Vampyres (1974)

a.k.a. Daughters of Dracula / Vampyres: Daughters of Darkness / Satan's Daughters / Blood Hunger
Directed by: José Larraz

I'm a pretty simple person, when there's some blood and gore mixed with nudity I'm gonna watch it. When those ingredients are present in a british flick from the 70's I'm really gonna watch it! Sex and horror go well together and seldom have the two of them mixed so well as in this movie... It's strange as I wouldn't really say there's a huge ass plot that moves the story forward all of the time, it's rather that we get to spend a couple of days with the main characters and that's it, but I fucking love this movie. And it's not only because of the plentiful amounts of nudity we get here, the whole movie has such a great gothic atmosphere and, at times, quite shocking violence. But, I'm not gonna say that all of those nude lesbian scenes with Marianne Morris and Anulka made when wanna turn the movie off either...

This is also an utterly beautiful looking movie that really takes advantage of the british autumn as the falling leaves is a nice metaphor for death, and there is a lot of death in this movie. I'm not sure if it's because of the spanish director, but it doesn't feel like other british horror flicks at the time - it has a more south european feeling and it's easy to compare this flick to the vampire films of Jean Rollin as Vampyres is in the same vein as those (being surreal and dream like), but this one is so much better (and I do really like the Rollin vampire movies).


We start the film with two very beautiful and very nude women tumbling around in a bed, enjoying some sapphic love together when someone with a gun enters their bedroom and shoots them. We then flash forward and find the couple John and Harriet (Brian Deacon & Sally Faulkner) out on a camping trip with their trailer arriving on the grounds of a big mansion in the english countryside. While driving to their destination, Harriet noticed these two women standing by the side of the road trying to hitchhike... and for some reason she can't get that image out of her mind.

The two women were the two from the beginning of the movie, so already here we know that there's something fishy going on. The two women are Fran (Marianne Morris) and Miriam (Anulka) and they have this little thing going on where Fran is picked up by a car and get the driver to bring her back to her home (the big mansion). The driver is invited into the house and end up in bed with the beautiful Fran... and before you say "now, that's one lucky dude!", I have to tell you that the driver ends up dead the very next morning in what looks like a accident with his car.


One day Fran gets picked up by a man named Ted (Murray Brown), who of course won't say no to some rolling around in the hay with her. The next day he finds the bed empty and he's feeling a bit drained... sure, from all the sucking the night before he should feel drained, but not like that... He also has this big scar on his arm that appears he got from a broken glass. Or did he? Um, no he didn't... but more about that later. As he can't find Fran he decides to leave, but not feeling too good he ends up at the trailer with John and Harriet, where he's bandaged up and after having had some coffee he's right as rain again.

Instead of just leaving, Ted lets his little head do the thinking and he returns to the mansion, waiting in his car for Fran to return. She does, this time together with Miriam and another dude that picked them up in his car... yeah, why stop a winning concept? Later that night Miriam attacks the guy who drove them home and bites him to lick his blood (sounds sexy, but this is pretty ferocious), Fran joins in and soon the poor dude has his main vein drained, and not in the way he was hoping.


The next morning Ted wakes up again, and again feeling weak and unusally drained. He again looks for Fran, but as she's not around he gets into his car and drives off... on the road he passes by a car crash scene and when he stops he recognize the dead driver as the guy from the night before. Instead of letting the cops know this he instead returns to the house, where he manages to get locked inside the wine cellar looking for Fran. She returns to the house that same evening and again they have this new guy with them, and again it's party time! This time without Ted as he's too weak to party (I don't care how weak you are, you don't say no to partying with those two gorgeous women!).

The party ends just like all of the other parties these two women have, the guy gets killed and they drink his blood. But, throughout the movie, Harriet (the woman camping near the house) has been doing her Ms. Marple thing and been nosying around the house where she even entered the wine cellar to find Fran and Miriam sleeping a very strange looking sleep (well, Miriam awoke and hid from Harriet). So, things really needs to be taken care of there...


As I said earlier, I really love this movie and one of the things that I really love is how the movie ends... it's not a happy ending and it's not really an end to what is going on in the movie either, if that makes sense. We get to spend some time with these people and then we move on, while they keep doing before we first entered their world. I also like the way these two vampires are being portrayed as there is none of the regular vampire myths present. There are no fangs, the girls have to cut open wounds to drink the blood from people, they can move around in sunlight, they don't transform into any bats or anything and somehow I don't think crosses would make them go away either.

Even though Hammer (yeah, I know... apparently I can't talk about a british horror film from the 70's without bringing up Hammer, but it's valid here) are known for their lesbian vampire movies in the Karnstein series (The Vampire Lovers, Lust for a Vampire & Twins of Evil) this is the definite lesbian vampire movie to me (well, I'm ashamed to confess that I haven't watched Daughters of Darkness or The Blood Spattered Bride yet, but I will!). Sexy nude lesbian vampires... need I say more? Watch it!!!!