Review for Vampire Ecstasy

Well, there’s no doubting that ‘Vampire Ecstasy’ delivers on all counts if camp seventies sexy euro-horror sleaze is your bag. It’s closer to a skin-flick than a horror film (horrotica?) but this potent cross-over was incredibly popular at the time of making. (Jess Franco’s ‘The Female Vampire’ and Jean Rollin’s ‘Shiver of the Vampire’ being just two other examples).


Maybe all the Hammer / Amicus teasing had just got too much and cinemagoers demanded to see more than mere hints and nods towards vampiric sex. There are no such frustrations here.


Joe Sarno, the writer and Director of the film was no stranger to saucy cinema. Indeed, he went way above mere sauce and into hard-core during the early eighties having already turned in some 75 soft-core sexploitation films up to that point. So it’s no surprise that ‘Vampire Ecstasy’ is an extension of that – a loosely dark narrative housing an erotic film.



This version is, miraculously, uncut so is replete with writhing and topless vampires, lesbian sex, incestuous sex, phallic candles, torture (well, S & M) and lots of neck-sucking. 



After its hypnotic opening scenes (topless girls writhing to a hypnotic jungle-drum rhythm in some dark ritual) we see that a group of young women have been invited to a creepy old castle run by spooky housekeeper Wanda (Henkova). One of them is supposedly set to inherit the castle.


Wanda thinks that one of the girls, Helga, would be the perfect body to use to resurrect her vampire lover, Baroness Varga. Of course, things don’t run smoothly and two meddling kids, Julia and Peter, do all they can to put a spanner in the spokes – and that’s not intended as a euphemism though could quite easily have been. 
So after much naked dancing and licking phallic shaped candles and worse, the small group do all they can to fend off the advances of the undead with garlic and crucifixes.


The film appears to be in English though it’s not clear whether dialogue originated as English or not or whether it’s dubbed. Whatever the case it has that ‘Tales from Europe’ disassociated feeling as a result which only serves to add to its strange atmosphere rather than detract. 



The acting may be a bit wooden but it’s a fair trade off if what you want is cheesy sleaze; X-rated vampire euro-trash soft-core only thinly disguised as a story.


The transfer is actually surprisingly good (I have a copy of the film which has fared far less well) and the quality of some of the shooting shines through, even though there is repetitious use of a small number of set ups.



Also included is a 2005 interview with Joseph Sarno (he died in 2010) which is clumsily done though of passing interest, despite being only six minutes long. 


If you’re a fan of the genre and kind of know what to expect then you won’t be disappointed.