Female Vampire The Bare Breasted Countess (1975) Review
Female Vampire The Bare Breasted Countess (1975) Review
There appears to be two distinct train of thoughts when it comes to the films of Jesús Franco, you either consider his movies to be trite or otherwise works of erotic art. I am in the latter, the opening shot of Female Vampire being Exhibit A in my case for proving his work is far from being art. Walking through fog-enshrouded woodland our 18-year-old lead Lina Romay, as Countess Irina the female vampire of the title, walks along at a slow pace. Initially the image of this very scantily-clad female, against a scenic backdrop pulls one in, however it all goes tits up when she walks towards Franco’s camera and bumps right into it. Seriously, she bumps her face on the camera and the error is not edited out, it’s left in for all to see. How can this be ‘art’? It’s indicative of the carefree and careless nature that Franco directed his soft-porn fodder.
The plot, such as it is, is scant. Lina Romay (Franco’s late wife) stars as Countess Irina Karlstein, a mute vampire, immune to daylight and prone to rolling around her bed naked. She has a manservant, also mute, who appears to have based his wardrobe choices on the once popular TV advertising icon The Man From Milk Tray. Irina is unhappy with her lot in life. She yearns for something more fulfilling than just sucking her victims to orgasm and subsequent death. Perhaps her salvation will cum, oops come, in the form of Baron Von Rathony (Jack Taylor) who wanders about aimlessly around the Portuguese island of Madeira that both he and Irina are currently residing on.
Franco originally made three different versions of the film – heavily cut, not so heavily cut, uncut – with different titles, scenes and credits. One version is hardcore porn (Les avaleuses AKA The Swallowers), another concentrates purely on the horror (La comtesse noire AKA The Black Countess) and the other has a smidgeon of sexy stuff spliced with a splash of horror (La Comtesse auz seis nus AKA The Bare Breasted Countess). The version being reviewed here is The Swallowers but released under the title as Female Vampire.
Female Vampire starts promisingly but soon becomes a tireless stream of dull sexual escapades that one imagines were intended to titillate but spectaularly fail to do so. Written and directed by Jesús Franco (as J.P. Johnson) the vampire here wanders around at all hours, unaffected by daylight and, in the film’s only interesting idea, uses oral sex rather than biting into a juicy neck to fulfil her needs. It doesn’t help that the folks indulging in naked fun aren’t exactly easy on the eye, that sounds awful and makes me sound like someone who goes only for the aesthetically pleasing, but that’s not so. To enjoy the sex, and it is plentiful, it would help if the bodies writhing around were more pleasing on the eye, I’ve seen amateur porn with better bodies and more oomph to it than this.
Franco was under the delusion that Female Victim was erotic as opposed to pornographic – I’d argue it’s too stale to be classified as either – and had the gall to compare the sexual content of this film to controversial Japanese film In the Realm of the Senses (1976). In director Nagisa Oshima’s once taboo flick the sex was more political, in Female Vampire the sex is just there for the sake of it. Franco’s camera never really seems to venture far from female genitalia and the staging of the ‘erotic’ scenes is unbearably flaccid. I imagine this might appeal to a schoolboy who hasn’t seen the female form naked before however nowadays such a youngster would find more explicit material available somewhere online and better made too.
