Jakob’s Wife – Blu-Ray Review

Director: Travis Stevens

Release date: 2021

Contains spoilers

As you’ll see if you look at my original review of Jakob’s Wife I rated it rather highly – indeed the film went straight into my all time Top 100 Vampire films and, for me, is definitely a contender for the best vampire flick of 2021. With it getting a UK Blu-Ray release it seemed a perfect time to revisit the film and have a look at the Blu-Ray contents.

Barbara Crampton as Anne

Of course, when revisiting a film that I rated so highly there is a degree of trepidation – will the film stand up to a subsequent watch and I’m pleased to report this did, and I stand by the original score. The film itself focuses on Anne (Barbara Crampton, God of Vampires, Replace & the Sisterhood) and her husband Jakob (Larry Fessenden) and it is their fantastic performances that carry the film.

Larry Fessenden as Jakob

Jakob is a preacher and Anne his wife, whose existence has become second fiddle to his, for instance with him habitually talking over her as though her opinion is meaningless, and we see her becoming increasingly dissatisfied with her lot in life. She almost has an affair with an old flame, Tom Lowe (Robert Rusler, Vamp), but backs away from the temptation after a kiss – but at that moment a vampire (Bonnie Aarons) enters the equation, killing Tom and biting Anne. The vampire, looking a lot like Orlock and referred to as the Master but gender-swapped, very much represents female emancipation from the patriarchy (particularly the Christian patriarchy in this case). The film uses the performances, a streak of dark comedy and a bucket full of gore to entertain.

Bonnie Aarons as the Master

The Blu-Ray looks beautiful and vibrantly captures the use of colour scheme and lighting that Travis Stevens deliberately used as he plotted Anne’s move from timid preacher’s wife to independent woman (vampire) who demands that her husband treat her as an equal. The Blu-Ray extras are a set of deleted scenes and a “making of feature”. The deleted scenes are fully realised, rather than rushes, and I think pretty much deleted for pacing/run time reasons. The one that might have added to the film is the search for the presumed missing first victim, Amelia (Nyisha Bell), and only because it offered a sense of time passing that was missing in the film’s cut. The making of is not really a making of but, rather, a very short set of cast interviews with Barbara Crampton, Larry Fessenden, Bonnie Aarons and Robert Rusler. It is nice to have some form of extras but these are very much "extras-lite" and a real making of, or perhaps a director’s commentary, would have been more welcome – that said the film is a must see and a necessary part of a vampire genre fan’s collection (see the original review for film score). The UK Blu-Ray is slated for a January 10th 2022 release.

The imdb page is here.

On Blu-Ray @ Amazon US

On Blu-Ray @ Amazon UK