Vamp or Not? Leonor

Leonor was a Euro-Horror from 1975, directed by Juan Luis Buñuel. It came to my attention as it is often listed as a vampire movie. Imdb have keywords of “vampire” and “female vampire” for the film and offer the following plot synopsis “A female vampire rises from her crypt every night in search of children as her victims.” Unfortunately that synopsis is far from accurate as we’ll see.

J Gordon Melton mentions it in passing, as a vampire film, in the Vampire Book, unfortunately Melton’s encyclopaedia is riddled with inaccuracies and so you cannot simply take his word for it.

The film itself is based on the story Wake Not the Dead (for a clarification re authorship please see the article about the story) but the fact that it is based on a vampire story does not, in itself, make the film a vampire film if the vampiric elements are expunged.

This film begins with two riders attacked by bandits. One of the riders, Richard (Michel Piccoli), fights them and defeats them all – bar two who flee. He is a local Lord and the other rider (José María Caffarel) is a doctor – summoned because Richard’s wife, Leonor (Liv Ullmann), is dying. She has been administered by the castle’s gardener and herbalist Thomas (Antonio Ferrandis) but he has been unsuccessful in reviving her after her accident – she was crushed by her horse. Thomas mistrusts the doctor’s methods – bleeding and then opening her up for surgery.

Leonor dies and Richard is besides himself with grief. He has her interned in a sarcophagus – the bones of the former occupant are thrown into a field – and then has the crypt sealed. He does not wait for the priest to offer prayers and, we later discover, no mass is said for her. He then rides into town and speaks to a local man (George Rigaud) informing him that his wife was buried that day and he will marry the man’s daughter, Catherine (Ornella Muti).

We see the years pass by, we see that Catherine competes against the memory of the lost Leonor. We see her heavy with child and with a toddler. During this scene we also see Richard get very drunk with friends, one is a trader through whom we hear that the black death is sweeping through Italy. Richard’s drunkenness becomes violent and he smashes the room – and that violence is an outpouring of the grief he still feels. Indeed we see Leonor stalking the drunk Richard – though she is a figment of his imagination.

Time continues to move on, ten years have passed since Leonor died and it seems that Richard and Catherine are happy. But then he sees Leonor again, this time by a river bank, and his grief sends him into a spiral of insanity. Now, the problem here is that it is a little unbelievable to think that Ornella Muti would be unable to distract a man from his grief! Be that as it may. Richard ignores his wife’s bed, though it seems he does feel guilt for the way he treats her.

He opens up his Leonor’s crypt and sits vigil. At one point it seems that he is trying to open the sarcophagus but he only shifts the lid a little and then stops. Catherine attends the crypt but she cannot make her husband leave the crypt and rejoin the living. Eventually he rides out to a bridge and cries out in his grief.

His grief is heard by a mysterious stranger who asks why his grief is so great when nations have crumbled with less fuss. He suggests that Richard let the dead rest but then suggests she can be brought back but only by Richard, himself, if he wants it enough. They go to the crypt and despite the warnings Richard wishes to be reunited with his lost love. The stranger’s actions are much lessened than the story this was based on.

The sarcophagus is opened and Leonor appears in a gale. Richard runs in fear but then returns to her. She has no memory of much other than Richard and doesn’t realise how much time has passed. Richard returns home and tells Catherine (whose father has died and been buried whilst Richard was away from his castle) to leave. When she tenderly touches him and asks why, he stabs her, burns her clothes and drops her body down a well.

He brings Leonor back – telling the servants that she is the new mistress. When in the castle she shuts curtains as though the daylight is too bright – this seems lifted from the base story but is quickly forgotten as she wanders the day with impunity. She has Thomas (who recognises her) make a strong perfume for her. Presumably she thinks there is a charnel smell but only mentions that her skin feels odd. She seems reserved towards her husband not matching Richard’s passion.

Then we see her walking out and meeting a girl. She tells the girl a story – a rather macabre one that she says is true and involves cannibalism – and the girl falls asleep. She rips open the girls dress and… we don’t see. All we discover is that the girl is dead and then, later, that 13 children are dead. Following the murder she meets Richard with passion but we do not see whether she just murders the children or feeds off them in some way. Later we see her perched over Richard’s chest – does she feed, we do not know.

The only other things we discover is that the plague is getting closer – obviously plague and vampirism can be linked in some mythologies but the plague was a feature within the film before she was raised from the dead. The mysterious stranger has a red powder that can be used to make a circle to keep her out. She is apparently killed, in the end, when Richard rides them both off the bridge (by that time she has killed his two sons). They land in running water but I didn't think that was done because running water is sometimes used against vampires.

The frustrating thing about this is that it is based on a vampire story – follows it with a degree of accuracy, even – and yet fails to illuminate the vampiric aspects. She may feed on the children, we don’t know. As such I cannot really say it is Vamp or it isn’t – the vital evidence is missing. However it is a film based on a vampire story, for what that is worth.

The imdb page is here.

Interesting Shorts: Wake Not the Dead

[Edited re Comments recieved] This story is often credited to Johann Ludwig Tieck, with a suggestion that it was published around 1800, though it seems that the credit should actually fall to Ernst Benjamin Salomo Raupach who published the story under the title "Leave the dead alone". From Volver a la Magia Radio-Show blog "This story was published in 1823 in the pages of Minerva, a literary magazine in Leipzig. That same year the story was translated from German into English in the first volume of Popular Tales and Romances of the Northern Nations under the title Wake Not the Dead and was wrongly attributed to Johann Ludwig Tieck."

Authorship aside, the story commonly known as 'Wake not the Dead' follows Walter – a Lord – whose wife Brunhilda dies, leaving him heartbroken. The story seen in the film Leonor quite closely follows the original in basic plot. Walter does remarry – Swanhilda – though his first wife was dark haired and the second was blonde, opposite to the film.

The longing for Brunhilda eventually does send him mad with grief and he happens upon a sorcerer. The sorcerer revives Brunhilda for him though his role is more active than in the film and the ritual involves blood. “Upon this the sorcerer poured upon it some blood from out of a human skull, exclaiming at the same time, 'Drink, sleeper, of this warm stream, that thy heart may again beat within thy bosom.'” Brunhilda, when revived, actively seeks the removal of Swanhilda but Walter only sends the second wife away, rather than kill her.

The vampirism is more pronounced and Brunhilda is a creature of the night, “This being done, she cried; ‘Haste, let us away ere the dawn breaks, for my eye is yet too weak to endure the light of day.’” She is not destroyed by sunlight but does avoid it. She feeds from the young, and does kill Walter’s children. She is able to put a person into a deep sleep through the magic power of her breath, in order to aid her feeding. Walter stumbles upon a mysterious herb that counteracts the effect and thus is able to see Brunhilda for what she is – as she feeds from him.

Killing her is tied in with the moon – she is weakened during the dark of the new moon and this is another example of early vampire stories having the vampire gain power from the moon. Walter must pierce her bosom on that night with a dagger and then renounce her.

An interesting vampire story, with some unusual lore – the victim in this, Walter, is entirely to blame as he caused the vampire to rise – and the means of the resurrection was necromancy by a sorcerer who had a morally grey outlook (he neither believed in good or evil).

The story can be found online here.

Thirst – review

Director: Chan-wook Park

Release date: 2009

Contains spoilers

I have waited with baited breath to see Thirst, or Bakjwi. Its limited UK theatrical run came nowhere near me but, at long last, the UK DVD is available and my thanks to Ian for having the vampire Father Christmas deliver said disc. So did the film disappoint? Read on…

We have seen Park’s work before, in passing at least, with his segment of Three… Extremes, Cut, beginning on the set of a fictional vampire film Live Evil. Thirst’s international working title was Evil Live. Park is often seen as an auteur and he does have a wonderful visual style.

Yet this film, visually impressive, is more than just that – as it is more than just a vampire flick. The film begins by looking at the priest Father Hyeon (Kang-ho Song). He spends his days offering comfort and guidance to the sick in a hospital. As the film begins he listens to a story told by the patient Hyo-Song. He asks Hyeon to play the flute, but by the time the priest returns with his instrument Hyo-Song is in respiratory distress and ends up comatose.

Father Hyeon has also seen a patient, Sarah, die that day and goes to his superior – the blind and wheel chair bound Father Noh (In-hwan Park) – and asks whether he can go to the clinic. The Vatican, he is told, frowns on the clinic but, eventually, Father Hyeon is on a plane to Africa. In the clinic they search for a cure to the Emmanuel Virus, a virus that seems to effect Asian and Caucasian males. It causes plague like blisters to cover the body and eventually gets into the lungs, causing the excessive bleeding and death. Hyeon is a volunteer in an experiment to find a potential vaccine.

He becomes ill with the disease – though he writes home to his patients as though he is on vacation – and eventually, on a hospital table, he dies despite blood transfusions. Then he comes alive again – a miracle it seems. He is (though he does not know it) vampire – where this comes from, transfusion of blood or the experimental cure is not tackled; it just is. Father Hyeon comes home, the only one of 50 to volunteer who survived (folklore later increases this to 500) and the people look to him to cure their ills – there is talk of the bandaged saint.

Six months later he is at the hospital when a woman, Mrs Ra (Hae-sook Kim), asks him to pray for her son Kang-woo (Ha-Kyun Shin) – he has leukaemia and his wife Tae-ju (Ok-bin Kim) is there also. Hyeon does pray for him and it becomes apparent that the family knew Hyeon when he was an orphan. He finds that the family believe he has cured the sickly Kang-woo’s leukaemia as it, apparently, has gone.

Tae-ju was abandoned with Mrs Ra as an infant and Mrs Ra married her to Kang-woo on adulthood. Due to his sickly nature Kang-woo is spoilt and takes his wife for granted, Mrs Ra abuses her. She runs at night, barefoot through the streets, and blames her excursions on sleepwalking. Hyeon finds himself aroused by Tae-ju and flagellates himself when he gets back to his room. His hearing becomes hyper-sensitive and he collapses.

He awakens naked, on the floor of his room, as the sun has risen and his back starts to burn. Like the actual source of the vampirism, why it triggers now isn’t explicitly stated but is clearly tied in with the sexuality aspects. In the evening he emerges from a wardrobe – but the Emmanuel Virus has clearly taken a hold of him again. He performs his duties, swaddled in bandages, until he has to pray for a dying woman and gets her blood on his hand. He licks it.

He ends up in Hyo-Song’s room drinking blood via a tube from the comatose man. The blood revives him and makes his EV blisters recede into his skin. Later Tae-ju is running through the streets again and he appears before her, she is blurred until he takes his glasses off (his eyesight has repaired). She retreats from him but he catches her and then walks off – we see that, with superhuman speed, he put his shoes on her feet.

From then on in the story fairly much follows Émile Zola’s novel Thérèse Raquin with Tae-ju taking the role of Thérèse, Kang-woo as Camille and Hyeon as Laurent – the book is credited. For those who know the story, you know where this then leads but for those who don’t let it be sufficient to say that Hyeon and Tae-ju begin an affair and madness and murder follow in its wake, with a blackly comic overtone – and rather funny to, I was laughing out loud at some of the parts of this. However the film is so much more than that.

The film has elements of horror, black comedy, romantic comedy and drama and the story is much more than Thérèse Raquin. The entire religious aspect is astounding. If we look at the fact that Tae-ju denies Hell because she does not have faith and thus will not go to Hell, that Hyeon leaves the priesthood for her and her embracement of a very Western consumer lifestyle (represented by shoes) then we see that he is almost the Messiah of secular society. As he turns her they become one and the same, aspects of each other perhaps – this is directly referenced. Emmanuel is (biblically) the Messiah foretold, thus the virus has searched out the one who will return from the dead and the film even symbolically shows leviathan rising at the end.

When Hyeon admits his condition to Father Noh, he does so by opening his chest and letting the priest push his fingers in (to the heart), which is reminiscent of doubting Thomas and whilst Hyeon may turn from the priesthood and commit crimes he is still, at heart, a caring man. There is certainly a whole thesis waiting to be interpreted within the film and perhaps more than I can say without spoiling too much.

The vampirism is one that has a sexual or even a hedonistic nature, Hyeon admits that he wants to taste every sinful pleasure. There is no impact on the vampires through religion or religious icons – a deliberate move on Chan-wook Park’s part given the main character. They also do not have fangs, a bite mark on Tae-ju is a normal human bite. They do have superhuman strength, speed, leaping and resilience (it also appears that they might be able to fly, though it could be leaping in a single bound ala original Superman). A scene with Hyeon and Tae-ju bounding across the rooftops is beautifully balletic.

Kang-ho Song is brilliant as Hyeon but special mention must go to the young actress Ok-bin Kim who is magnificent in her role as Tae-ju. If I had a complaint it was perhaps (slightly) in the pacing but one wonders whether that was due to Western sensibility and whether there was truly a problem or not. That brings me to score and I would be remiss if I scored this any less than 9 out of 10. The imdb page is here.

Honourable Mentions: Skeleton Key

Okay, so it probably didn’t help that I watched director John Johnson’s Skeleton Key 2 prior to watching this, though some of the gags/characters in the second film now make more sense.

Not that this is a great film in any sense of the phrase but something within me is enamoured by Johnson’s work. Perhaps it is because he made the brave attempt at making an indie version of Dracula – Alucard – I don’t really know. These are badly acted, poorly realised, crude effects movies and yet there is an indefatigable something. Possibly because the primaries are having, obviously, a great time. Plus they have Conrad Brooks introducing them.

This sees journalist (for a magazine based in a pizza parlour) Howard (John Johnson) sent off with his photographer, Cornelius (Karthik Srinivasan) to find a 2 headed 5 legged goat. Instead Howard is attacked by a zombie, bitten, meets a manifestation of his own evil (Paul Stark) and ends up, along with taxi driver Nicopernicus (David Simmons), in Nilbog. A town were monsters rule, zombies roam the streets and their only allies appear to be a group of people who had been celebrating Halloween. All this is watched on video by Neil (Liam Smith) a fanboy who has already seen the film – thus offers commentary – and ends up in the film himself.

It is the vampires we are interested in and, like in the next film, the main vampire is the Bloofer Lady (Debbie Rochon) whom we first see briefly as one of the 'heroes' runs into her house and she shows fangs and hisses at him before he beats a hasty retreat. The Bloofer Lady does not appear then until towards the end of the film.

Next we see, after Howard and Cornelius get stuck in cobwebs, a character called Spiderella (Brinke Stevens). Now she is a spider creature but she does have fangs and bites Howard… somewhere rather personal. She is scared off by Codo, the dog owned by Nicopernicus. Not a vampire but worth mentioning due to the look and the fact that Brinke Stevens played her.

The 'heroes' actually manage to escape Nilbog in this film, leaving the few surviving female Halloween revellers in the hands of villain Dr Noches (Jay Barber) – including Howard’s love (or lust) interest Sandy (Denise Shrader). The 'heroes' end up returning but not before we see the Halloween reveller who was dressed as a leprechaun (Hans David Moore) turn into a vampire as he was bitten before he escaped with the 'heroes'. This would almost explain how we got a leprechaun vampire in the second film, except he gets staked in this!

Meanwhile the nurse (Mariah Smith) and School Girl (Lindsey Welch) revellers are turned by the Bloofer Lady – in a gratuitous nudey scene that Neil pauses and comments about. As it is, it is Neil who has to go in later and face the vampire women. Sandy (and her French Maid outfit) is kept in the lair of Dr Noches.

He stakes the nurse (I’ll refer to them by Halloween costume even though, as vampires, they have changed into nightwear) and misses her heart and immediately gets her with another stake. The school girl is staked by mop – which I must admit was a nice touch. He holds the Bloofer Lady off by fingers held in the shape of a cross, finds a mallet and stake in her room (and wonders just why she’d keep such things in her room) and then stakes her – much too high up to get her heart, as it happens, but that’s just as well as she appears in film #2, played by Syn DeVil.

That’s it for vampires folks. Not a great film but bizarrely fascinating. I can’t recommend you search it out – you’d likely hate me – but if you like really cheap films you might want to ignore that and get it anyway. The imdb page is here.

Blood Creek – review

Director: Joel Schumacher

First released: 2009

Contains spoilers

Blood Creek is a Joel Schumacher film, his first vampire film since the Lost Boys. Now I will say at the beginning that this is a typical Schumacher film, it looks good – even the bits that don’t look that good are shot in a way that you overlook it, we’ll discuss that when we get to zombie horses (I kid you not) – and it is eminently watchable if your brain has been switched off.

However, I did consider running this as a ‘Vamp or Not?’ You see the lore is very odd, there is mention of zombies on the net and I actually started by typing ‘Vamp or Not?’ as the title to this article. Yet I knew I was going to go Vamp on this, ultimately, and I had reported on this way back when, at the time when the film was still to be called Town Creek, and the press release definitively mentions vampires.

So, odd lore to come. However the film itself starts with a voice over that mentions Hitler being obsessed with the occult and him sending agents out in the 1930s to find rune stones that he believed were the path to immortality. We see a farm in 1936, run by an immigrant German family. The father, Otto Wollner (Rainer Winkelvoss), receives a letter from Berlin. He sits with his wife (Joy McBrin), son Karl (László Mátray) and young daughter Liese (played young by Andreea Perminov and older by Emma Booth). A Berlin historical society want to send a scholar, Richard Wirth (Michael Fassbender), to stay with them – they have sent 150 dollars expenses.

Wirth’s gear arrives – mostly crates of books. He arrives not long after, complete with long leather coat! He is clearly, just in the tone of his conversations, a Nazi. Berlin is aware that the Wollners found a rune stone when they built the farm, a relic of the first Vikings to land on the Americas. When asked where it is Otto confesses he used the stone as a foundation stone but it is clearly visible within the root cellar. When Wirth goes down there he finds Liese. She is burying a pet bird that has died. He takes it before the rune stone, chants and it comes alive for a short while (its eye turns a milky white opaque). He is exhausted and bleeding from his nose but has elicited her help – it will only hurt a little, each time.

Cut to the modern day and Evan Marshall (Henry Cavill) is a paramedic at the scene of a crystal meth kitchen trying to save the life of a suspect – who dies (but that is unimportant to the rest of the film). We very quickly have establishment that his brother Victor (Dominic Purcell, Blade Trinity) was an Iraq veteran. Their father (Gerard McSorley) thinks Evan useless. Victor vanished on a camping trip with Evan, just when he got home from Iraq – the father blames Evan and Victor’s marital family still hope he will reappear.

Evan is trying to move on, he has put up a memorial stone in the cemetery but he still has nightmares about Victor vanishing. He is woken from his nightmare by a hairy looking Victor, returned. He is told to say nothing, get the guns and come with Victor to get revenge. Whilst he prepares, Victor shaves and washes. They drive to the river and then canoe upstream. Evan notices a woman putting up missing posters for her husband.

They trek through to a farm, surrounded by fences with oddly daubed paint (they are runic symbols). They see a man drive off – Victor says he won’t be back until evening. They enter the farm. Victor warns Evan of a dog, but he is attacked and bitten – Victor kills it by knife. As Victor heads for the house (Evan left to cover the porch), Evan feels the need to inject himself with rabies vaccine – why? Evan is a paramedic – he will know that the vaccine can be administered up to a month after being bitten and the scene has no later impact in the film. I think it was a nod to those films/books that connect vampirism with rabies but it felt silly and unnecessary.

Karl bolts from the house and Victor shoots his shoulder. Evan shoots him in the belly (he is not dead at that point. They take control of the house – though Liese fights back a little and Victor repeatedly asks ‘where is he?’ Cutting to the chase there is a container where Victor had been held for two years and fed to Wirth by the Wollners – who are stuck in time. In there now is the man who has recently gone missing. When Otto returns Wirth is accidentally freed from the place they keep him and all Hell breaks loose. On to the unusual lore.

First the zombies. Wirth is able to use his occult powers to raise any dead creature as a zombie. He can raise dogs, he can raise a horse he butchers with his long nails and he can raise humans. The horse gets in the house and bullets just rip chunks out of it. Fire eventually scares it out. The CGI isn’t great but the scene is filmed in such a way that you are more concerned with the action than the CGI. The human zombies (such as Karl) can also get in the house. This was odd as Wirth himself is held out by rune symbols and yet his creatures can enter as can the power of his spells – when Karl kills Otto in the house, Wirth raises him also. The zombies can be stopped via massive brain trauma and, whilst under Wirth’s direct control they act as he directs, they can also ask for help.

Wirth himself is unusual. At first we see him with bandages around his face but then we get a reveal to his yellowed skin carved with runic symbols. He gains strength through the rune stone but he needs human blood to live. There are rules around the blood. His own blood is poisonous to him, as is the blood of his family (and there is a set of armour made out of the bones of his ancestor, the wearer of which is safe from him). He cannot drink the blood of the dead.

Liese trapped him with runic symbols and, subsequently, the Wollners have fed him, but just enough to keep him alive – why they didn’t just starve him to death is not explained. It is his magic that keeps them alive, frozen in time. To be honest, strip away the occult/Nazi aspects and this then becomes more or less the Fear Itself episode The Sacrifice. He wishes to open his third eye, which he can do on the night of a lunar eclipse (that night, conveniently) with a lot of blood. Opening the eye involves hammering a hole in his own skull – he believes this will make him invincible. Should he die then the zombies would cease and those frozen in time would catch their years all at once.

He later pulls the skin from his skull – which seems to turn to dust in the wind. He can be poisoned as mentioned above and can be killed by stopping the blood reaching his brain – decapitation then. Clearly he is an unusual sort of vampire, but tying vampires and the occult together is nothing new. Indeed Stoker hinted in Dracula that the Count was one of the students of the Scholomance – the Devil’s academy and thus a student of arcane knowledge.

The film itself is slick, Schumacher knows how to keep a pace going. The action sequences are also well shot and keep the pace bobbing along. If you think too much you’ll get nothing out of this – for instance, if the zombies can pass the runes, why hadn’t he killed a horse and have it kick the fences down to allow his escape decades ago? Evan going off with Victor like that seemed improbable and the source of their (minor plot impact) feud that is mentioned at one point was silly in itself. They are not the only plot holes/inconsistencies and I should mention that the film is also primed for sequels, but that is the normal case these days, is it not. If, however, you can take your brain out and just go along for the ride then this is worth your time – it is a slickly directed, action horror with (and this is the selling point for me) an unusual vampire.

I enjoyed this as I watched it. 6 out of 10. The imdb page is here.

Vamp or Not? Brainiac

From 1962 and directed by Chano Urueta, Brainiac or El Barón del Terror is somewhat of an oddity – and I understand that is saying something given that this is a Mexican horror flick. Most definitely a B movie (at times, during its length, the printed backdrops used might even suggest a Z grade movie) there is something oddly compelling about the film.

It is often listed as a vampire flick, indeed vampire is a plot keyword on imdb and yet it becomes one of the oddest vampire flicks produced – if it is indeed a vampire flick and that, ladies and gentlemen, is what we are investigating here today.

The film begins in 1661, in the court of the Mexican inquisition and the Baron Vitelius d’Estera (Abel Salazar, the Curse of the Crying Woman, el Vampiro and el Ataúd del Vampiro) sits accused of all sorts of crimes. From casting spells and heresy, to seducing women, it seems he’s done it all! Indeed when they mention seducing women d’Esera gives a little grin, as he also does when they describe the tortures that had no effect on him – Salazar stealing the show in these scenes with just a twitch of his lips.

One man, Marcos Miranda (Rubén Rojo), stands up for him and is sentenced to 200 lashes for doing so. The masked inquisition then orders that the baron will be burned at the stake. He acquiesces to this but removes his manacles with magic and walks to the execution site with pride. He is set alight but a comet flies above the scene. He names all four of the inquisitors, seeing exactly who they are behind their hoods, and says that when the comet returns in 300 years he will extract his revenge on their descendants.

Cut to 1961 and Reinaldo (Rubén Rojo) is dancing with Victoria (Rosa María Gallardo). However they have to leave to go to the observatory as they are both astronomers. The Professor (Luis Aragón) has predicted a comet will burn through the night sky and, indeed, it does. They go out for a closer look but soon discover it has vanished from the skies (and no other observatory spots it).

Out in the countryside a rock lands on Earth – quite serenely and leaving no crater. It becomes a creature and said creature is the Baron returned. He has a mutated, pulsating head, fangs, two sucker like appendages for fingers and a long forked tongue. He grabs a guy, sticks the tongue at the back of his head and then magically makes the man’s suit appear on himself. The baron then takes on human form.

What the tongue did is quickly revealed. It plunged into the back of the man’s head (like the man was attacked with an electric drill, we hear) and allowed the baron to suck the man’s brain out, for the baron lives on brain matter now. When we see the tongue marks they look a bit crap, to be honest – but effects clearly are not the film’s forte. However, we have to concede that they look awfully like typical fang marks for your standard vampire movie, is it enough for our 'Vamp or Not' though?

We discover, as the film goes on, that the Baron must periodically eat brains and he has a bowl of them for surreptitious snacking thereof. He is able to go invisible and pass through solid objects (a mysterious bank robbery is mentioned and we can safely assume it was him). He also has eye mojo (that appears to be someone flashing a light in his eyes). He uses this to freeze male victims and cause female victims to get all passionate, often kissing him in front of their husbands/fathers/boyfriends.

The passion does not last long, however, as he quickly turns into brainiac form and allows the girl to have a good old scream as he attacks her. The one woman who doesn’t seem to succumb to this is a bride, perhaps this tells us something as the film flirts with the idea of suppressed sexuality and yet she does not fall for it, she also faints rather than screams.

He goes on a wrecking course through the descendants of the inquisition until only one is left – Victoria. Of course, Reinaldo is the descendant/reincarnation of the man who defended the Baron. Also interesting is the fact that the Baron has actually fallen in love with her – but his hatred is stronger than his love. The Baron can be killed by fire. Luckily the local police station keeps a stock of handy-dandy flame throwers.

It is an odd film, no doubt, but is it vampire? I can see why it is listed. He comes back from the dead, he has fangs (though they are not used) and has a tongue – the use of the tongue as the killing implement is not unique for it is both a favourite of some Far Eastern vampire varieties (for instance the aswang) and also appears in some Western films, such as Daughter of Darkness. This is, however, one of the earlier examples in a film. The eating of brains is unusual (and pre it becoming a zombie favourite) but it is still ingestion of human tissue to survive.

However, for me the reason this might fall into the vampire genre is all around the repressed sexuality and the Baron being the figure who releases it. Even when he doesn’t use mojo women seem to love him, but he can release their desires with a flash of his eyes and they become wanton – kissing him in front of the significant male in their lives. This, of course, leads to their doom rather than turning them, thus he does not create others of his kind.

I pretty much fell onto the vamp side when I watched this – though I am prepared to debate that. The imdb page is here.

Ramble On

Okay folks the web counter that I have on site (and I put on a little while into the life of the blog) has just passed 999,999 – that means we have had over a million page views – and that doesn’t include feed readers. Thank you all so very much, you are all great blog mates and I appreciate all the traffic, most of the comments (even the negative ones are appreciated, but not the spam ones) and most of all the friendships I have made via the blog.

Some of the blog friends have been around since the beginning, others are newer. One newer blog friend is Nicole Hadaway, author of Release. Currently she is running a competition - the prize being the book A Child's Wound by Dwayne Kavanagh, not a vampire novel, but worth entering the competition one feels.

Also worth noting is the fact that the new ethereal tales (issue 6) is due out 29.01.10. I submitted a rather long, short story called The Butterfly on a Wheel – which is a vampire story, surprise, surprise. The editor has, wisely, split it into three parts and part one is in this issue. As well as my story there are 17 other stories and poems and, if past issues are anything to go by, they will all be of a high quality. Check it out here.

I have put a new picture link on the right hand side for World Goth Day. Set for the 22nd May it is a chance to get your Goth on for the day (how you choose to do that is a matter of personal choice…)

And finally, at the suggestion of Marissa Farrar (whose book Alone is reviewed here), I have added a poll – just for fun. In a wrestling match who would win…. Vampire or Shark? (For the source of the poll please check out my review of Vampiro and the comments thereof.)