From the moment Lina Romay walks out of the fog wearing a cape, a belt, thigh-high boots and nothing else, it is on. She is an eroticized, convex abyss, absorbing all light because it wants to be there, with her, in her. Her pupils, her nipples, her pubic hair, the camera scans down and then back up again. She is the vampire as that which takes in, but in so doing, the taking from, the relieving of, is a profound gift. This is no mere pornography, this is the centering and fixing of magickal relations between Jess Franco behind the camera and Lina Romay, the engazed. The viewer can feel this erotic bond across distances spatial and temporal. It is a sudden jolt, a charge, a warmth that steals across. Wherein breath is held without notice.

Here is the Countess Irina: Finding dudes to snack on first thing in the morning as they are coming out of their huts at the local Peacock Enclosure and like, they get right to it, and that is breakfast. Breakfast's cries and groans and throes of something echo across the valley and Countess Irina raises her cloak to the sun in supplication and greeting. Petulant and weary, The Karlstein Malediction weighs heavily upon Irina. She is the sort of Vampire Countess who is So Hot she causes cameras to go out of focus and push everything into an ambient blur of light. The Countess Irina has some wickedly biomorphic black chunky-heeled shoes that she rocks sunbathing by the hotel pool. She is so awesome at being a vampire that she is all about sunbathing. The sun is ok with it. She is so awesome and famous a vampire that journalists in bikinis conduct major magazine interviews with her about her Family Curse despite the fact that she does not talk. The subject of the interview is: Yeah, so, you are a super-famous probable vampire who has come back to some of your ancestral lands and we are all scared out of our minds that you are going to eat all of us. Is that what is going on here? What are your future plans, etc.? I should mention that this movie is hilarious, like intentionally really funny. Countess Irina is the sort of awesome vampire who puts nosy journalists into erotic trance-obsessions and flaunts her stuff in front of her Renfield while sucking her thumb and writhing around on her crazy-upholstered bed, so: really awesome. Jess Franco stars as a local coroner who is like: this peacock-enclosure dude - straight killed by (unexplicit) vampiric fellatio. The cops are like 'no way!' and he is like 'so way, yeah!'. Countess Karlstein's hotel bed has the most awe-inspiring Gothic Headboard I have ever seen. It honestly looks like H.R. Giger designed it specifically for this movie. Moreover, there are two exactly identical beds in that hotel suite!

Jess Franco's direction works empathically and organically with Irina's drives and hungers, one scene flowing into the next, seemingly languidly, but necessitated by the conditions retained from prior scene's denouement. It is not so much plot-driven, as driven by desire.

There is an amazing scene where Dr. Roberts (Franco) consults a Dr. Orloff(!) in his capacity as a mystical seer, and I realize: the Jess Franco hippie combover/goatee styling is a thing among island doctors!!!! Incredible!

'Female Vampire' most frequently feels like a Russ Meyer movie of roughly the same vintage ate their room-mate's entire tray of freshly baked chocolate/cream cheese hashish brownies they were saving for a party later that evening and now cannot move from some spot on the living room floor, not even to get up on the couch. This makes 'Female Vampire' one of the best movies ever made.

So Vampirism is a vibe that you can be hip to, and other than the two good comb-over/goatee doctors of whatever, there is a local poet who refuses the goatee but reads Velikovsky and von Daniken and stuff and digs the Lemurian scene. He knows what's up and can feel the Countess up in his area. Hungry vampires can summon a bunch of telepathic surface noise with which to stun their prey, like fish in a dynamited lake. Well, that and the not wearing any underwear. Countess Irina is so hot for it that she goes to town on her Gothic Revival bedpost and you know it is all about it.

'Female Vampire' is the rare film which is highly effective in both its pure, extended eroticism and its grand, sweeping, romantic declaratives. Make no mistake. 'Female Vampire' is a love letter. A celebration of togetherness, of no longer being alone, of finding another who can truly see you as you can truly see them.

Movement without movement. Ascent without effort.

'Female Vampire' is the least nocturnal vampire movie ever made, sun-bleached and near-tropical in affect. The brunch mimosa of Seventies vampire movies. This is glorious, glorious glorious

Please, please 'Female Vampire' one day, won't you please take me with you, behind the mist, forevermore?