Daughters of Darkness (1971)

One of the worst movies I've ever seen

One of my all time favorites.

An Exercise In Nonsense

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Negative! Complete failure, pile of crap film. Successful as an "ART" film, if deaf and blind. Boring, Amateur Acting, Garbage Story.OK, first rule of a film, should probably be is ENTERTAINMENT. This movie is boring, slow, amateur acting all around, amateur directing, the story is just plain garbage. Best part is the cinematography, that was good. The editing sucked, you can tell by how long they linger on a frame. And all the cuts of the waves crashing in. The music was OK, not great. The ending with the car crash and fire was just plain garbage. Then the new embodiment of the "Countess" maybe waiting for a sequel, real Hollywood ending. Believe it it sucked. I'm reading through the reviews. And most people love this crap. Maybe they go into it thinking it's an ART film and they excuse all the elements that make up an ENTERTAINING film, like story, acting, etc. I don't know, but it must be why the same people love Suspiria, another pile of crap that people love, and other Argento films. I hate Argento and I hate this movie. Here's the story, a newlywed couple stay at an abandoned hotel. We have no back story on the wife, not good. The back story on the husband is he has a mother, but there's mystery. So, you stick around for the mystery. Finally we find out who the mother is, an older guy in drag, probably some kind of sugar daddy for the husband. This leads to nothing. Nothing! OK, so then we get a scene, wait for it, when the husband beats the wife with a belt. Not cool. Then a shot of them naked with marks on the wife, and the guy still holding the belt. She takes off but is brought back to the hotel by the "Countess". Now the Countess is supposedly Elizabeth Bathory, the blood sucking/bathing wench who also checked in at the hotel. She appears earlier with her "Secretary". We have no other info on her or why she's staying at this hotel. Apparently she stayed there 40 years before, at her last world tour, because the concierge recognized her and that she hasn't aged a day.The countess sends her secretary to seduce the husband, she dies by cutting herself on a shaver, they bury her on the beach. The countess opens her coat like bat wings, real chess here. But people love this crap. The countess kills the husband and she and the wife drink his blood, and they dumb the body. There's a retired detective that comes around, he gets run over while riding his bike. At the end, the wife is now the new secretary, she is driving the countess. The countess asks for speed because daylight is approaching, they crash, the countess flies out of the car onto a branch, and is impaled, the car goes on fire and so does the countess. Next scene, we see the wife, acting as the new countess speaking to another couple at an outside part. The end. The story sucks. No backstory on the wife, the backstory on the husband at first is interesting, then goes into a dead end. The countess and her secretary, just ridiculous. The acting all around are garbage. The woman playing the countess, you can tell there's talent there but the crap she's given is utter nonsense. It just goes on and on. The secretary was decent compared to the rest. The wife was just plain owful. The husband was OK, but not great, again, given garbage dialogue. The concierge and old detective could have been played by the same person, both utter trash. The sets were OK, but not great. Just because you put someone in a red dress in the middle of the set does not equate to art. The Bathory story is also garbage. The movie with Ingrid Pitt "Countess Dracula" is also garbage. I'm starting to think that it's not about the product. It's about the marketing. You can produce a movie or any other product, have nonsense stories, crappy acting, amateur directing, but if you have a great publicity campaign then you can call it "ART" and denounce those who don't like it as snobs. Maybe that's what happened here. And with "Suspiria" a worse film than this.

A troubled newly wed couple on their way to meet his mother are forced to stay in an off-season hotel, where a mysterious woman traps them in her malevolent web.Interesting start to this, with lots of movement as we discover the flawed nature of the marriage. Great performance from the actress playing Barthory, who has real presence on screen and does great close-ups. But the hammy performance of the concierge sets off the alram bells, and sure enough the story stutters and starts and loses its pace even as the ridiculous killings are ticked off. This actually had the potential for a psychological thriller, but they decided to just give it a lick of the supernatural instead. And what's with the mother? Weird but random.Lots of praise for the eroticism, but it fell flat for me. There are some good two-shots of faces closing together, but it really doesn't take its time and is a bit prudish with the wife.The lighting of the hotel foyer was too bright and flat, but otherwise it looked good. And the music was interesting.Overall, a misconceived story that doesn't really pack a mythology, but it looks good and covers up some of the weakness through the central performance.

Beware as you go into this, it may sound like Hammer but it's nothing like it. It's a chic, stylish vampire film dripping with the most wanton aestheticism. The whole thing exudes the scent of an absinthe dream, the contours of a flowing red dress.Superficially it is about a couple of newly-weds - but who, as the film opens with them having sex in a train cabin, openly declare that they don't love each other - who find themselves stranded in Ostande and move in to a strangely empty hotel for a few days. A countess Bathory arrives there with her female companion, there's also the baffled concierge who tries to stay out of passion's way.I say superficially because the dynamics between the couple is what at first sight seems to be driving the story. The woman is desperate to break out from the limbo of anonymous sex and be introduced, thus be legitimized as a wife and woman, to the man's mother, an aristocrat back in England. The man, on the other hand, is content to derail those expectations and savour the erotic dream he has concocted to inhabit.But of course we come to understand that the narrative is powered from outside. The countess courts both, seducing in the emotional space between them. She personifies that wanton aestheticism right down to her body language. It is important to note that she is played by the actress who starred in Marienbad for Resnais, which this film alludes to; in the mysterious hotel setting with its expansive balustrades, in the twilight wanderings, in the sense of time revoked and sensations amplified.She is the architect of all this, building around these people the desires that will yield them to her. So it is the man's semi-conscious world of secret pleasures, but it's she who is slowly, slyly perverting them. She does this with the malevolent purity of a femme fatale.It does not matter that she is Bathory, or that blood is eventually savored from wrists, this is merely the desire made visible in a way that would appeal to a niche audience. So even though Jess Franco borrowed the velvety sunsets and decadent air from this for Vampyros Lesbos, this operates deeper. It matters for example that she seduces the man into a new obsession with violence, the destructive flipside of eros. It further pries the woman apart from him.Gradually what was a matter of taking pleasure from flesh is spun into something else entirely; again involving flesh but now literally draining from his.It ends with a stunning sequence across countryside roads; a lot of the imagery recalls L'Herbier - who also inspired Resnais - but here more pertinently. The soul has been so withered away from inside, so consumed from the fever of passion, that mere sunlight sends it reeling. Of course we can explain away by falling back to our knowledge of vampire lore, but we'd be missing on the finer abstractions; how, for example, the femme fatale is magically cast into the circumstances that, as we know from our knowledge of this type of film, would precipitate her demise. Nothing else would do after all.If we follow the set of reactions from what at first sight appears like an accident, it can be plainly seen how it all flows from her desire to control the narrative.It's marvelous stuff just the same, the colors, the desolate aura. I just want to urge you to see as more than just an 'artsy vampire flick'. Save that for Jean Rollin.

Two days after getting married in Switzerland, Valerie (Danielle Ouimet) and Stefan Chilton (John Karlen) travel by train to take a boat to England to visit Stefan's mother at the Chilton Manor. However, the train has to stop in Ostend and the couple lodges in the royal suite at a seaside hotel. The concierge Pierre advises that the place is empty since it is out of season and they become aware of three murders in Bruges.In the same night, the Hungarian Countess Elizabeth Báthory (Delphine Seyrig) arrives in the hotel with her secretary Ilona Harczy (Andrea Rau) and Pierre swears that she had been in the hotel forty years ago with the same appearance. When Valerie and Stefan cross the path with the mysterious countess, their lives are affected by the woman. Meanwhile a retired detective (Georges Jamin) snoops at the hotel suspecting that the countess may be the serial-killer that drains the blood of the victims to use as elixir of youth. "Les Lèvres Rouges", a.k.a. "Daughters of Darkness", is a weird and stylish vampire film. The story is very erotic and keeps the sexual tension along 100 minutes running time. Stefan is a sadistic homosexual weirdo and his "mother" is actually an effeminate man. The Countess is a lesbian vampire that wants Valerie as her protégé and mate. The film was shot only during the night and has a beautiful cinematography. My vote is six.Title (Brazil): Not Available