Vampyres

VAMPYRES

This 1974 film opens with a prologue in which a gunman kills two lesbian lovers.  For reasons not explained, the women become vampires.  They shack up in a sprawling dilapidated house with a well-stocked wine cellar and pose as hitchhikers to lure various victims to their abode.  Fran (who appears to be the alpha vampire) for some reason keeps one fellow alive over several nights and days, while Miriam prefers to kill her blood sources quickly.  A man and a woman camping nearby observe the house and speculate about whether or not anyone lives there.  Eventually, the guy Fran kept alive escapes and drives off.  Not much else occurs in this story.

Vampyres suffers from the lack of a clear single protagonist with a goal the viewer hopes he or she will achieve.  The narrative focus meanders back and forth between Fran and the campers with Miriam sometimes popping up.  The plot, such as it is, seems mostly like an excuse to string together some bloody images of the vampires feasting along with several nudity-heavy sex scenes.  The musical score is awesome, and I love the location (the house looks exactly like the sort of place lesbian vampires would exist), but the tale itself ends with no sense of resolution and never gripped me, filled me with tension, or made me wonder what would happen next.  Vampyres has fine atmosphere but a paper-thin plot.  Don’t waste your 88 minutes.