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Vampire Blues
[One Shot Productions]
1999; color
Directed by Jess Franco
Starring: Rachel Sheppard, Analía Ivars, Lina Romay, Jesus Franco & Peter Temboury
Vampire Junction
[One Shot Productions]
2001; color
Directed by Jess Franco
Starring: Samantha Olsen, Lina Romay, Viktor Seastrom, Fata Morgana & Paul Lapidus
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Two newer Franco films, one from 1999 and the other from 2001, both shot-on-video with obviously sub-zero budgets, both with oddball takes on the vampire saga and both similar in some ways to his hallucinatory 1970 "epic" Nightmares Come At Night. Vampire Blues has the sparsest dialogue I can recall in any Franco film. It's so minimalistic there might be only 50 spoken lines in the entire 90 minutes. Instead, he goes heavy on the visual side of storytelling, forgoing his zoom obsession for lingering shots of the lead characters engaging in various activities. The lead character is a woman vacationing, by herself, in an unnamed seaside resort town. (There's a quote at the beginning of the film that sets the tone, which says something to the effect of 'those who travel alone are the easiest prey.') While we see extended shots of this girl sunning herself on the beach, she's being followed not only by Franco's camera but by a female vampire who's fixated on her from afar. We get frequent and even more extended shots of the girl sleeping, and in what may be her dreams (or possibly the vampire projecting herself into the girl's unconsciousness), we see drawn out shots of the vampire naked and erotically stroking herself with her hands and a long billowy red scarf. Her companion in some of these sequences is a 20-something dude playing acoustic guitar very badly. (I think his "tune" is the Blues of the title.) The girl seems somewhat startled by the dreams and keeps staring at a mansion that overlooks the beach as if she's drawn to it for an unknown reason. One night she goes to a club where the entertainment is a bizarre gypsy lady, played to the hilt by Lina Romay. Romay immediately fixates on the girl and starts hanging out with her, somehow knowing about the vampire. After few more dream sequences and separate lesbian hook-ups between the girl and the vampire and the girl and Romay, we get one of the weirdest vampire killing scenes ever committed to film. (Or, in this case, video). As Romay watches, the vampire is seducing the girl again and she pretends to join in, instead whipping out a giant black dildo that she'd previously mumbled some incantations over and… well… it ain't exactly a stake through the heart but the vampire dies pretty quickly, thus bringing this oh so strange tale to an end. The second tale of vampiric exploits once again features Lina Romay, this time appearing as a "foreign journalist" who's trying to get a story. It isn't really explained what the story she's trying to get is but, through the courtesy of some narrative voice-overs, we learn she's sort of stranded in what looks like a modern day abandoned wild west themed town. The vampires in question this time around, (there are at least three, two mostly naked chicks and a guy in a long coat who seems to be the head vampire) appear and disappear like ghosts but manage to put the bite on the handful of people left in the town. While there's far more substantial dialogue in this one, the story is ten times more confusing so it was even harder to follow. In the end, not only do the vampires evaporate into the ether one last time, they take Romay along with them. (She is in a threesome with the two girls at the time so maybe there's some sort of combination orgasm / vampire bite thing going on that kills 'em all. Who knows?) Vampire Junction is one of the most impenetrable Franco films I've ever seen - and that's saying something. Seriously, it's so fucking hard to follow I'll listen to just about any explanation so if you've got the temerity to tackle this one I heartily welcome your insight cause I'm pretty much in the dark. If you're a devoted fan you have to see them both but, if you're forced to pick one over the other, Vampire Blues is the way to go.
—the Kommandant
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