VAMPIRE ECSTASY

YEAH, WHATEVER. CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

First off: I have absolutely no problem with screen nudity, and I have absolutely no problem with movies with lots of breasts in them. You want to do the naked women thing? Fine. Fill your boots. But please be aware that constantly cutting every few minutes to sex scenes, orgy scenes, topless rituals and sundry other footage of ladies jiggling about is liable to get more than a tad boring. That's the main problem with this choice bit of seventies Eurotat: there's nominally an actual plot but the obsession with girls with their kit off gets in the way. Call me boring, but if I want naked women, there's at least three websites I can look at for that sort of thing. If I've actually rented a DVD or gone to the cinema, you can take it as read that I want a "proper" film.

Vampire Ecstasy (aka The Devil's Plaything) is a fairly dull Swedish-German-Swiss offering for the smut market that plays well over an hour before any vampires bother to show up. Various young ladies arrive at a remote mountain castle: some for the reading of a will and one because she and her brother are researching local folklore, including the legendary vampire baroness who used to live in the castle. But are the housekeeper and staff seeking to perform the rites and rituals to resurrect the baroness?

Director Joseph Sarno spent many years churning out smut and XXX films: Vampire Ecstasy is nowhere near hardcore, even in this longer unrated edit (the American R-print excised about seventeen minutes from the sex scenes and Satanic ritual/jiggy dance sequences, and to be honest it would probably be a slightly better watch). The film doesn't have the weird dreamlike feel of the works of Jean Rollin, for whom nubile young lovelies cavorting around crumbly old castles in the nude is pretty much his territory: it has more of a plot but not really enough to fill the running time so much of it is taken up with nudity and sex scenes (including an unhealthy dash of incest). Yes, it's very nice, but it's just not very interesting.

**

Don't let me stop you though: