I have seen many films in my time, but few leave you as utterly bewildered and downright annoyed as A Virgin Among the Living Dead (1973). Director Jesús Franco, a man who clearly had a knack for making something out of nothing, has concocted this film, a confusing, slow-moving slab of near incoherence that occasionally stumbles into the realm of horror and eroticism but never does either well. Shot in Portugal, this film was clearly made to fill some obscure tax loophole, because there’s no other explanation for its existence.
The plot, which I’m not even sure qualifies as a plot, revolves around Christina, a young woman who arrives in Europe to visit her estranged relatives in a decrepit castle. Her father is dead, and she’s here for the reading of his will, but soon finds out that the relatives are all undead. (Huh?) It gets even more ridiculous from there. They fear that Christina will ask them to leave the mansion when she inherits it, and the story limps forward as she grapples with this existential crisis of the undead. In the midst of all this, Christina becomes entangled in some half-baked occult mystery involving a spirit called the Queen of the Night, who claims her father’s soul because he committed suicide.
The pacing? Let me tell you, it’s glacial. At least a dozen scenes could be described as “atmospheric” but only because there’s nothing happening. We watch as Christina wanders the mansion, often accompanied by odd characters who come across as more confused than the audience. It’s like watching someone flip through a fashion magazine while waiting for a bus to show up, but the bus never arrives. And just when you think the film might have reached the height of its ridiculousness, it cranks up the weirdness by introducing zombie-like figures—though don’t expect anything remotely close to a good zombie movie. These “zombies” are more like extras with bad makeup and worse direction.
Then there’s the supposed erotic element, added in various versions of the film, ranging from orgy scenes to clumsy, nonsensical sex stuff that’s about as erotic as an IRS audit. The film’s attempt to sprinkle in adult content to mask its utter lack of substance feels forced and incredibly awkward. The idea seems to be that by adding nudity and sexual innuendo, Franco could somehow distract from the fact that the movie has no real narrative or tension. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t work. These scenes just hang there like a limp noodle in a hot bath, unexciting and completely out of place.
The performances aren’t helping either. Christine von Blanc, as Christina, is about as engaging as a wet rag. She spends most of the film looking either mildly confused or entirely bored by the absurdity unfolding around her. It’s hard to blame her when she’s trapped in a script that makes absolutely no sense, but still, I would have liked to see some kind of emotion, some spark of life, something to make me care whether she inherited the mansion or not. But alas, this isn’t that kind of film.
And let’s not forget the absurdity of the zombie subplot, which might have been terrifying in a different film but here just feels like a lazy afterthought. Director Jean Rollin, known for his own brand of oddball horror, apparently shot some quick zombie scenes to patch up the film. They feel just as rushed and awkward as the rest of the production, with people in cheap zombie makeup stumbling around like they’ve just been told they’ve won the worst role in cinematic history.
The movie’s visuals aren’t much to write home about either. Yes, there are some lovely locations in Portugal—shiny, scenic shots of castles and misty landscapes—but these are undermined by Franco’s inability to make anything visually interesting out of them. The camera lingers on these landscapes for what feels like an eternity, and you almost start to wish that the zombies would come and put an end to it all. And when they do appear, they don’t feel like an eerie presence—they feel like a forced addition, as though the filmmakers needed to meet some arbitrary quota of “creepy things” for the audience to endure.
In a nutshell, A Virgin Among the Living Dead is a film that suffers from a severe identity crisis. It wants to be a gory zombie flick. It wants to be a weird, erotic supernatural thriller. It wants to be a gothic mystery. But what it ends up being is an incoherent mess, lazily stitched together from various ideas that never quite come to fruition. You’re left watching a parade of nonsensical scenes where people stand around looking confused, only occasionally interrupted by clumsy attempts at horror and sex that are far more uncomfortable than thrilling.
Ultimately, this movie is a relic of a time when people tried to make a movie just to see if they could get away with it. It’s the kind of film that might have been a tax shelter, but it’s also a shelter for your dwindling attention span. There are no heroes, no real villains, and certainly no coherent plot. It’s a collection of scenes, thrown together haphazardly in the hopes that something would stick. Nothing does.
In conclusion, A Virgin Among the Living Dead is one of those films that’s not so much “so bad it’s good” as it is just bad. The only redeeming feature here is that it’s so bewildering in its incompetence that you might find yourself watching just to see how the next absurd thing happens. If you find yourself watching this, I feel for you—but at least you’ll know that you’ve experienced a piece of cinema that somehow manages to be as lost as its protagonist.
