Customer Reviews

The Brides Wore Blood

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Intentionally or otherwise, The Brides Wore Black comes across as a faux Euro-Shock film, a story that even Jess Franco or Jean Rollin might have rejected as being too feeble to consider. The movie begins with a framing sequence, evidently set in the then-contemporary period of the early 1970s, judging by the hairstyles, fashions, and dialogue ("Far out!"). If I have followed the internal chronology correctly, the extended flashback, containing the main body of the film, has to take place 20 or more years earlier--and yet, everyone still looks and sounds like a refugee from the tag-end of the Counter-Culture.

The story itself has something to do with a family curse that turns the first-born son of every generation into a vampire. The patriarch of the family, acting on advice from a local psychic and occult expert, plans a magical ritual to lift the curse. This evidently requires him to trap four beautiful women and use them to fulfill various parts of the ritual. There's also a stray vampire roaming through the ancestral manor, and when the patriarch's spell-casting goes awry, a fuzzy-faced demon is unleashed as well. The resulting action is confusing, unconvincing, and, in my case, somnolence-inducing.

There are a few "We're almost going to show you some female nudity" scenes, and one missed opportunity for a lesbian sequence that might have served to (briefly) dissipate the otherwise unrelieved tedium. There's just not much here to recommend to even the most fanatical horror buff.

I have always liked this Florida made cheapie about vampires in an old mansion. The acting isn't bad and anyone who likes irony will love the end of this baby. The disc is hosted by Son of Ghoul, and that is a major plus in itself. Horror fans and fans of bad cinema should get this disc.

One doesn't normally associate Florida with vampirism, yet director Robert Favorite's 1972 film The Brides Wore Blood, an interesting but unfulfilling little vampire flick, comes to us directly from the Sunshine State, a state whose very name does not bode well for vampires and their kind. This film doesn't do much for vampires either. There was potential here, and I believe the film has something of a minor cult following, but there are far too many things left dangling in the end to suit my tastes - and there is not enough blood to help make up for any of these shortcomings.

Our story revolves around the ancient curse on the house of Delorca. Apparently, every son of somebody or other eventually turns into a vampire and must pass the curse on to his own son. The current pre-vampire's uncle sets out to break the curse once and for all, calling upon the help of a psychic. The master plan is to invite four girls to the mansion and do something with them - the details of the plan never really surface, especially since things get out of hand for the uncle pretty quickly. All I know is that the plan originally involved injecting something with a great big needle in at least one of the girls - this particular scene is one of the longest and most realistic needle insertion scenes I've ever seen. But I digress. How do you get four attractive young ladies to visit your creepy mansion? That's easy - just have your weird, hunchbacked, mute servant accost them on the street and thrust invitations into their hands. As I said, things go awry, a few vampire-like things take place, there are a few scenes of satisfying blood loss, the questionable motives of a couple of characters are never even examined, and the film eventually ends.

The opening scene is the most problematic of all, as it introduces us to a talent-deprived pair of lovers who discover a journal and begin reading the story which the movie itself expounds upon. We're never reunited with this original couple, and what would otherwise have been a fairly effective ending just does not work based on the context of the earlier presentation. Besides that, my favorite character obviously went home halfway through the shoot and nobody noticed, as she just disappeared off the cinematic map. Vampire fans also won't get many bangs for their bucks, as the whole vampirism issue seems incidental to the story. And those fangs - never in my life have I seen more ridiculous-looking vampire fangs than what I saw here. You couldn't get juice from a peeled orange with these tiny little things. I won't call this a bad movie, though. It's nothing more than a horror film that doesn't really live up to its potential.

While I admit this movie lacks something in continuity and execution, I have watched it over and over. It was filmed on my college campus and several of the actors were from the college - even the dean made a brief appearance. Definitely gives us the giggles.