{"id":4341,"date":"2015-09-10T01:45:12","date_gmt":"2015-09-10T01:45:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fantasticcrapcomics.com\/?p=4341"},"modified":"2015-09-10T01:45:27","modified_gmt":"2015-09-10T01:45:27","slug":"female-vampire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fantasticcrapcomics.com\/?p=4341","title":{"rendered":"FEMALE VAMPIRE!!!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Female Vampire<\/strong><\/a>~ 1975, Jess Franco, France<\/p>\n

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There is no agreed upon consensus regarding Jesus Franco<\/strong>, the now deceased, and maddeningly prolific\u00a0Spanish director responsible for Female Vampire<\/strong><\/em>. Numerous respected academics have weighed in on him, and Franco has been called one of the greatest minds in cinematic history, and also the single shittiest hacks who\u00a0ever lived, and in both cases, more than once. It’s safe to say that the jury is still\u00a0out, but even the most fanatical Franco-phile is usually willing to admit that Jess shot more than his share of total stinkers back in the day. This man’s first priority seemed to be making absolutely certain that he was always working on a movie, and whether or not anyone would ever want to watch it really didn’t seem to be a concern. He was sort of like those kids in school who always turned up so they could dick around with their friends, but gave no shits about their GPA. Perfect attendance, never turned in an assignment; that’s Franco all over.<\/p>\n

Female Vampire<\/em> is a fairly typical example of Franco’s work from the mid 1970’s. It stars\u00a0Lina Romay’s<\/strong> naughty bits<\/strong>, and costars Lina Romay<\/strong> herself, albeit\u00a0in a small, supporting role. Both Ms Romay and her\u00a0erogenous zones\u00a0are\u00a0longtime collaborators of Franco’s, on and off screen; and\u00a0in fact, Romay\u00a0was\u00a0Franco’s common-law spouse!<\/p>\n

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Yeah, I don’t know how, either. Maybe he was funny.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Regardless of any social or romantic commitment the two may have had to one another, Romay would continue to be a common feature in the director’s work for years and years, often appearing nude, and occasionally even performing in Franco’s hardcore pornographic films. Female Vampire<\/em> really showcases Franco’s\u00a0easy going attitude toward nudity and sex, as well as\u00a0his apparent disinterest in the quality of his finished work, and\u00a0as a\u00a0result,\u00a0we now\u00a0have\u00a0a frustratingly incoherent festival of boobs and jet black\u00a0pubic fur that some would dare to call a movie,\u00a0and which is today\u00a0widely available on Blu-ray\u00a0throughout most\u00a0developed countries. Sex sells.<\/p>\n

THE PLOT~<\/strong> Lina Romay plays Countess Irina Karnstein, a vampire who gets sexy\u00a0with folks all day, every day. Countess Karnstein is totally a vampire, you guys, but she doesn’t drink blood to live… She… Well, she get’s her sustenance through… other methods… SEXY methods. You pickin’ up what I’m puttin’ down? It’s semen.<\/p>\n

Really, there’s not much of a story here. Shocker, right?\u00a0Franco\u00a0does do\u00a0a little bit of work to try and\u00a0paint the vampire as a tragic figure, constantly groping for intimacy, by ultimately hollow and alone, but\u00a0this\u00a0isn’t new terrirory for vampire fiction by any stretch of the imagination,\u00a0and it’s been done better elsewhere. For the most part,\u00a0it’s a movie that volleys back and forth between gratuitous sex scenes featuring\u00a0Lina Romay\u00a0and whatever person or object happens to be in the room with her, and then flowery,\u00a0romantic French bullshit, which we\u00a0already have enough of that in the world.\u00a0Occasionally, we might get a\u00a0token exposition scene tacked on in a desperate attempt\u00a0to\u00a0give Female\u00a0Vampire<\/em>\u00a0some vague\u00a0illusion of\u00a0story,\u00a0but calling these scenes half-assed would be generous. Female Vampire<\/em> is\u00a0not\u00a0a movie to search out if you crave intellectual stimulation. It plays to a different part of the brain, if it plays at all.<\/p>\n

It’s pretty common to see Franco fans talk about Female Vampire<\/em> as being an example of “erotic” vampire cinema, and to me, calling\u00a0this film\u00a0“erotic” is worse than wishful thinking, it’s downright embarrassing. Female Vampire’s<\/em> sexual content is handled with the subtly and grace of an elephant high\u00a0on methamphetamines and LSD, barging through a hospital burn ward. This thing is clumsy, tactless, exploitative, shameless, lecherous\u00a0and crass.This is not erotica, this is pornography that never pulls the trigger.\u00a0It does succeed\u00a0occasionally at pulling off a haunting, poetic sort of\u00a0vibe, but honestly,\u00a0it’s sort of hard\u00a0NOT to feel poetic when you’re filming a nude woman in a black cloak frolicking about the mist shrouded forests of rural France.\u00a0This would have been an excellent place to call “cut,”, but of course, Franco finds a way to ruin even these brief moments of genuine beauty\u00a0by launching right into\u00a0an eye-rollingly juvenile zoom shot straight into Romay’s pubic mat. Why don’t you just paint monster trucks onto the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel to jazz it up, you bumbling, artless pornographer? Dammit, Franco. I’m just angry now.<\/p>\n

But is it fair to come down so hard on Franco, a man who, like you or\u00a0I, had bills to pay, and who was making movies\u00a0in an environment\u00a0where sex was increasingly in demand? It’s certainly reasonable to assume that a lot of the sexual content in Female Vampire<\/em> was integral in securing financing from investors, who expected this to greatly enhance the films\u00a0commercial appeal, but adding nudity to Franco’s work in order to make it more\u00a0commercial is\u00a0like putting chocolate sprinkles of a tire fire; it’s never going to be a delicious treat. There’s nothing\u00a0less\u00a0accessible than the mad celluloid ramblings of Jess Franco, and that’s a fact of life.\u00a0It’s a lesson financers learned the hard way, but clearly they made enough money to justify decades worth of budget, because Franco kept going and going long after this mess hit the screen. Now we can only furrow our brows in confusion, because it’s too late to stop him.<\/p>\n

It’s also amazing just\u00a0how much this film could have been improved by\u00a0just purchasing a decent tripod. The camera is constantly moving throughout the entire picture, and the pans and tilts are terribly\u00a0awkward and jerky, which is super\u00a0distracting. Technical issues like this are probably just one more thing that Franco couldn’t be bothered to give two shits about. Female Vampire’s<\/em> first and only objective is to exist, so in that regard, it’s was successful.<\/p>\n

To me,\u00a0it’s always been tough to figure out\u00a0if Franco is, in fact, a mad genius, or if this is actually just the single best example of the “Emperor’s New Clothes<\/strong>”\u00a0phenomenon\u00a0 ever. Yes, his wild, jazzy, off-road attitude towards motion picture production is certainly\u00a0fascinating, but at some\u00a0point, this starts\u00a0to feel terribly self indulgent, and the art is quickly swallowed up by the director’s personality, for better or for worse. Franco made movies for Franco… I guess\u00a0I can accept that,\u00a0but now\u00a0we too are\u00a0a part of this equation, and I think that in extreme cases,\u00a0the audience has a right to throw up their arms and say “What the fuck, dude?” Again, it’s too late for answers.<\/p>\n

In the end, Female Vampire<\/em> is barely even a movie. It’s just Lina Romay in her birthday suit wearing a cape and a belt, sexing up France with a trail of corpses in her wake, and even as I type this, I know that sounds a lot better than it actually ends up being. Art, or smut? We can sidestep that argument, because clearly, Female Vampire<\/em> is both. Genius, or shit? I’m really not sure.<\/p>\n

C-<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Female Vampire~ 1975, Jess Franco, France There is no agreed upon consensus regarding Jesus Franco, the now deceased, and maddeningly prolific\u00a0Spanish director responsible for Female Vampire. Numerous respected academics have weighed in on him, and Franco has been called one of the greatest minds in cinematic history, and also the single shittiest hacks who\u00a0ever lived, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[393],"tags":[1396,1395,1394,1391,1392,1393,1397,1244],"class_list":["post-4341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-erotikill","tag-female-vampire","tag-france","tag-jess-franco","tag-jesus-franco","tag-lina-romay","tag-lina-romays-naughty-bits","tag-spain"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fantasticcrapcomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4341","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fantasticcrapcomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fantasticcrapcomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fantasticcrapcomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fantasticcrapcomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4341"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/fantasticcrapcomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4341\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4453,"href":"https:\/\/fantasticcrapcomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4341\/revisions\/4453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fantasticcrapcomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fantasticcrapcomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fantasticcrapcomics.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}