Vampyros Lesbos is a movie that sounds way more fun than it actually is. You hear the title and think: “Yes. This will be a blood-soaked, sapphic thrill ride with fangs, fog, and sex-crazed vampire chicks clawing each other apart under a blood moon.” Instead, what you get is 89 minutes of moaning, mirror shots, and softcore nonsense soundtracked by what can only be described as lounge music for lobotomy patients. Jess Franco, that mad wizard of Eurotrash cinema, made a movie about a lesbian vampire… and somehow made it boring.
Yes. You read that right. Boring.
The plot — and I’m using that term like one might use “architecture” to describe a pile of sticks — revolves around Linda Westinghouse (Ewa Strömberg), a woman who works in a notary office and begins having strange erotic dreams about a mysterious woman in a cape. This woman turns out to be Countess Nadine Carody (played by Soledad Miranda), a vampire who lives in Turkey, seduces women, and occasionally eats them — usually in that order. Linda, poor thing, travels to the Countess’s lair and is pulled into a hypnotic world of sensuality, fangs, and slow-motion writhing. Then things happen, or they don’t. It’s hard to tell because the entire movie feels like a dream you had after falling asleep during a late-night rerun of The Love Boat while on NyQuil.
Let’s be clear: Vampyros Lesbos isn’t so much a narrative film as it is an extended montage of half-naked women draped over modernist furniture while Franco zooms in and out like he’s trying to focus a telescope from the bottom of a swimming pool. It’s a softcore vampire movie with all the urgency of a poetry reading at a sedative factory. The vampire bites are less “terrifying seduction of the soul” and more “gentle nibbles from someone unsure if this is foreplay or foreclosures.”
And the dialogue? If you can stay awake long enough to listen, it’s an exquisite blend of existential gibberish and high school poetry club disasters. At one point, Nadine purrs:
“I am the daughter of darkness… the mistress of night… the lover of shadows…”
It sounds dramatic until you realize she’s saying this while lounging on a shag rug wearing an outfit made of glitter and apathy. Every line in this movie is whispered, half-mumbled, or dubbed in post by someone who clearly lost a bet. There’s no urgency, no stakes, just people staring at each other like they forgot why they entered the room.
Soledad Miranda, who looks like a fashion model trying to escape a shampoo commercial gone wrong, does her best with what she’s given — which is mostly long stretches of slow walking, glassy-eyed staring, and pretending to bite women in ways that are neither frightening nor erotic. She’s beautiful, yes, but her performance is less vampiric and more valium-induced. If she’s a creature of the night, then the night she’s from must be a Tuesday evening in a retirement home.
Ewa Strömberg’s Linda is no better. She’s our heroine, our audience surrogate, our central character — and she spends most of the film looking confused, partially nude, or both. Her acting style can best be described as “lost at IKEA.” She reacts to lesbian vampire seduction the way one might react to misplacing their keys: mild concern followed by blank stares and a whole lot of sighing.
And then there’s the editing, which should be studied in film schools under the heading: What Not to Do. Scenes begin mid-sentence, cut away mid-moan, and jump from dream to reality with zero warning or logic. It’s like Franco glued the film together while blindfolded, possibly during an earthquake. You’ll never know whether what you’re watching is real, a hallucination, a dream, or just Franco padding the runtime with stock footage of seagulls.
Oh, and let’s not forget the music — the one thing everyone always remembers about Vampyros Lesbos, mostly because it never stops. The soundtrack is a relentless, psychedelic lounge orgy of bongo drums, sitar twangs, and moaning synthesizers that sounds like the house band in Hell’s least popular strip club. It loops endlessly, awkwardly, and inappropriately. Whether someone’s dying, seducing, or just staring blankly into a mirror, the music treats every moment like a groovy dance number that never arrives.
Now, credit where credit’s due: the movie does look good — in the way a 1970s furniture catalog looks good. There’s color. There’s style. Franco was clearly playing around with composition and lighting and mirrors and curtains and all the things that make art students foam at the mouth. But pretty visuals don’t make up for the fact that this movie has less tension than a yoga retreat.
The horror? Nonexistent. The gore? You’ll see more blood in a shaving commercial. The vampire mythology? Tossed out the window like a garlic sandwich. Nadine doesn’t sleep in a coffin. She doesn’t fear sunlight. She seduces, yes, but with the kind of halfhearted effort that makes you wonder if she’s even into it or just doing it out of obligation to the genre.
And when the big climax finally arrives — and trust me, the word “climax” is generous here — it involves a limp confrontation that ends as abruptly as it began, followed by a final monologue that tries to be profound but lands with all the force of a wet sponge thrown at a brick wall.
Final Verdict: 1 out of 5 psychedelic bite marks
Vampyros Lesbos is the cinematic equivalent of someone trying to seduce you by reading Kafka while doing interpretive dance on shag carpet. It wants to be art, but it’s mostly arse. A slow, soggy, half-naked mess of a movie that’s too tame to be sexy, too lazy to be scary, and too high on its own supply to realize how monumentally dull it is. Watch it only if you’ve run out of Ambien and still want to fall asleep with a confused grimace on your face.
