Nov 13, 2020
Vampyres (Daughters of Darkness, 1974)
"Who's there? Outside? I hear voices... Met him. Picked him up. On the roadside, no doubt. Just like Rupert. Just like me! Who are you? Where the hell do you come from? I must get away from here. I must get away from here!"
#vampyres#daughters of darkness#josé ramón larraz#blood tw#films i done watched#Gore#British cinema#Horror film#Diana Daubeney#Marianne Morris#Anulka Dziubinska#Murray Brown#Sally Faulkner#Brian Deacon#Michael Byrne#Karl Lanchbury#Margaret Heald#Douglas Jones#Gerald Case#Bessie Love#James Kenelm Clarke#My first exposure to the films of Larraz some years ago but before I was really aware of him or his work. Back then it was just a slightly#Subpar brit horror with surprisingly strong sex and violence. And all these years later? Yeah... Kind of the same. Certainly it's not the#Strongest of the directors horror films not even the few made during his UK exile from Franco's Spain (Symptoms is in another league#Entirely). But it's fun enough. There are some aspects I appreciate more now; the absolute refusal to expound on certain mysterious aspects#Of the plot (who fired the shots in the opening scene? Why do clocks not work around the vampires?) probably annoyed me first time round#But now I kind of appreciate the total commitment tk making a weird creepy film which makes not a lick of sense. Poor Sally Faulkner though#She would give one of brit Horrors most accomplished performances a few years later in Norman J Warren's Prey but here she is absolutely#Abandoned by a paper thin script which gives her all the character depth of 'unhappy girl in caravan'. A last minute cameo by Michael Byrne#As a wine loving proto yuppie who gets gruesomely drained of his claret nearly steals the whole film out from under the leads
