directed by Robert Hartford-Davis, Julian More
UK, Greece
87 minutes
1.5 stars out of 5
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The first thing I noticed about Blood Suckers was ultimately incidental to the narrative of the film itself, but it did set me up for the experience I was about to have. After some B-roll and an opening voiceover in which the course of events leading up to the film is established, the first actual scene of the film hits, and the editing immediately made me feel like I was going crazy. This could just be me, and I'm not entirely sure how to describe it, but you know when a production team can't get two actors's schedules coordinated, so they have to film them in separate locations and then edit the footage so that it looks like they're in the same room? The whole first scene of Blood Suckers feels exactly like that, except all of the actors are in a room together. Every time someone speaks, the frame changes to focus on a shoulders-up shot of that person, and when someone else replies, it changes to them, on and on, with the dialogue uncomfortably rapid-fire and the cuts way too fast. There's just something really bizarre and disorienting about it, and things only got worse when the film segued awkwardly into an orgy scene that felt like it lasted about a half an hour.
Honestly, I am going to stay on that orgy scene for another minute because it is so jarring that it deserves further attention. I actually enjoyed the way it was edited when it turned into a bad trip and a woman got murdered - that was the only place in the film where its gonzo editing style felt like it fit the mood. But that orgy absolutely could have been half or even a quarter as long as it was.
So, what is this movie about? Well, despite the opening narration by one of the characters, the fun thing about this movie is that it doesn't really have a main character, and as a result, the plot feels entirely different depending on who you're focusing on. To disappeared Oxford student Richard Fountain's friends, it's about the search for a promising young academic who runs off to Greece and gets involved in weird drug orgies and other sexual deviancy. To Fountain, it's about the time he realized he could only get it up for vampires. To any of the friends who go to Greece to look for him, it's a series of increasingly odd events culminating in a death or two followed by the rescue of their friend who falls in love with a witchy Greek lady and subsequently decides "fuck the Ivory Tower" and kills his girlfriend. The vampirism thread is, unsatisfyingly, left somewhat open-ended: is it "true" vampirism or is it just the wiles of an exotic foreign enchantress taking advantage of a guy's secret vampire fetish?
I promise you, this is much more boring than I'm making it seem. This is one of those movies that is really not entertaining in the sense that it's well-made or even interesting at all, but every choice involved in its production and everything about the way the final product was put together adds up into a horror movie that is so tonally strange that it's hard to peel your eyes off of it. I looked into the film on Wikipedia to see if I could find any explanation for why it is the way that it is, and apparently they just kind of ran out of money during filming. The voice-over narration was added because the film was essentially shot in two parts - one pre- and one post-going broke - and the second half added in a lot of new actors and scenes that required some extensive piecing together to make work with the previously-shot footage.
I can't say I would ever recommend this to anybody, because it's the kind of thing where if you stumble across it and think it sounds good, you already know your own tastes and are virtually guaranteed to be down for what you're getting into. If I had to pick between this and Land of the Minotaur in terms of "weird '70s Greek horror that Peter Cushing was inexplicably involved in", I would pick Land of the Minotaur any day, both because of the Brian Eno score and because, unlike Blood Suckers, it lacks a scene where someone says "Could Bob's African background have given him some kind of vivid imagination?"