Vampiress Review: "Vampyros Lesbos"

The Gist: A woman becomes the target of a sexy lesbian vampire who wants her as a companion

Clarification:  Probably one of Jess Francos most well known films.  Vampyros Lesbos is more or less a really sexy lesbian version of Dracula.  The character "Linda Westinghouse" is pretty much just Mina, Countess Carody is Dracula, Agra is Renfield and so on.

Selling Point: Everything about Soledad Miranda

Female Vampire Factor: Many of Jess Franco's vampire films don't have fangs but in most cases that can be forgiven as he gets the seductress part of the vampire so right.  If you want to see Soledad Miranda with fangs she does have them in his version of Count Dracula but this is by far the superior film.  

Soledad Miranda (Countess Nadine Carody)

 Countess Carody's chosen profession in this film is that she is a performance artist who does nude vampire stage acts which probably makes her at least some inspiration for the character Regine Dandridge in Fright Night 2.

 Once she gets to you she has a psychic bond to you and can communicate with you subconsciously.  This results in anyone she takes a liking to eventually going crazy.  By the films end she has turned Linda Westinghouse (Ewa Stromburg) who doesn't want any part of the curse.  Linda is eventually told that in order to free herself she must kill the Countess which she does by draining her of her blood then shoving a sharp object through her eye.  It was pretty sexy up until the last part.

It's a great film from an artistic standpoint.  Miranda's role here made her stand out as probably one of the greatest female vampires in films of all time.  Sadly she would die in a car accident just a few weeks after this film premiered in August of 1970.  This becomes all the more tragic since she was originally scheduled to take the role Lina Romay had in the film Female Vampires (Erotikill).  That means we would have eventually got a film of Soledad Miranda in nothing but over the knee boots and a cloak sexing people to death (Not that Romay did a bad job by any means).  This film gets a Vampire Beauty Rating of 4 out of 5 with only the lack of fangs really hurting it.