Lust for a Vampire (1971) review

7. Lust for a Vampire (1971)

Directed by: Jimmy Sangster

Produced by: Michael Style, Harry Fine

Screenplay by: Tudor Gates

Starring: Ralph Bates, Barbara Jefford, Suzanna Leigh

“The Vampire Lovers” was Hammer Horror’s first adaptation of Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla novella, a landmark of vampire fiction even older than Dracula. Visually lavish and erotically charged, it’s filled with the Gothic scenery you’d want and represents a step forward in mainstream queer storytelling, showing its vampire taking both male and female victims. One year later, a sequel came out called “Lust for a Vampire,” which takes an already salacious title and just launches it into explicit territory. But what about the movie itself? Well, even though it also has nice aesthetics and a few solid leading performances, the product as a whole comes across as really goofy, with poor editing, unclear stakes and just a myriad of unintentionally hilarious elements.

Taking place in the 1830s, 40 years after the events of the first movie, we meet author Richard LeStrange (Michael Johnson), who arrives in the village of the long-deserted Castle Karnstein, doing research for his books about black magic and the supernatural. He’s warned to avoid the castle by the superstitious villagers, citing the legendary vampire acts of Carmilla and the Karnstein family. LeStrange naturally doesn’t listen, but soon comes across students from Miss Simpson’s (Helen Christie) finishing school and is immediately taken with new charge Mircalla (Yutte Stensgaard). When one of the servers from the village inn is found dead with a pair of neck wounds, LeStrange suspects the stories are true and gets himself hired as a teacher at the school to investigate further. But even as students disappear, Miss Simpson and the benefactors look to cover it up, while LeStrange finds an ally in dance teacher Janet (Suzanna Leigh), eventually realizing that Carmilla herself is the student he’s fallen in love with.

I kind of had a feeling that the movie was in trouble with the opening, which features a stagecoach kidnapping a young woman, led by a figure wearing a dark hooded cloak in broad daylight; that doesn’t help anyone blend in, lady. It leads to a ritual led by Count Karnstein (Mike Raven), who bears a striking resemblance to Christopher Lee, who of course played Dracula in seven Hammer films; there’s even an insert closeup shot of Lee’s eyes, though I’m not sure which movie it’s from. So already this film shows a lack of logic or identity, but whatever; we can at least count on trashy entertainment value, right? While there are occasionally spicy moments with the girls bonding and skinny dipping in the lake, the tension with Carmilla herself is downplayed. Ingrid Pitt reportedly turned down reprising the role because she thought the script was terrible, and her replacement Yutte Stensgaard doesn’t convey nearly the same sense of seductive power or tragic nuance due to her flat expression and awkward delivery.

The atmosphere in general isn’t very engaging; there are a lot of boring conversations between Miss Simpson and Countess Herritzen (Barbara Jefford) about covering up the missing students, and the tone in the other daytime school scenes is so light and silly, which should clash appropriately with the subsequent horror scenes, but the story and dialogue are just plain dull. I started out liking LeStrange and how smarmily he just dismisses the Karnstein legends like, “You grew up with these superstitions and I didn’t, so that’s not my problem.” But although I think the performance is good, the character isn’t very interesting; Hammer regular Ralph Bates appears with a really bad haircut as school headmaster Barton and is authentically squirmy, but the role is somewhat irrelevant. Suzanna Leigh gives the most convincing performance as Janet, but her scenes are few and far between.

I usually really like the production design of Hammer films, and although this one has its usual nice sets, the lighting is distractingly bright and gives the screen no ambience. Also, the editing is appalling during the vampire attack scenes; in an effort to I guess make the killer a mystery, they use a point-of-view shot, but the way it’s directed is laughable, with some amateurish acting and bizarre angles. It’s directed by Jimmy Sangster, who wrote some of Hammer’s most famous works like “The Curse of Frankenstein,” “Horror of Dracula” and “The Mummy,” but directing clearly wasn’t his strength, as although this script seems to have worthwhile ideas, the execution leaves a lot to be desired.

It's not like you watch a movie with a title like “Lust for a Vampire” expecting anything more than something enjoyably tawdry, but even by the standards Hammer had already been lowering to around the early 1970s, this is quite bad. There are some interactions that I think work well and even some concepts that could’ve been explored, but the story’s a mess, it’s not very sexy, and even the music has these random choices, with two inappropriate occasions where they play this really lame song “Strange Love,” which caused Sangster to disown the film. So this is one of those movies where a lot went wrong from the top down, as apparently Tudor Gates’s original script went through major changes, due to meddling from producers and the British Board of Film Classification, which trimmed much of the prevalent lesbianism. There was a third installment called “Twins of Evil” that came out later that year, but we’ll cover it some other time. There are much worse vampire flicks out there, but you’re better off just going back to the first movie, as everything from the blood to the titillation is done so much better.

My rating: 4.5/10