The Velvet Vampire (1971)

              I probably didn’t need to include this movie, especially after ‘Daughters of Darkness,’ but it’s been poking around in the background of my recommendations for long enough that I figured if I was going to use this as an opportunity to catch up on other movies I’ve been meaning to see I might as well include this one.  It does turn out to be slightly more interesting than you’d think a Corman-produced movie from the director of ‘The Student Nurses’ would be, but only by not being as exploitative as it might have been.

              According to some accounts this movie was directly inspired by ‘Daughters of Darkness,’ and it certainly seems that way, even if I question whether the production timeline actually works out for that.  Once again it’s ‘troubled married couple preyed upon by high-status vampire,’ and true to form the couple is the least interesting part of the movie.  Which causes particular problems here because the movie is so low-budget that for long stretches of the movie they make up two thirds of the entire cast.

There's this whole thing about bloodstones, I dunno.

              Director and co-writer Stephanie Rothman is worth knowing about.  She was only a director for eight years, from 1966 to 1974.  She got her start with Roger Corman, reshooting large parts of ‘Blood Bath’ in 1966 before directing her first movie, ‘It’s a Bikini World.’  She reportedly didn’t enjoy the experience so didn’t direct again until 1970’s ‘The Student Nurses,’ which was a commercial success and spawned a number of sequels, none of which she was involved in.  ‘The Velvet Vampire’ was her last movie for Corman before jumping to Dimension Pictures where she directed three more movies, all similar to the ones she made for Corman, then left to try to break out of the exploitation movie business.  The stigma of her earlier pictures was too strong, unfortunately, and she eventually dropped out of the business entirely.

              Her work is often described as being markedly feminist.  To steal directly from her Wikipedia article, Pam Cook wrote: “Rothman often parodied the codes of exploitation genres to expose their roots in male fantasies and so undermine them, and it is this use of formal play to subvert male myths of women that has interested some feminists and that, it has been argued, places Rothman's work inside the tradition of women's counter cinema.”  She’s often quoted as regretting that she couldn’t accomplish more, that she felt held back in the industry and kept wanting to make more important movies, ones that said something.  In her own words: “A Stephanie Rothman film deals with questions of self-determination. My characters try to forge a humane and rational way of coming to terms with the vicissitudes of existence. My films are not always about succeeding but they are always concerned with fighting the good fight.”

              And I can certainly understand the impulse to use the opportunity of a low-budget exploitation movie to sneak in some ideology.  By all accounts that’s what she did with ‘The Student Nurses.’  Even at the time it was noted that in amongst the boob shots and comedy hijinks the characters dealt with issues like abortion, immigration, violence, etc.  This has worked before and will work again.  Movies like ‘Dawn of the Dead,’ ‘Maniac,’ and ‘Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!’ were dismissed as mere exploitation fare at the time of their releases but have since been reassessed.

              However, it's very hard to square those quotes with the actual movie ‘The Velvet Vampire.’  About the most feminist thing I can say about it is that Michael Blodgett gets about as nude as either of the women.  As for it addressing any kind of ‘questions of self-determination,’ it’s about a long weekend where a couple in a quasi-open relationship hang out at the desert house of a woman they just met, it turns out she’s a vampire, guy sleeps with the vampire then gets killed, vampire kinda tries to sleep with the woman but she runs away, the vampire chases her then dies, there’s a big ol’ twist ending, the end.

              I will give the movie a slight amount of credit for the opening.  After a very cheap set of credits it opens on a still shot overlooking a city streetcorner and a large building.  A time lapse gies way to night and a single female figure walks down the sidewalk in a bright red dress.  It follows her for a few moments, then she’s attacked by a burly, tattooed biker.  He pulls a knife, they struggle, and he ends up dead with a knife in his side.  Instead of being upset the woman’s face is calculating as she looks at the body.  In the next scene the camera watches as she approaches a nearby public fountain and calmly washes her now very bloody hands.  This is a pretty decent way to introduce Diane LeFanu (see what they did with the last name there?  There’s also a character called Stoker.  The writers were very clever), out titular velvet vampire.

              She has a meet cute with Lee and Susan Ritter, a married couple, at an art gallery and invites them out to her place in the desert for the weekend.  They say yes and drive out almost all of the way there before their car breaks down, conveniently robbing them of a way to leave on their own, and the vampire shows up in a dune buggy.  Yet again we have a vampire who is slightly inconvenienced by the sun until it becomes important to the plot, although I will admit the dune buggy part is a new one on me.  They go back to her place, a fairly nice house in the pretty literal middle of nowhere, with the promise that the car will be fixed by the end of the weekend.

              Roughly 70% of the movie takes place in this house, with brief excursions to a nearby cave and a deserted ghost town.  Susan gets lost and scared at the first and bitten by a rattlesnake at the second.  The rest of the time is taken up by various scenes where there are conversations making it clear Diane and Lee want to fuck, conversations that lead to Diane and Lee fucking, conversations where Susan is annoyed about Diane and Lee fucking, conversations between Lee and Susan in bed while Diane watches from behind one-way glass, and some dream sequences where Diane puts the moves on either naked Lee or naked Susan.

              There are also various other scenes that roughly sketch in Diane’s backstory.  There’s a graveyard nearby where she claims her husband is buried.  She’s later seen naked cuddling a well-preserved corpse, so I’ll buy that.  She has a live-in servant named Juan who drops the occasional line about how he’s been with Diane since he was a boy, and then eventually he’s just randomly killed by Diane.  At one point the local mechanic comes by to fix the dune buggy but is also feasted upon by Diane.  He’s buried in a shallow grave at that same cemetery.  A local girl confronts Diane and Lee during a conversation at the graveyard, digs up the grave with her bare hands and uncovers the mechanic, Juan and Diane kill her, and then we’re done with that plot point.

              The acting varies about as widely as I’ve ever seen.  Celeste Yarnall as Diane is pretty good, and I buy Michael Blodgett as the entitled asshole he’s portraying, but Sherry Miles as Susan, woof.  She makes a nothing part actively bad.  For production they had access to a nice house for a main location and for other scenes borrowed some existing sets Corman had already paid for.  The dialogue is fairly utilitarian and blunt.  About the cleverest it ever gets is when characters are slinging basically single entendres at each other.  There are a few moments of recognizable human interaction, like when Diane asks Susan if she’s had another man since getting married and Susan calmly says it’s none of her business, but for the most part it’s just blocks of words used as needed to get to the next scene.

              The end of the movie is worth discussing in some detail.  At this point Juan, Lee, and everyone for miles in every direction has been killed by Diane except for Susan.  She’s just discovered the room that Diane’s been using to spy on her and her husband while they were in bed.  There’s a dead body in there as well for good measure.  She runs into Diane’s room, looking for Lee, and instead of mentioning the dead body she starts demanding an answer about all the spying.  Diane deflects by pointing out that Susan watched while she and Lee got busy so it’s all good, and by the way come over here.  Diane finally starts putting some moves on her and Susan is not really into it.  It’s 67 minutes in before the movie even pretends to contain lesbianism, which to be fair neither the trailer nor promotional material really promised, so fine.  Susan hears a noises, goes to look, and finds Lee’s corpse.  She fights off Diane, runs out into the desert, and manages to get a ride to the nearest bus stop.

              Susan gets on a Greyhound bus back to LA only to see Diane already sitting there in the back.  Susan takes a seat, Diane moves to sit right behind her, and apparently things were just super tense for the entire trip back to LA because the next scene is Susan disembarking, then getting chased through the terminal by Diane.  IMDB insists this section was shot without permits, and I can believe that.  Then Susan runs past a giant cross as a piece of public art and Diane is stopped in her pursuit.  There happens to be a stall nearby selling apparently just crosses so Susan grabs a couple then yells at everyone around her to grab one too and wave it at Diane.  For some reason everyone listens to her and a circle forms around her.  Shrinking from the crosses and shielding herself from the sun, which conveniently hurts her now, Diane crumples to the ground and apparently dies.

              Susan wakes up in the bed of the owner of the art gallery from the beginning of the movie.  There’s a tossed off line from the owner that Diane had a blood condition and just believed she was a vampire, then Susan cuts herself with a knife and the owner drinks the blood from her palm.  The movie crashes to a close with a closeup of Susan’s shocked eyes!

              I was already kind of annoyed with ‘Daughters of Darkness’ for its emphasis on arch conversations and characters talking nonsense to each other but at least there it was done with some intelligence.  This movie asks the question: what if we took the barest of premises from that movie, stripped out the interesting setting, the interesting characters, and any complexity in the relationship between the husband and wife, then shot it all as flat and unstylish as 1970’s TV?  I have certainly seen worse Corman movies and I’m not going to turn up my nose at substandard production values but the script is rote, the acting never rises much above passable, and even compared to the rest of the movies I’ve been watching nothing actually happens.  By some distance the least interesting of the films I’ve watched so far.