Wendigo Meets FEMALE VAMPIRE (Les Avaleuses,1973)

Wendigo didn't know that Lina Romay had died until I told him, but he knew the name when I said it. He'd first seen her in the pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland, but got to know her better, he's not ashamed to admit, in the pages of Celebrity Sleuth and Celebrity Skin. Because the latter two magazines were fairly informative about their subjects' careers, he had some awareness of the late actress's work and her relationship with Jess Franco, but he doesn't recall seeing any of Romay's films before I showed him Franco's Female Vampire last weekend. He was more familiar with it under the alternate title The Bare Breasted Countess and had a good idea of what he was in for -- but it didn't help much. Wendigo's a Franco skeptic -- he thinks poorly of his Count Dracula, for instance, -- but was willing to give the cult auteur another shot.

We cheated: this is a shot from Erotikill, an alternate version of Female Vampire.

Romay plays Countess Irina von Karlstein, last of an accursed line and vacationing in Portugal. The mute Irina is more like a succubus than a vampire in the current sense of the word, -- except in the alternate Erotikill version -- but Wendigo notes that vampires in pre-modern folklore were not exclusively blood-drinkers, and that a succubus is really just a kind of vampire, or vice versa. In Irina's case, it's succubus with an emphasis on suck. She drains your life force through oral sex -- but she's increasingly unhappy with her plight. The big problem seems to be that her sex partners die
before she can be satisfied.

 

Here's Romay in a mood more typical of the Female Vampire version.

Seeking satisfaction, she can't stop preying on people, or humping her bed, or fellating her bedpost. Recklessly, she drains the masseur of the hotel she's staying in, as well as a reporter sent to interview her notorious aristocratic self. Courting danger, she briefly turns vigilante vampire to break up some sort of torture-snuff ring before falling hard for a morbid poet (Jack Taylor) who wants her to take him "beyond the mists." This isn't just a poetic metaphor; after Irina kills the reporter, we see her escort the bare-breasted victim literally beyond the mists and into a magical forest from which she never returns.

Interview with the Female Vampire, and its sequel

Irina can only show the way but can't follow until the poet's example awakens the idea that she could will her own death. But maybe she won't have to go to that trouble, since the dedicated Dr. Roberts ("Jess Franck"), advised by the inevitable (for Franco) "Dr. Orloff," is determined to track down a vampire perpetrator of recent murders despite the skepticism of the local police. Will the intrepid occult investigator overcome Irina's equally-mute manservant in time to confront the countess in her Kool-aid filled bathtub -- because there's no way Franco's telling us that's blood -- before more people die or Wendigo falls asleep?...

There's your story, but Franco's real subject is ennui -- terminal dissatisfaction despite all efforts. In Wendigo's opinion, that choice of subject inherently limits the film's appeal, because even if Franco succeeds in creating empathy in the audience, their shared ennui would only leave them indifferent to Irina's fate or anyone else's. He might get away with it if Female Vampire were more successful on an artistic level, but Wendigo felt that Franco succeeded only sporadically in creating the right mood. He manages it best in the purely pictorial scenes when Romay wanders through the woods. There are other odd or arguably surreal moments that impressed or amused him. He was tickled by the way Romay would start to flap her arms like bat wings as if about to transform, only to have Franco cut to the flapping bat-winged hood ornament of a limousine as Irina delivers her self-pitying internal
monologues.

I bought a vampire limousine

But there's too much going on in the movie, and not enough, to maintain the tone. The movie suffers, in Wendigo's view, whenever it returns to Dr. Roberts and his desultory investigations. These scenes have a perfunctory quality -- Franco himself is lifeless in the vampire-hunter role -- and the English dubbing we subjected ourselves to was awful. But the real problem is Franco's all-too-obvious desire to film his girlfriend screwing and masturbating. To a certain extent you need these scenes to drive home the theme -- lack of satisfaction is one of the few themes capable of artistic realization in porn -- but Franco doesn't know when to quit. The sex and masturbation scenes just go on and on, far longer than necessary to make any point Franco can think of. They contributed to my own feeling that something like Female Vampire could never really have what we think of as a "director's cut" -- a definitive version of Franco's vision from which nothing can be cut. My hunch is that he thought almost everything he shot was provisional or expendable -- and the history of variants running between 70 and 110 minutes seems to bear me out. This may be the perfect case of a film being less than the sum of its parts. The way Wendigo sees it, Franco failed by succeeding. Female Vampire does inspire the ennui it describes. It leaves one drained and indifferent -- or at least that's how Wendigo felt.

While we watched, I suggested that this could be Franco's imitation of a Jean Rollin film, and Wendigo is willing to agree to a degree. Wendigo likes Rollin better because the Frenchman was capable of seeing magic in practically any setting or any object, while Franco, in my friend's opinion, has all the magical sensibility of a Polaroid camera. He has some sense of style, but Wendigo senses an essential absence of ideas or real imagination that limits Franco as a cinematic fantasist. His nice Portuguese location goes largely to waste, for instance, while he spends precious time in Romay's bedroom. We also compared Franco unfavorably to fellow Spaniard Paul Naschy -- you can tell the difference when you consider the awful scenes with Franco as Dr. Roberts. Naschy was a true believer in material like this, but Franco is clearly just going through the motions. Those scenes are just excuses to cast himself and get a Dr. Orloff into the movie -- and all the scenes could easily be cut without harming the story.

Jean-Pierre Bouyxou as "Dr. Orloff" looks up -- to show that he's blind,

while "Jess Franck" (left) looks on.

Wendigo hasn't seen much Franco, and hasn't seen anything that he's liked yet -- though he's curious to see the shorter, blood-oriented Erotikill version of this film. I've seen some that I've liked so I'm still willing to cut Franco some slack, but I can understand Wendigo's frustration. His admiration for Lina Romay's attributes remains undiminished however, and we agree that there is new poignancy now in the final moments when the countess, no longer bare breasted and possibly redeemed, finally walks on her own through the mist into posterity. Like the countess, Lina Romay herself now belongs to the ages.

1954-2012

Wendigo Meets MIDNIGHT SON (2011)

Don't watch Scott Leberecht's feature-film directing debut the way we did if you can avoid doing so. Wendigo and I watched it on FearNet, and despite the fact that we pay a premium to get that station, it censors movies. Curse words grow common at a certain point but all get censored, and women's naked breasts disappear in clouds of pixilation. Despite those drawbacks, we found the film worth reviewing, and we regret that it didn't get a chance to prove itself in theaters, apart from a handful of film festivals. Back in the day, something like Midnight Son would have been booked into drive-ins and grindhouse theaters. That's not to say that it's a good film or worthy of play in a modern multiplex -- Wendigo confesses that he would have been disappointed had he shelled out ten bucks to see it -- but is that the film's fault or the fault of modern distribution or exhibition policies? Does no one know how to promote something like this anymore? But enough editorializing.

Midnight Son is a B movie with the mindset of an "independent" film. That is, Leberecht, a former special-effects art director for Industrial Light and Magic, aspires more to art than exploitation. Like many a modern vampire movie this one can be taken as a metaphor for alienation, addiction, or what have you. The protagonist, Jacob (Zak Kilberg) is a security guard first seen waking up at night and parting the curtain-like blanket that keeps the sun off his bed. He's avoided sunlight since childhood, when his arm literally caught fire in strong daylight. He's feeling kinda poorly as he approaches his 25th birthday -- as a friendly janitor (veteran character actor Tracey Walter earns an "and" and honorary red-herring status for his trouble) helpfully explains, a body finishes growing at about that time. Jacob feels weak, has fainting spells, and goes through fits of the munchies -- nothing seems to satisfy him. A doctor suspects a form of anemia, and through trial and error Jacob discovers that only raw blood can calm his rumbly tummy. He buys animal blood by the carton from the local meat market, but after a while it fails to satisfy. Suspecting the worst -- he watches Fright Night on video and handles a cross to test himself -- he grows desperate for human blood. Caught trying to get into a medical-waste dumpster outside a hospital, Jacob becomes a client of Marcus (Jo D. Jonz), a corrupt orderly who eventually starts bleeding innocent people to supply our horrified hero. His increasingly dangerous relationship with Marcus complicates his romance with Mary (Maya Parish) a coke-addict cocktail waitress whose nosebleed during sex awakens his appetite for human blood. His efforts to avoid killing for blood only embroil him in violence -- and he worries that he may have killed without realizing it as police investigate the death of a woman who worked in his building.

At a certain point, Leberecht stops teasing and makes clear that Jacob has become some sort of vampire. Worse, he's started making vampires without meaning to. In one case, the new vampire is a menace that has to be stopped. With the other, Jacob faces a choice that decides the future for both himself and the woman he wants to love....

Wendigo was encouraged initially by Leberecht's pictorial ambition. Midnight Son is a slickly made movie, and for a special-effects guy the director seemed to have a sure hand with his actors, keeping them lively but also keeping them from going over the top. Wendigo sticks with that assessment; without going overboard himself, he found the movie a modest but solid success. The lead actors proved themselves promising, and the supporting cast didn't suck. The story won't set anyone's world on fire -- it isn't really anything new and doesn't pretend to be. It works familiar B-movie ground effectively, though it did leave us asking unanswered questions about Jacob's upbringing and whether his parents knew anything about his potential. Is his vampirism a biological accident or destiny? Leberecht doesn't say. But questions like that don't reflect poorly on the film. Arguably, they reflect its success as a character study that keeps you thinking afterward.

If anything, Midnight Son is too modest in its approach, too reticent apart from some moments of sex and gore, to grab the general audience, and it's not pretentious or transgressive enough to attract arthouse attention. FearNet was probably this film's best hope for wider exposure, which comes with a price. Regrettably, it isn't original or outrageous enough to distinguish itself from the low-budget pack, and Leberecht clearly can't afford (and maybe wasn't interested in) the effects that would have made his movie more spectacular. For Wendigo, Midnight Son was a mostly enjoyable experience, but it could never deliver enough enjoyment to justify dropping multiplex money to see it. But he thinks that any real vampire-movie fan would get something out of this sincere, somewhat thoughtful and somewhat above-average effort. He hopes that Leberecht can build on it and go on to bigger and better things.
Here's a trailer created for Midnight Son's showing at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival.

Wendigo Meets THE TWILIGHT SAGA: BREAKING DAWN, PART 1 (2011)

Regular readers should know the drill by now, but for the uninitiated, my friend Wendigo is a fan of the Twilight books and rejects the contention that Stephenie Meyer's use of vampires is "wrong" in any significant way. The folklore of the vampire has evolved over time and keeps evolving, and if it evolves to the point that they become often-benign fantasy creatures -- elves in our world, I say -- so be it. That being said, Wendigo's attitude toward the Twilight movies is more tempered. He feels that the series started strong, slipped in the second installment -- the story required more emotional range than Kristen Stewart had at the time, -- and recovered in the third part. He waited for the fourth film with trepidation, knowing that Summit Entertainment had cynically decided to divide the final book into two films, Harry Potter style. We saw Deathly Hollows Part 2 a few days before Breaking Dawn Part 1 and thus were well aware of the pitfalls of splitting a long novel -- the Potter series sadly staggered to its conclusion, we felt. While Wendigo thought that the novel Breaking Dawn did have a convenient dividing point, he wasn't certain that writer Melissa Rosenberg and new director Bill Condon would pick the right spot. He feared that, like Deathly Hollows Part 1, the first Breaking Dawn would feel unpleasantly incomplete.

Part 1 actually takes us about two-thirds through the novel, but Wendigo says that's where it should break if you have to break it. The final third and second film will bring a lot of new characters into the spotlight, some of whom are introduced fleetingly in Part 1 -- most notably a group of Cullen-inspired Alaskan vampires who show up for the long-awaited nuptials of Edward (you know who) and Bella Swan (ditto). In simplest terms, the first film leads up to the climactic moment of the book if not the entire series, the violent birth of Bella's hybrid baby, while the second film addresses the consequences, hinted at in a mid-credits visit to the Volturii, those nasty foreign vampires who've been spoiling for a fight with the kindly Cullen clan.  Part 1 itself divides neatly into halves, the first building up to the wedding and Brazilian honeymoon, the second playing out Bella's unexpected and increasingly nightmarish pregnancy.

Even Wendigo feels that the wedding preparation, the ceremony and the celebration dragged a bit. So if you're not all in for Twilight, the first 45 minutes or so of the picture may be unendurable. Everything is nicely shot by Condon, a proven talent, but the content, especially to the uninitiated, is on the level not even of a Lifetime but a Hallmark TV movie -- less menace than benign numbness. Wendigo stresses that the tone in the novel is less treacly; the wedding in print is a more bittersweet event, more starkly a farewell to the life and the people Bella has known, than the movie's celebratory tone suggests. For moviegoers, the wedding is a payoff, a victory lap, the audience's reward for three film's worth of patience. Few shadows are cast, the most prominent by the sulking Jacob (you know who, too), and Condon leavens the happy tone with Ed's flashback confession to his Depression-era career as a vigilante vampire and Bella's horrorshow dream of her family slaughtered by her bloodstained intended.

 

Above: Depression Edward eyes some action while Bride of Frankenstein plays in an homage by the director of Gods and Monsters to himself. Below...Are you entertained? Is this what you came to see?

Wendigo's big complaint about the first half is less with the wedding than with the silly reception speeches. It's meant to be funny, but he found it generic and tedious -- though I felt that Pattinson was at his most relaxed to date during Ed's slightly tipsy speech. Wendigo felt that time would have been better spent recreating the exotic mystery of the new couple's journey to their Brazilian honeymoon island. Condon pays too much attention to the swanky furnishings of the Cullen vacation house -- including their all-too fragile bed -- to evoke the location the way Meyer does. The landscapes back in Forks may be familiar by now, but that doesn't relieve Condon of an artistic obligation to make it look impressive. Part 1 was the most claustrophobic of the Twilight films so far as far as Wendigo was concerned. That said, Condon pulled off some nice visuals, even if he's more comfortable with interior than with outdoor space, and the action sequences with the superspeedy vampires and the CGI wolves were mostly well done. Condon may be the most prestigious director to take on Twilight, but in Wendigo's opinion Catherine Hardwicke still sets the standard for handling the material right.

Above, the voice of Taylor Lautner stands out from the pack.

Below, the live Lautner bows before the Cullen baby, his "imprinted" mistress.

Bella and Edward's honeymoon is cut short when the new Mrs. C. finds herself visibly pregnant after only two weks of marriage. This catches all the Cullens flatfooted -- in patriarch Carlisle's centuries of medical practice he's never heard of a vampire impregnating a human -- while it infuriates the Forks wolfpack, who regard the impending offspring as an abomination. It's not so good for Bella, either, since the baby is like a parasite, draining her vitality from within. This leads to differences of opinion -- Jacob defies his pack to protect Bella (for a film focusing on the main pair's wedding, Wendigo felt that Taylor Lautner stole it with a forceful performance), and more importantly, the Cullens are split over whether the baby should be aborted -- if possible -- or carried to term. Ultimately it's Bella's decision, and despite being well-aware of the mortal risk to her, she insists on keeping the baby and -- still more horribly -- naming it "Ejay" if it's a boy and "Renesme" if a girl. Don't ask. A political message might be inferred here, but the movie doesn't really try to make a political issue of it. Both sides of the debate have good arguments, but it probably makes sense in the overall context of Twilight for Bella to carry the baby to term.

Since we started watching the movies Wendigo and I have pondered what metaphoric meaning vampirism might have for Stephenie Meyer. By now we're fairly convinced that it stands simply for coming of age, for the rites of passage that culminate, for females, in childbirth. It seems archetypically right that Bella should finally be turned upon giving birth, on an understanding that vampirism represents the mystery of adulthood, its pains and responsibilities, from the anxious yet ardent perspective of Meyer's target readership of teenage girls. Wendigo would add that the target audience really could extend to anyone capable of empathy with those adolescent feelings. It's a pretty good overarching metaphor -- but we haven't quite figured out where the shapeshifting Indians fit into the symbolic plan.

Cullens must fight for a very good reason,

Punching out wolves like Liam Neeson. Y'heard?

Breaking Dawn Part 1 disappoints Wendigo slightly for being less explicit and graphic, in order to keep the PG-13 rating, than the book. That means we don't get to see Bella nude and we don't see the baby's birth in all its splatterpunk splendor -- Edward discreetly bites through Bella's belly and placenta offscreen, obscured by mommy's belly. It's the main moment when the book lives up to the expectation horror fans bring, rightly or not, to anything dealing with vampires. While I felt the pregnancy and birth were the strongest drama of the movie series so far, Wendigo stresses that the film's birth scene falls far, far short of the horror that might finally have reconciled gorehounds and genre buffs to these much-hated films. Readers actually feared for Bella's survival, but the film's toned-down presentation, and the obvious fact that a sequel's on the way, diminish any anxiety viewers might fear. The cliffhanger becomes not whether Bella will survive, but what kind of vampire she'll be as she wakes up red-eyed in the final shot of Part 1.

Wendigo isn't worried over whether there'll be enough material left in Breaking Dawn for one more feature film. He can't really explain without spoiling Part 2, but suffice it to say that "all sorts of stuff" happens. He's also satisfied with Part 1 as it is, though he admits to a bias in favor of the material that makes him potentially more forgiving than he was with the last two Harry Potter films. But he thinks he could say objectively that Breaking Dawn Part 1 is better than either half of Deathly Hallows. It's still well short of the standard set for him by the first film -- though his wish that Hardwicke had stayed on was dampened after seeing Red Riding Hood -- and he doesn't think it's quite as good as Eclipse was. But at least it didn't make him dread seeing the final film in the series. Despite his reservations and criticisms, he's looking forward to seeing Condon close things out.

Wendigo Meets HOUSE OF DARK SHADOWS (1970)

Before there was Team Edward there was Team Barnabas. A newspaper account of a 1970 publicity appearance by Jonathan Frid reads like a description of a flash mob a good thirty years before anyone thought of such a thing. Once word got out that Frid had appeared, 600 fans mobbed the venue. A police escort was necessary to get him away from the crowd. Frid was a 45 year old man and, like many cinematic vampire actors before him, not a conventionally handsome man. As with the others, there was something about the idea of the vampire that made Frid, briefly, a cult figure. But if anything, Frid was even more decisively, disastrously typecast than Bela Lugosi. When he makes a cameo appearance in Tim Burton's Dark Shadows later this year, it'll be the 87 year old Frid's first appearance on film in nearly forty years, since his starring role in Oliver Stone's first movie, Seizure.

My friend Wendigo says that Barnabas Collins is an important transitional figure in American pop culture, the bridge between the oldschool villainous master vampire and a new paradigm that was in part a product of the medium that created him. Collins was a character on a soap opera, one that so captured the public's imagination in his original story arc that creator-producer Dan Curtis decided that he shouldn't be killed off. That meant that Barnabas, unlike any previous vampire, became a character that evolved, and as he evolved, he set the template for the reluctant and the noble vampire, a supernatural being that eventually befriended and earned the trust of mortals. He could go through phases when he ceased to be a vampire, and phases when he again became evil, and finally ended the series as a happy human being. A pragmatic production decision precipitated a kind of cultural revolution, the consequences of which continue today. You don't have the greater emphasis on romance in the John Badham-Frank Langella Dracula, Wendigo says, without the example of Barnabas Collins, for whom love was redeeming, and whose love was liberating for women.

The classic publicity shot for House seems to stress Barnabas the lover. Was it false advertising?

So why in hell did Curtis ignore all this when he adapted his revolutionary concept for the big screen? In short, House of Dark Shadows portrays Barnabas Collins as a purely predatory vampire who preys on his descendants and their friends until he is staked and destroyed. What seemed to be special about him on TV is totally set aside. Wendigo has wondered why ever since he first saw the picture. He's old enough to have watched the last years of the soap opera religiously as a small, monster-loving boy. He first saw House several years later on cable TV. It worked for him as a horror film, but Barnabas being killed confused him. He enjoyed the idea of a monster being a good guy, so something was obviously missing when the vampire was just a standard bad guy. But the main thing he missed was one of the series's linchpin characters: Angelique the witch, who had become the show's nearest thing to a "big bad" as Barnabas became a hero. In the soap, her curse made Barnabas a vampire -- but in the way of soaps she was also his true love, and in the way of this particular soap even Angelique redeemed herself by sacrificing herself to aid Barnabas's final reversion to humanity. Had Curtis cast the actress Lara Parker in House, he could have had a happy ending for Barnabas by making Angelique the villain whose curse might be lifted by killing her. But Curtis presumably couldn't spare her from the still-running daily show, while Frid could be written out for the duration by Barnabas getting trapped in his own coffin. Without Angelique, Wendigo says, House isn't really the Dark Shadows that he knows and many fans love.

Dark Shadows the series was flashback happy, but this is just a costume party sequence from House with Grayson Hall in the foreground. Screencap from fanpop.com

House re-enacts the soap's introduction of Barnabas, who is sprung from the coffin his father had trapped him in back in the 18th century when ghoulish caretaker Willie Loomis (John Karlen) breaks into the coffin looking for treasure. Making Loomis his thrall, Barnabas sets to preying on folks, only to see in Maggie Evans (Kathryn Leigh Scott) the spitting image of his lost love Josette, who had killed herself rather than join him in vampirism. Riffing on the She/Imhotep concept that Curtis would later inflict on Dracula itself, Barnabas hopes to reclaim Josette by claiming Maggie. Scientist-scholar Julia Hoffman (Grayson Hall) discovers Barnabas's secret, while her research on the vampire's victims suggests a cellular irregularity that could be cured. Tempted by the prospect of living by day with Maggie, Barnabas submits to Hoffman's treatments, but a botched or sabotaged injection turns him into a decrepit old man with no choice but to drink blood again. In the film this results in Hoffman's death, though the character continues through the end of the series. Several characters who lasted for the duration are bumped off here, making House a veritable alternate-universe Dark Shadows -- parallel time, in the show's own nomenclature. An extended middle episode involving a vampirized Caroline Stoddard (Nancy Barrett) -- one of Wendigo's favorite creepy parts of the film, is entirely original to this movie and deviant from the series. After Barnabas slaughters most of the cast, it's up to Jeff Clark (Roger Davis) and a repentant Willie to stop the vampire from claiming Maggie as his eternal, undead bride.

Barnabas suffers some serious pre-wedding jitters thanks to makeup ace Dick Smith (above) before settling down to consummate the unholy marriage. Caps by filmfanatic.org and collinsport/sarawebsite.com

On its own terms, House is an occasionally stylish film that takes some advantage of location filming in Tarrytown NY as well as costlier, artsier sets than a soap opera uses.  Curtis directs at a breakneck pace, trying to cram weeks worth of storylines in approximately 90 minutes and starting in the middle of events. His editing is sometimes too rapid, or simply choppy, perhaps too much in the manner of soaps. The pace left Wendigo unsure of exactly how much time actually passes; it could be weeks or it could be months. Curtis's limitations as a novice movie director make the film less than it could be, but even a slicker production would not really represent the Dark Shadows that made cultural history. For Wendigo, that would have required not just Angelique but the show's signature flashbacks that showed the likable mortal Barnabas before his curse and gave viewers a greater stake in his redemption. The film is still worth a look as an influential vampire film at the start of the Seventies -- we both had a stronger sense of how much Robert Quarry's Count Yorga was influenced by Frid, if not by Barnabas, after rewatching House -- but Wendigo would recommend watching a run of soap episodes instead to see what Dark Shadows was all about before Tim Burton and Johnny Depp mess with its legacy. Until then, if you've ever wondered what a modern Dark Shadows TV show would look like, compared to the failed revival of 1990-1, Wendigo suggests taking a look at Vampire Diaries, not as a reenactment of the older show but a modernization incorporating Dan Curtis's innovations and their elaborations over time. And if Burton really messes with Curtis's legacy, we suppose it might count as poetic justice. Check back in a few months and we'll tell you what we think.

Here's the trailer, uploaded by CrowTRobot1313.

Wendigo Meets WE ARE THE NIGHT (Wir sind die Nacht, 2010)

About a third of the way through Dennis Gansel's film -- at the point when novice vampire Lena is urged to put aside her qualms about blood-drinking and "just let go," my friend Wendigo turned to me and said, "This is Near Dark." A few minutes later, when the four vampire women went on a shopping spree, I suggested, "This is Near Dark meets Sex in the City," and Wendigo agreed. Moments after that, as the ladies raced their stolen luxury cars through a tunnel, we decided it might really be Lost Boys meets Sex in the City. It got more Near Dark-y again when one of the characters got trapped outside her car and caught on fire. But let's backtrack a little.

What makes Wir sind die Nacht a German Near Dark? Wendigo says that a cast of ruthless amoral vampires dragging a hapless human into their life of fun and murder made it so, at least for a while. That's basically the formula of Lost Boys as well, though the Schumacher film portrays the unlife more as a joyride than a crime spree. Overall, Wendigo would say the Near Dark analogy is closer because the German vamps are far more gratuitously destructive than Kiefer Sutherland's crew -- but he feels that you could go either way. The fact that the predators are all beautiful women who consume conspicuously makes it a bloodthirsty Sex in the City and gives it an identity of its own within vampire cinema.

Gansel gives us a mythos backstory in which the world's female vampires -- there are no more than 100 of them on Earth -- exterminated their male counterparts because the men were bossy and stupid. These are somewhat conventional vampires, invisible in mirrors and vulnerable to sustained sunlight. The one rule they have that we know of is that they'll keep vampirism within the gender, which gives the whole story a homoerotic potential that Gansel largely steers clear of. Our heroine Lena (Karoline Herfurth) is a guttersnipe pickpocket who raises the eyebrows of boss vampire Louise (Nina Hoss) when she tries to get her dirty self into the nightclub Louise runs. Something about Lena's eyes gives Louise hope that this time, she'll have found a soulmate, or the nearest thing to one since her maker was destroyed (or destroyed herself) on a beach many years earlier. Wendigo wondered whether Louise had felt the same way about her two established galpals, onetime silent starlet Charlotte (Jennifer Ulrich) and ditzy Nora (Anna Fischer). They're all just friends now, though Charlotte gives signs of growing sick of it all, but Louise clearly wants more from Lena, who once vamped gets a supernatural skin treatment and hair extensions along with the expected strength, speed and power to defy gravity. These vamps can walk on ceilings and jump from airplanes without parachutes. But somehow Lena isn't having fun.

Wendigo liked that the film didn't go for either of the obvious directions. Louise and Lena do not become lovers, nor do they become mortal enemies in a revenge feud until the very end of the picture. Not that he has any objection to lesbian vampires, but he liked that being vampirized didn't automatically turn Lena (or Nora, who has a crush on a mortal bellboy) into a lesbian -- which makes things difficult for Louise. This is a glamorous but not romantic vampire film in which vampirized people can't shake lose the baggage of their lives. This is most poignantly shown in Charlotte's subplot, which has her visiting a hospital where her now-elderly daughter lies dying, and deciding afterward to take a walk in the sun. Unlike in some stories, vampirism here doesn't mean losing your soul. Lena is, unusually, a "noble vampire" from the get-go, constantly struggling against the impulse to kill for blood. As Wendigo notes, in fiction a noble vampire doesn't usually start out noble, -- not even Edward Cullen did -- but has an early career of murder prior to a moral transformation. Lena is very much like the heroes of Near Dark and Lost Boys in her scruples, but in the two American films the hero is presumed not to have fully transformed, while Lena has as far as we can tell. She never drinks straight from a vein, except possibly at the very end of the film. Through her, We Are the Night has it both ways, showing the vampire lifestyle as superficially cool while the heroine rejects that coolness.

Perhaps scandalously, Lena rejects the women-only vampire lifestyle for romantic love with a man, to the point of violating the great taboo and guaranteeing a shitstorm for herself in any imagined sequel. The most scandalous thing about this is that the hero, Tom the policeman, is as densely inane as any human male lead in a vampire film dating back to David Manners. Tom is a handsome cretin, a veritable dummkop who admits to becoming a cop because he likes to run around chasing people. He's utterly outwitted by the mortal Lena and seems to have nothing to offer the immortal Lena, except for being a hunk. I guess we have to accept that that's enough.

We watched a dubbed, edited for language version of We Are the Night on FearNet On-Demand. Wendigo felt that the dubbing was okay for the most part -- we'd like to see more dubbing of foreign films to give them a fair chance in the U.S. market and pre-empt Hollywood remakes -- except for the actress who voices Lena in English. She simply sounds too perky -- and too old, Wendigo adds -- for the tough urchin we see on screen. He thought the opening sequence, in which Louise's crew slaughters the crew and passengers of a jetliner and ditch in mid-air with their shopping bags from Paris, was an inspired introduction to the vampires. It established each woman's personality while stressing how alien all three are to humans. He liked the effects and art direction that let the vampires walk on ceilings and walls, as well as little bits like Charlotte putting a cigarette out in her own eye. He also liked most of the action scenes -- though some suffered from the fragmented confusion common to overedited action scenes everywhere. One drawback to watching the thing dubbed was that we lost some of the German-ness of it, particularly an awareness of some of the landmarks that we suspected should have been obvious to us, but weren't. Whether the dubbing actors should have spoken with German accents is a question for another time. But We Are the Night, with its flaws, is decent enough to have broad appeal for horror fans in any language.

Here's an English-language trailer from production company RatPackFilm's YouTube channel.

Wendigo Meets DRACULA: THE VAMPIRE AND THE VOIVODE (2009)

When I told my friend Wendigo about a new Dracula documentary available for streaming on Netflix, we both felt it would be interesting to check it out as a kind of update of the 1970s book tie-in documentary In Search of Dracula. That earlier film was virtually a Mondo Dracula from the golden age of exploitation documentaries that could be sold as a virtual horror movie thanks to Christopher Lee's participation. The new film from Michael Bayley Hughes is both more modest and more ambitious, claiming to be the first movie that tells the true stories of both Bram Stoker and his subject. Dracula scholar Elizabeth Miller appears on screen frequently and was a script consultant; her participation made it credible for Wendigo, who has corresponded with Miller. There's still something of the Mondo method to this movie. It travels to the novel's locations, from the Borgo Pass to Whitby, and lingers in Romania to investigate the Dracula-centered tourist industry that's grown there since In Search of Dracula was made and Communism fell. Like many a Mondo movie, it has an eye for the tellingly tacky and sometimes salacious detail. Those bits may make the film entertaining for those who find its main storyline a little dry.

Wendigo wants to send a shout-out to his virtual friend Elizabeth Miller.

Under Miller's influence, Hughes takes the anti-In Search of Dracula approach, refusing to equate Stoker's character with the historical voivode Vlad Tepes. He emphasizes the shallowness of Stoker's research and his creation of a fantastical Transylvania that Romania has a hard time living up to. Hughes practices biographical criticism on Dracula, stressing how Stoker's personal experiences before his research for the novel shaped some of its scenes and moods. Wendigo found a lot of Hughes's interpretations tentative or merely conjectural. The filmmaker proposes that many events "may have" influenced Stoker without really nailing down any proof, from a legend about poet Christina Rosseti's wondrously preserved corpse to the mummies kept in an overrated state of preservation in a church near one of his homes. This sort of stuff is inevitable in almost every literary biography these days, but Wendigo was at least happy that Hughes got the key point right about Dracula and Vlad.

Bram Stoker is remembered by a Whitby re-enactor (above) and a Romanian hotel (below)

But there wouldn't be much of a movie if they didn't talk about Vlad at all. Wendigo found the Romanian half of the picture "interesting but odd." Again, Hughes scrupulously distinguishes the fictional vampire from the famous voivode. It seems, however, that the Romanian tourist history makes no such distinction. Stoker draws tourists there, and they honor the author with a statue for that, but they exploit the interest in Dracula by selling Vlad paraphernalia. Wendigo finds that a sad way for Romania to sell out their own history, and we suspect that Hughes shares Wendigo's point of view. The director focuses on the vulgar in time-honored Mondo fashion, from voivode knicknacks and mugs to the Miss Transylvania beauty contest in Bistrita. There's also some of the same sort of peasant footage we got in In Search of Dracula, with Hughes stressing how the peasantry is still largely unchanged since the Seventies.

Faces of Transylvania

Overall, Wendigo was underwhelmed by Vampire and the Voivode as a movie. It's informative enough, especially on Stoker, but given the film's own ballyhoo it has surprisingly little to say about the actual writing of Dracula. Hughes neglects to mention one of the by-now best known tidbits about Stoker, his modeling of the vampire on his employer, the Victorian master thespian Henry Irving, and ignores Stoker's own account of an erotic dream that inspired the episode of Dracula's brides. We both objected to the claim that no other work of Stoker's endures, when movies have been made of at least two other novels -- and more than one from The Jewel of Seven Stars. Visually, Hughes went easy on re-enactments. His attempts are so minimal as to be funny, consisting of a guy dressed up as Vlad striking poses and an elderly, confused-seeming man wandering around with a candelabra in a supposed recreation of a scene from the novel. The picture is heavy on talking heads, some adding to the amusement by dressing in costume like Harry Collett as a Whitby coachman, but few apart from Miller really added to its credibility.

Wendigo found V&V in many respects less scholarly than In Search of Dracula, if more respectable in its conclusions. He would have liked more readings from Dracula or from chronicles of Vlad, but for whatever reason V&V was surprisingly lacking in these. Intellectually, Wendigo's more in a agreement with this movie, but he still considers In Search Of the more entertaining film. Either way, the definitive documentary about Dracula as a historical and cultural phenomenon remains to be made.

Wendigo Meets CAPTAIN KRONOS, VAMPIRE HUNTER (1974)

It's not a good sign for the movie, I suppose, when the DVD box cover forgets to show you the title character, and that's where Wendigo and I started with the now-remaindered Paramount DVD of Brian Clemens's would-be tentpole picture from the dying days of the Hammer studio. With Dracula played out and the Karnstein act already growing tired, the home of the vampire made this last stab at infusing some novelty into the bloodsuckers, making sure to make Captain Kronos a tangental sequel to the Karnstein series (here pronounced "Karn-steen," Mel Brooks style) while pointing toward new directions that were never actually taken.

A Van Helsing for the Swaggering Seventies, Kronos (Horst Janson) is a sword-swinging, often-shirtless, cheroot smoking stud on a mission from God. The way Wendigo sees it, Kronos was to Peter Cushing's Van Helsing what Hugh Jackman's Van Helsing was to all other respectable vampire hunters: a floundering attempt to be more cool on all levels. At this point, Hammer thought it was better to look good than to talk good, giving us a very Germanic, very wooden star. Nor, under Clemens's direction, does Janson look very good as an action hero. The director doesn't direct action very well and has difficulty maintaining the balance he seeks between horror action and tongue-in-cheek fantasy. The climactic swordfight between hunter and vampire, waged while everyone else stands in mesmerized stillness, looks ridiculous, but not in a good way, and much of the action is like that.

Hammer clearly wanted Kronos to stand for something new in vampire movies. The script stresses that there are as many varieties of vampire as there are animals in nature, with different modes of attack, different vulnerabilities, etc. For this introductory outing the studio tries to spice up its usual gothic formula. The vampire doesn't drain its victims of blood alone, but of youth above all, leaving the usual pretty Hammer victims dessicated old ladies. It slinks about by day, albeit concealed in black robes that keep the predator's true identity a mystery until the end. It drains the life even from the landscapes, plants withering in its shadow. It can be trailed in obscure ways; plant a dead toad in a box beneath a road, for instance, and the poor croaker will come back to life if a vampire passes over. Wendigo assures me that this is authentic folklore, but that only shows that folks will believe all manner of lore. In one blackly comic scene, Kronos and his hunchbacked assistant struggle to figure out the right method to kill a more-or-less compliant subordinate vampire, trying the usual stake and the unusual expedient of hanging before literally stumbling upon the solution of applying blessed steel to its flesh. This inspires the forging of a sword from a steel crucifix while Kronos gets all spiritual and meditative like the martial-arts masters he was probably meant to emulate. These eccentric details are most of the best things about Captain Kronos in Wendigo's opinion.

Above: Shadow of the vampire -- or shadow of Gumby?

Below: a crucifix was no help to this victim.

The other best thing about the movie, of course, is Caroline Munro.

Munro is an icon of Seventies genre cinema, the Vampirella that never was and a mesmerizing presence in everything from The Golden Voyage of Sinbad to Starcrash. Sadly, she's underutilized and at the same time overutilized here. She isn't given much to do but service Kronos after he frees her from the stocks (she'd been sentenced for dancing on Sundays), but Clemens always cuts to her reaction shots as she makes saucy and sardonic faces in lieu of actual commentary on the action. Wendigo is compelled to admit that she's little more than eye candy here -- but he doesn't mind indulging his cinematic sweet tooth every so often. He's always regretted that she didn't have as many substantial roles as she deserved -- and that she didn't do nude scenes. He treasures what we do have of her just the same. She effortlessly eclipses most of the cast, from John Cater's learned hunchback to Wanda Ventham as a poor man's Ingrid Pitt.

Dr. Grost's Zoology: Dead toads are our friends;

bats are not.

Wendigo thinks that Captain Kronos could have become the series Hammer hoped for -- if it had a different director and star and had come out in a period when people hadn't grown bored with vampires. As it turned out, Clemens's Kronos was the wrong film at the wrong time. Would it be worth trying again now? Again, Wendigo notes sadly that Stephen Sommers's abominable Van Helsing is, for all intents and purposes, a Kronos remake. He presumes that any attempt to literally redo Kronos would end up sharing all of Van Helsing's flaws and excesses. The simplicity of a hunter stalking a single master vampire and deducing the right method of killing it probably wouldn't satisfy 21st century audiences -- but you never know. People who are interested in alternate approaches to vampires and vampire hunting -- and people interested in Caroline Munro -- might be satisfied with the Captain Kronos we have, but the whole remains less than the sum of its parts.

Here's a trailer uploaded to YouTube by TheCultMovieReview.