films, which boasts a great picture quality. There is inevitably a bit of print damage here & there (notably a few vertical lines during the opening titles), & it’s occasionally a touch soft, but this really suits the film well & it’s a lot better than I’d dared hope. The audio is pretty good too. It’s only an English 2.0 mono track but it sounds very clear. Again it’s not up to the standards of the very best of today’s new releases, but for a film of this age & relative obscurity it’s really good. It’s a shame it’s dubbed only (since the dubbing isn’t too great, & there are moments when the actors are speaking but the English dub has run out of dialogue – a really weird effect), but since much of the film is without dialogue it’s not much of a problem.

Arrow have given us a good batch of extras here too, with an alternative opening sequence in French, which titles the film as “The Bare-Breasted Countess”, the original trailer, & a selection of four deleted scenes. These aren’t actually deleted scenes so much as alternate versions of scenes in the film, taken from the more “horror”-themed version with Iriana biting on the neck & showing blood. In addition there’s a big Franco filmo, plus the Arrow catalogue. OK, so it’s not quite up to Lord of the Rings standards, but extras for films like this aren’t easy to come by, so it’s excellent to see these here. Great stuff.

Note: Unfortunately, that thorn in the side of UK distributors, the BBFC, has struck again with this title. This version is longer than any yet released in the UK, but it still has an 18 certificate:

“To obtain this category cuts of 1m 51s were required. The cuts were Compulsory.

Cut required to remove sight of non-consenting woman being stripped and forced to engage in sex with two other women, cut made in accordance with BBFC policy, BBFC guidelines and the Video Recordings Act 1984.” (BBFC website)

I haven’t seen the cut footage, but this scene it was cut from feels out of keeping with the rest of the film anyway, so I can live with having it shorter. Maybe if this footage were reinstated I might like the scene more, but this version of the film is good enough for me.