Dr Lenera
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Joined: 19/10/2005
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1794, Austria. Following the death of his sister, Baron Joaqcum von Hartog vows to destroy the vampiric Karnstein family, and stakes them all except for Mircalla. Several years later, General Speilsdorf is holding a birthday party and one of the guests is a Countess who has moved into a castle nearby. She is called away to attend to a sick friend, so her supposed daughter Marcilla replaces her and stays on in the house as a guest. Marcilla and Speilsdorf's niece Laura become the best of friends, but Laura has nightmares of a cat strangling her, keeps growing paler and weaker, and is eventually found dead with two puncture marks in her neck. Marcilla disappears. Nearby, Emma and her father encounter the Countess and Marcilla, though she now calls herself Carmilla, whilst out riding, and, because the Countess has to attend a sick friend, invites Carmilla to stay………
The Vampire Lovers is probably Hammer's most enduring movie of the 70s and was such a hit that it must have seemed for a while that the company, who were struggling to keep up with the way the horror genre was going, was having a major revival. Alas, it was not to be, though they put up a good fight with some sometimes interesting productions like Vampire Circus and Dr Jekyll And Sister Hyde. The trouble was that they usually flopped. The Vampire Lovers, the first film Hammer made in 1970, doesn't quite, to me, rank up there with some of their true classics and there are three or four of their films from that decade I prefer. Still, it remains an enjoyable and quite intriguing effort, a very traditional Gothic tale spiced up with a little 'modern' permissiveness. It was based on the1871 novella Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, which had already been filmed in 1963 as Blood and Roses, and was a co-production with American International Pictures and Fantale Films, a partnership between producers Harry Fine and Micheal Styles and writer Tudor Gates. They were sure they could get away with a vampire story with lesbianism because the 'X' certificate's minimum age restriction was about to be raised from sixteen to eighteen. Gates' script actually stuck quite close to the novella, in which lesbianism was certainly hinted at. As usual with Hammer, they sent the script to the censors before any filming to avoid wasted footage, and amazingly it was passed, with only a dream orgasm ending in a scream removed, though upon release the BBFC removed an opening decapitation and Mircalla kissing Emma's breasts. The US censors the MPAA cut far more for an 'R' rating, though that didn't stop it from being a major success.
The film opens in great fashion, despite having a shot of a matted castle which this time I recognised from Scars Of Dracula! As Douglas Wilmer's Baron von Hartog's doom-laden voice narrates what are flash-back events, we have a tremendously eerie and atmospheric shot of a shrouded, hooded figure rising out of the fog, though I think this would have been even more eerie and atmospheric without the narration. Anyway, after another great shot of the figure moving down the busy village street and the discovery of a bitten corpse, the Baron decapitates the creature, who is revealed to be a beautiful woman who almost has the Baron under her power and nearly bites him. Wonderful stuff, but now we move forward a decade or two [it's not specified, but when von Hartog returns near the end he's considerably older] and the film becomes quite a slowly paced Gothic tale, more a dark romance than anything else. There's little blood or even horror except for the dreams that Laura and Emma have, effectively represented by quick black and white shots of a cat and Carmilla's teeth. The film almost repeats itself as Carmilla does the same things in the second house she gets into as in the first, and it's fair to say that excitement is considerably lacking. Still, the film does just about remain engrossing, especially when Carmilla actually appears to fall in love with Emma. After about an hour, Von Hartog returns, and the pace picks up as three guys are hunting down Carmilla. I'm sure Bram Stoker was heavily influenced by Carmilla when he wrote Dracula and nowhere is it more obvious in the final segments. Even if you haven't seen this movie, I doubt it's much of a spoiler to tell you that Carmilla is dispatched, and this vampire isn't just staked but has her head cut off too [very unconvincingly - why did every single decapitation in Hammer films always look crap]! I think that, as they had done with Dracula, they could have made the climax more exciting – killing off the main villain while she is asleep hardly cuts it!
The lesbianism is actually very tame by today's standards, mostly consisting of Carmilla undressing in front of various women, some kissing and cuddling, and Carmilla 'going down' on Emma off screen, but Sapphic sexuality was still a fairly new thing in commercial cinema, with The Killing Of Sister George the year before the film that maybe opened things up. Before that lesbianism was mostly either treated as a joke or just hinted at, and even The Vampire Lovers was unable to show Carmilla biting people on the breast, as she sometimes does. What's interesting about Carmilla is that not only does she also use men when she needs to, she genuinely seems to fall for Emma, and has to take out her vampiric desires on other poor, unrelated victims to keep her going. She's a really great character, is Carmilla, sometimes scary, presenting a gloriously inhibited sexuality [her clothes just won't stay on], but at times somewhat sad. There's one touching bit where she sees a funeral carriage pass by, shudders and says forlornly to Emma, "you must die, everybody must die”. On a lighter note, there's also a wonderful pub scene, of the kind you've seen in a hundred similar films, where a man mentions the word "vampire” in saying the vampire is a myth. Suddenly the music, laughter and chatter stops and the land lord says in his best doom laden manner, "not round here it isn't, Mr Renton”. The scene loses a point for the landlord not being Michael Ripper though. The Vampire Lovers generally looks good, with the usual fine eye for period detail on a small budget, though you can see tennis courts in the background of one scene, and the actual script suffers from having a few too many characters, in particular a pointless, Dracula-like 'Man In Black' [played by John Forbes-Robertson, who would later play Dracula in The Legend Of The 7 Golden Vampires] , who just seems to follow Carmilla around on a horse and sometimes look menacing. This character was originally supposed to disintegrate but AIP wanted him to survive to pave the way for a possible sequel.
Despite pacing problems which are more as a result of the overstuffed, talky script, director Roy Ward Baker proves himself totally at home with Gothic horror. His horror films of the 70s tend to be neglected in favour of his earlier films like A Night To Remember but they have a vibrancy and use of colour that at times almost approximates the great Terence Fisher. Ingrid Pitt is fantastic as Carmilla, in a role that Shirley Eaton was considered for. She's not much of an actress but has a hypnotic presence and striking carnality in every scene, even when she's not doing anything. Hammer surrounded her and the other nubile young women [who include Kate O'Mara, Pippa Steel and Madeline Smith], with a strong array of older actors such as Peter Cushing [in what is almost a cameo], Douglas Wilmer and George Cole, and Jon Finch is a stronger young male lead than normal, though his character doesn't really need to be in the film. Harry Robinson provides a lush, rich score, emphasising dark beauty over intense horror, though this critic's ears this time noted a few bars from the score to Taste The Blood Of Dracula shoehorned in during one scene and a waltz that had previously been used in The Curse Of Frankenstein. I don't think that The Vampire Lovers is quite as good a film as its' fame and reputation; I remember the first time I saw it I found it a little dull and said to myself "is that it?” afterwards. It does grow on you though, has plenty of interesting things in it, and stands as a fascinating footnote in the history of horror cinema, where, as it was dying a slow and painful death, the old fashioned, Gothic horror film tried to fight back against the more relevant, modern and frightening new wave of scary movies that was replacing it in cinemas during the 70s.
6.5/10
< Message edited by Dr Lenera -- 30/6/2011 12:09:31 PM >
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check out more of my reviews on http://horrorcultfilms.co.uk/
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RE: Hammer Horror - 
! I was so engrossed, lots of gore, and Christopher Lee was just awesome. It's the most violent of the series, but the best sequel is definitely Taste the Blood of Dracula. That film is truly dark.
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