"Female Vampire" review

Female Vampire (1973)

Director: Jesus Franco
Writers: Gérard Brisseau Jesus Franco

Lina Romay... Countess Irina Karlstein
Jack Taylor... Baron Von Rathony
Alice Arno... Irina´s servant
Monica Swinn... Princess de Rochefort
Jesus Franco... Dr. Roberts

I rented "Female Vampire" after a reader recommended it to me. We were discussing the merits of Lina Romay in a Jess Franco disaster called "Lust for Frankenstein" and he insisted that I had to see this movie to understand the Romay sex appeal. In his words, "When miss romay was a quite astonishing 18 year old sexual dream come true, we will find yet another unwatchable jess franco abomination in which she appeared namely "the female vampire". Well actually it would be totally unwatchable if not for the astounding lina romay at her absolute peak, she is naked for most of the film, and with franco zooming in on her incredible arse and twat for long periods in the film it becomes one of the greatest masturbation aids of all time." This is a ringing endorsement. The only other Romay movie I've seen was "Ilsa, the Wicked Warden" which was a great smorgasbord of sleaze but Lina wasn't the reason I loved it. "Female Vampire" needed to be seen.

Lina Romay is a mute vampire who gives people oral sex until they die. Of course she does. Franco decides to get right to it and has Lina strolling through the woods naked in the first five seconds of the movie. She then runs into a guy and proceeds to give him some Romay head until he croaks. That pretty much sums up the movie. Some other people bump into Romay and she sucks the life out of them through their genitals.

Lina Romay is naked through most of the movie and has some extended scenes where she rolls around on a bed so we can soak in every nook and cranny of her beautiful body. My reader was right about Lina being a sight for sore eyes in "Female Vampire". In fact if she wasn't in this movie, I think I would have tossed the DVD across the room.

"Female Vampire" is a pretty boring flick. I saw the 110 minutes version and I couldn't wait for it to end after the 45 minute mark. After I saw Romay roll around naked on top of her dead lesbian lover, I knew I had reached the sleaze peak. There was nowhere to go but down. Romay continues down the path of getting people naked and sucking their life essence from their crotch. But if you've seen one crotch sucking scene, you've seen them all.

And for a director who loves to zoom in on female body parts, you'd think Franco would have learned how to zoom in without the camera going out of focus. There are many instances where Franco thinks he's spotted something interesting going on and zooms in only to give the viewer a headache with some blurry shots of naked Romay and friends. Of course, complaining about incompetence in a Franco movie is like cursing the sky for being blue but it's astonishing how much this guy didn't learn from making all these movies.

Lina Romay is the kind of actress that is perfect for exploitation movies. She's got a great body, she's not shy about getting naked and is pretty much up for whatever depravity the filmmakers, (Franco mostly), feels like filming. As far as "Female Vampire" is concerned, she is the only reason to watch it. If you need some prime Lina in your life, it may be worth watching once.

SCORE: 1.5 out of 4 lusty Linas