Review of The Vampire Lovers (1970) by Paul S — 14 Jul 2005

This is basically soft porn with a lesbian vampire theme. The rules are changed a bit, to suit the source material, a short story or epic poem or some such.

Peter Cushing makes the most of a supporting role, but the central character is a female vampire called Mircalla, who hunts under aliases that are always anagrams of her real name. At the beginning she is referred to as Marcilla, then for the larger part of the film she is Carmilla, which is the title of the original story. She is supposedly the last of the Karnstein family of vampires, but she always travels with a countess who claims to be her mother, and is shadowed by a Dracula lookalike named in the credits simply as "Man In Black". However, we do get to see that he has fangs, and the two subsequent films might lead us to believe that he is the current holder of the title of Count Karnstein.

Despite Ingrid Pitt's protests on the dvd commentary that there is no overt lesbian reference here, I'm afraid I must strongly disagree. Besides the erotic scenes of her feeding on young girls, there is a scene where she blatantly declares her love for one of them. Carmilla becomes enraged when the girl expresses her wish to meet a young man, and fall in love. "I don't ever want anyone to take you away from me!" she growls at the girl. The girl argues that there is a difference between the love of a man and a woman, and the love between two girls. Carmilla insists that there is not, and that she wants the girl to love her forever, and never leave her for a man. No lesbian references indeed.

An interesting enough film, with some novel ideas about vampires, and enough Peter Cushing to make the whole thing worthwhile.