Daughters of Darkness (1971)

Overrated and overhyped

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

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.

Daughters of Darkness is one of those films where the viewer can generally be sure of what will happen from one moment to the next, but it's still interesting enough to keep watching. It's fairly predictable, up until the last second, which unfortunately you find yourself wishing that perhaps you're wrong...and finding out you were right all along.It's a good enough story, though, with characters boasting many facets and many levels of depth, although unfortunately the surface is barely scratched with most of them. That's also kind of a disappointment since the cast of characters is so small, it's not like they couldn't have explored deeper. The actors were most all up to the task, so why does it seem so shallow in so many ways?The direction, the cinematography, the hair, the makeup, the costumes -- all of it is splendid. Unfortunately by the last half-hour, it's all started to spin its wheels, and the experience has begun to sour. By the last shot, you're done with the movie and more than slightly irritated that you were asked to invest 100 minutes into something that really didn't deserve them.But the Countess was so seductive and interesting, and the young couple were so strange and intriguing, and you knew the story like any old tale, but you hoped that familiarity wouldn't spoil you on it. And when it did anyway, you felt betrayed, as betrayed as you should, yet you still took away a particular feeling from it, something you did like, even if it was ultimately not an overwhelmingly positive experience.This is a film with far more style than substance, and what substance there is remains mostly untapped. There's far too much time-wasting and actor-wasting, too many scenes that don't add up to anything, and an ending that will literally make you angry.Is it worth watching? Once. And only once.Don't make the mistake of going down that road again: it presents far more than it can back up, and that perhaps is the most unfortunate quality of all in this film. It is, at its heart, even flimsier than the shallowest Hammer vampire number, and not nearly as fun as any of them, ultimately. It could have been much better. If only it had bothered to make a good ending of itself. But a bad ending can ruin even a good story, and this was just barely adequate, struggling to breach the surface of mediocrity and pastiche.There is a visual splendour to it, and it is enjoyable to watch and digest as a piece of art. The characters are not all so superficial as they may appear, but any depth remains sadly unexplored, perhaps tragically, by the resolution or lack thereof. Some plot threads are completely dropped, others misappropriated, and all in all this ends up an unsatisfying mess by the last fade to red.If you like unconventional vampire films, give it a try. It won't have any secrets for you, and it won't have any surprises, but it might be amusing for a couple of hours. Don't expect it to become a favourite though.

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.

Stay with this film, it is incredible. Great acting, cinematography, direction. The lead actress isn't great, but the actress who plays Erzebet Bathory is phenomenal. Bizaar sets, and strange milieu really add to this film's strange portrayal of vampires and how they deal with the living. I really loved this film. Of course, today, everything happens at the speed of light. Back in 1970, they took their time with building the film and really letting it sink in before hitting you with the shocks. This one has plenty of shocking moments and some really great inventive scenes that add to the history of the vampire film. Unfortunately, today we now have 'Twilight', a disgusting parody of the genre that hopefully audiences will someday say, 'What the hell were we thinking?'.