SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

NekoHomey Purely Joyful Movie!

Myron Clemons A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Keeley Coleman The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

gavin6942 A lesbian vampire couple waylay and abduct various passer-byes, both male and female, to hold them captive at their rural manor in the English countryside in order to kill and feed on them to satisfy their insatiable thirst for blood.If you think about lesbian vampires, you might think Hammer. Or maybe you tend to think more in the direction of Eurotrash, like Jess Franco or Jean Renoir. But you probably don't think of "Vampyres".I certainly was not familiar with this film, best thanks to the fine folks at Blue Underground, it is taken out of obscurity and presented to a new generation. Well, as much as anyone follows Blue, that is. Which you should be, because even though they're not as prolific as Scream! Factory, they pick out some real winners.

trashgang I got a bit of a mixed feeling about this vampire flick. The vampires itself doesn't have fangs and the script itself is a bit weak surely concerning the plot. But still it is one that you must have seen.The two vampires are played by Marianne Morris (Fran) and Anulka Dziubinska (Miriam). The latter is the most famous one because she used to be a page 3 girl and appeared in playboy in 1972. Both have a lesbian relation and do go a lot in their nudies, Marianna goes more than Anulka did but it's also clearly to see that the director avoided to show pubic hair. On that part he succeeded mostly, here and there you can see a fraction of a second some pubic hair but he couldn't avoid it with the most famous name in this flick, Sally Faulkner (Harriet). She goes naked all the way and goes full frontal in one love scene towards the end of the flick. She's also the only actor here who really made it into the British scene and appeared in a lot of series. The other actors only acted for a few years around the seventies and early eighties. Karl Lanchbury (Rupert) maybe recognized by some due earlier attempts to be in horror flicks like Scream...And Die (1974) also from the same director.The director itself, José Ramon Larraz, does ring a bell with exploitation and drive-in geeks. But this is his most famous flick for the usual viewer but Los Ritos Sexuales Del Diablo (Black Candles) (1982) was also a hard to get flick, it is now available on region 1 DVD on a grindhouse compilation together with Evil Eye.Be sure to catch the full uncut version on Anchor Bay. There isn't that much of red stuff in it but the atmosphere and acting made this flick still worth watching. Not an usual way to tell a vampire story but it do offers something towards the scene. Gore 0/5 Nudity 2,5/5 Effects 0/5 Story 2/5 Comedy 0/5

Scott LeBrun This entry in the popular sub genre of erotic vampire movies is quite enjoyable, and on more than just a titillation level. Two gorgeous women, Fran (brunette Marianne Morris) and Miriam (blonde Anulka Dziubinska) are unconventional vampires (for one thing, being out in the daytime isn't terribly harmful to them) who live in a large, isolated country home and who prey on various unfortunate travellers. While a vacationing couple, John (Brian Deacon) and Harriet (Sally Faulkner) caravan in the area, one of Fran and Miriam's acquisitions, a man named Ted (Murray Brown) just can't get them out of his mind and keeps returning. The charms and physical assets of Morris and Dziubinska are utilized to the max; in fact, there's no fooling around here on the part of producer Brian Smedley-Aston and director Jose Ramon Larraz - the first dose of nudity & erotica is doled out no more than 17 seconds into the movie! The ladies are a pleasure to watch, with Morris particularly enticing. She and Dziubinska also have an incredible shower scene just past the half way point that will have viewers very happy. And this works quite well as a horror movie, too, with genuinely foreboding atmosphere and an accent on the elements. All interior scenes are equally heavy on ambiance. A prominent theme is that of obsession, whether it's the way that Ted keeps being drawn back to that house, the often agitated Harriet's morbid curiosity about Fran and Miriam, or the hunger of Fran and Miriam themselves for both sex and blood. Supporting performances are good, especially by Brown, and Michael Byrne has a nice bit late in the movie as the playboy / wine expert who's as intrigued by the ladies as so many characters prove to be; silent era star Bessie Love has a small, small role right at the end. The English countryside provides an excellent back drop to a movie with a great mood and feel. The violence is effectively harsh and nasty, but parcelled out carefully enough that it's never over done. Its pacing may be rather unhurried throughout, but "Vampyres" does emerge as an effectively provocative and visceral horror movie that's definitely worth a look. Seven out of 10.

Dries Vermeulen Cult reputations can be a bitch. There's just no way a modest boobs 'n' blood shocker from 1974 can survive seasoned gore hound scrutiny three and a half decades down the line, even with the heavily hyped reinstatement of a few minutes of footage deemed too extreme at the time. For those already bracing themselves for massive disappointment, a reality check may be in order. An attempt to outdo genre giant Hammer, commercially compelled to up the ante in terms of both carnage and carnality at the dawn of a new decade, VAMPYRES was made by people with a background in the British sex film industry, unlike its cross-oceanic counterpart hardly a fertile breeding ground for any artistry or ambition beyond the obvious.A comparative dark horse among the fornication filmmaking fraternity of the inhibited isles, primarily because of his Mediterranean lineage (then still synonymous with being carnally knowledgeable if not downright depraved in the minds of English-speaking "respectable" citizens on both sides of the Atlantic), José Ramon Larraz had already earned his stripes as a purveyor of psychologically wrought "erotica" rather than the snickering tits 'n' titters peekaboo farces far more prevalent in UK flea pits. WHIRLPOOL, DEVIATION and SCREAM...AND DIE! testified of a timidly developing auteur sensibility, something barely heard of in an industry interested solely in reaping maximum box office from minimal investment. It's tempting to speculate that the unending censorship problems that befell VAMPYRES, combined with the lukewarm critical reception afforded his crossover SYMPTOMS that same year, inspired the director's impromptu return to his fatherland for a career only intermittently highlighted by anything out of the ordinary such as EL MIRON (The Voyeur) or THE COMING OF SIN.A stalwart editor who had learned his trade on quintessential British cinema classics like Tony Richardson's TOM JONES and Nic Roeg and the late Donald Cammell's PERFORMANCE, Brian Smedley-Aston graduated from performing second unit chores on TV shows like Shirley MacLaine's ill-fated SHIRLEY'S WORLD to producing pseudo-porn (as close to the real deal as the BBFC would allow) with the Fiona Richmond triumvirate of EXPOSE, HARDCORE and LET'S GET LAID, very much in order of diminishing ambition. Apart from the country's then top sex symbol Ms. Richmond, and by extension her sugar daddy and fabled Revue Bar proprietor Paul Raymond, another constant on these progressively threadbare productions was his good friend James Kenelm Clarke, a classically trained composer employed on tons of '60s BBC shows. Pressed into duty as a makeshift movie maker, latter proved most adept at plying his erstwhile trade, contributing an effectively eerie score for his big screen calling card.Defiantly uneventful to the brink of art-house abstraction, VAMPYRES must make mighty strange viewing for contemporary audiences weaned on the Misty Mundae variety of bodacious bloodsuckers. It's hard to tell how much of this narrative minimalism's intentional or dictated by an allegedly active three week shooting schedule to accommodate its pittance of a budget. More low key than his outré compatriot Jess Franco, Larraz actually seems liberated rather than constrained by any potential limitations, mining the "breathing room" between set pieces for atmosphere both convincingly Gothic and genuinely erotic. Contributing extensively to the effect is the film's undoubtedly most respected artisan, veteran cinematographer Harry Waxman who shot the lofty likes of Ken Annakin's SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON and Roy Boulting's THE FAMILY WAY, equally at home wallowing in the mire of Tony Sloman's NOT TONIGHT, DARLING and Andrea Bianchi's WHAT THE PEEPER SAW.Questioning its catchpenny title, movie's vaguely Carpathian anti-heroines aren't even vampires in the traditional sense - inviting a double bill perhaps with Jean Rollin's subsequent and equally genre-bending FASCINATION, but I digress - but rather ghostly manifestations of a pair of naughty noblewomen cruelly punished for their "unnatural lust" in the cryptic pre-credits sequence. Haunting the grounds where they were slain, they appear at twilight, flagging down solitary motorists and taking them back to the mansion for some heavy petting and bloodletting, using daggers or shards of glass. One middle-aged Lothario named Ted (Murray Brown, Jonathan Harker to Jack Palance's Dracula in Dan Curtis's TV version) catches Fran's fancy who chooses to drain him more daintily than previous victims. Left to his own devices during daylight hours, Ted's perfectly capable of making his way back to civilized world so it's a clear sign of his amplifying addiction that he literally keeps coming back for more. His being recognized by local hotel's ancient retainer subtly suggests the possibility of the perpetrator's reincarnation.Film's weakest aspect is the inclusion of a couple camping nearby as observing outsiders and unnecessary audience identification figures, a thankless assignment for Brian Deacon (the catalyst caught between Oliver Reed and Glenda Jackson in Michael Apted's TRIPLE ECHO) and Sally Faulkner, so good in Norman J. Warren's PREY, the latter at least granted the benefit of a memorably gruesome death scene. Mouthing most of movie's clunky dialog, these two inevitably wind up more hindrance than help. Models with limited acting experience, both professionally post-dubbed, Marianne Morris and Anulka Dziubinska (a familiar face from '70s TV commercials) acquit themselves rather well as delectably dark and frostily fair suck sister respectively, their body language speaking veritable volumes in luxuriously lengthy liaisons. The BBFC holding a longstanding track record for nixing the mix of skin and hemoglobin, their since lifted veto accounts for the missing minutes. Larraz regular Karl Lanchbury, central stud in Trevor Wrenn's wall to wall shag fest EROTIC INFERNO, receives the most spectacular send-off in movie's most excerpted encounter.