José Larraz was part of the generation of Spanish artists who, creatively stifled by the Franco regime, went into voluntary exile to seek creative freedom elsewhere. After moving to Paris, he initially found some success as a photographer and as a comic writer, in the latter context creating the long-running series Paul Foran, in which the titular character would investigate apparently-supernatural mysteries to discover rational explanations behind the menace. His big break in the movies came with 1970’s Whirlpool, shot in England and financed by Danish production company Athena Films.
Whirlpool established Larraz as a director with a flair for horror and exploitation material with strong psychosexual undertones, and Larraz would continue in this vein, with his Vampyres attracting the most commercial success of his British-based movies. Eventually, the death of Franco in 1975 and the Spanish transition to democracy prompted him to return home at last, where a more permissive environment allowed him to continue making movies the way he wanted.
Arrow Films’ Blood Hunger is a Blu-Ray boxed set offering up a selection of three Larraz movies from the 1970s – an era when his mixture of horror vibes and sexual frankness was in vogue in the exploitation and B-movie worlds. It contains Whirlpool and Vampyres from his British period and The Coming of Sin from his return to Spain – let’s take a look and see how they hold up some 50-ish years later.
Whirlpool (AKA She Died With Her Boots On)
Theo (Karl Lanchbury) is a talented but rather sensitive photographer who lives in a large country cottage at the edge of a dark forest with his lesbian aunt Sara (Pia Andersson), who has her own contacts in the world of modelling, both professionally and otherwise. Sara has a tendency to lure young models back to the house to do modelling for Theo, with Sara and Theo kind of competing to see who can seduce their latest guest, kind of collaborating to get her into bed with Sara as Theo takes pictures, which seems to be their main fantasy.
The latest girl to get this treatment is Tulia (Vivien Neves), who doesn’t seem averse to an idle weekend of photography, bisexual flirting, and occasional sex. However, Tulia soon picks up on the fact that she’s not the first to ride this particular carousel. Rhonda (Johanna Heggar), an Irish model, came by here before – and it’s evident that both Theo and Sara are not entirely over her, and not willing to get into the circumstances of her departure. As she sleeps alone on her first night, Tulia dreams of Theo and Rhonda in a sexual embrace under the red light of the darkroom, then has a weird experience of Rhonda coming into her room, kissing her, then being revealed to be Theo in disguise. Was that a secondary dream? A bizarre reality? Or is Tulia psychically sensitive? “Sometimes I think Rhonda’s nothing but a ghost that haunts this house,” says Tulia. Is she right? Are Theo and Sara up to more than a weird sex thing? And who is the old piper in the tattered raincoat (Ernest C. Jennings) who seems to be observing them?
Something that Whirlpool instantly establish is Larraz’ eye for compelling visuals, honed through his own career as a photographer. The movie opens with Theo rowing his way around a beautifully sinister lake, the autumnal surroundings and overcast sky conspiring to make the water look black, and peering nervously into its depths. He eventually discovers on the bank a single boot, and is clearly troubled by it – but Lanchbury pitches his performance perfectly so we don’t know whether he’s troubled because he isn’t sure how it got there, or because he knows exactly how it got there – and if the latter, whether he was responsible. A touch later we see him developing photographs in his studio of a sexual encounter between Sara and one of her partners, setting up the weird dynamic of the household immediately. All of this is accomplished without dialogue, conveying masses of atmosphere, characterisation, and implication based purely on Lanchbury’s performance and Larraz’ eye for a compelling shot.
In particular, Larraz understands that if you can get the right locations for a project, you can get the landscape to do a lot of the work for you. The desolate autumnal forest around the house and the lonely church and its cemetery look fantastic – there’s stretches of the movie where every single frame has the same vibe as the cover to Black Sabbath’s first album. The script (by Larraz, from a story outline by Sam Lomberg) goes out of its way to suggest that there’s something outright uncanny about Theo, and to tie that into the landscape. The way he talks of the forest as his workplace (“I wouldn’t change it for the best studio in London!”) and seems to really come to life once he’s photographing Tulia out in the woods, combined with his reclusive nature (it’s Sara who makes trips into London, not him) gives him the air of a nature spirit.
Of course, nature spirits are not safe or tame things; Theo – speaks of his dark urges coming from him being “blessed with a special kind of awareness”. The sequence where Theo recruits a friend of his from the village to sexually assault and threaten to rape Tulia so Theo can get shots of Tulia’s horror and panic would, by itself, be fairly bog standard 1970s exploitation movie fare – rape scenes were par for the course in some sections of the market. However, the use of the forest location there, and the way the mysterious figure of the old piper ties into a similar incident in the past, all adds to the folk horror overtones, giving the sense of a wider community complicit in what Theo and Sara are doing, a community whose put on a respectable facade in the village but let the mask slip when Theo lures a new plaything out into the woods for them to play havoc with.
I may as well spoiler this part now: there’s prominent lesbian or bisexual women in all of the movies in this set. It appears to have been a Thing for Larraz. There’s an extent to which it was a Thing for the marketplace too – lots of exploitation movies got a bit of extra distribution through provocative sexual content, having some women bang was often a quick way to do that (and, thanks to the utter inability of the culture to be normal about the subject, women-on-women scenes got more mainstream distribution than man-on-man action, which would instantly get a movie pigeonholed into a “for gay audiences only” niche). Still, Larraz seems to have taken a particular relish in pandering to this particular quirk of mass audiences.
Here, though, Larraz at least averts the worst possible ways he could have handled this aspect of the story. Sara’s tendency to get her partners drunk before she puts the moves on them is a bit unsavoury, but would come across as being much more predatory if she wasn’t utterly blatant that this is what she’s doing as she’s serving the drinks. More dodgy is the “special” cigarettes she gives people without giving much details about what’s in them, but even then Tulia shows no sign of being too intoxicated or naïve to pick up on what’s going on and seems willing to play along with Sara and Theo’s odd psychosexual games, to the point of having a threesome with them. (It’s an open question as to whether Sara is really Theo’s “aunt” or not, or whether that’s a pose they’ve adopted and their relationship is more complicated.)
Perhaps more to the point, it’s Theo and not Sara who is the real danger factor here – it’s him who is the aggressor by the end of the movie, and well before that it’s him who arranges for his buddy to attempt to rape Tulia. The latter is perhaps the most badly handled aspect of Whirlpool – less so for the scene itself, which is about as thoughtfully handled as such things get in 1970s exploitation cinema, and is at least narratively justified since it has parallels with something that happened to Rhonda during her stay, but the aftermath is badly mishandled.
It just seems incongruous that Tulia sticks around after that, especially when at the end of the attempted rape she loudly and firmly demands to be taken back to London. As it stands, after a stop back at the house she seems to have calmed down and is not just game to hip into bed with Sara but is willing to have Theo there taking shots, and is then a positively aggressive participant in the threesome that ensues. It feels like the two sequences really need to be swapped around in the narrative order, Theo and Sara pushing Tulia’s limits in a broadly consensual fashion within the confines of the house before Theo brings in an outsider for nastier ends. The entire storyline seems to be about this constant escalation, and putting “consensual threesome” after “attempted rape” in the escalation process is bizarre. It feels like a writing error which might have been picked up if Larraz had given the script another pass or had an outside collaborator looking over it with him.
This isn’t the only instance where Larraz’ status as a beginner gets exposed. Earlier int he movie there’s a there’s a strip poker game which drags on entirely too long, requiring us to watch each and every round played out but establishing nothing new beyond “Sara is horny, Theo is weird, and Tulia is kind of into both of them”, all of which are ideas the movie has already already established. Sure, it’s an excuse to get some tits on screen, but we play a fair bit of the game before we even get to see some skin.
With its “creepy photographer” gimmick, the movie reminds me a bit of Peeping Tom, though the passage of a decade allows Larraz to be significantly more explicit about what he shows than Michael Powell was. Unlike in Peeping Tom, there’s no ironic comeuppance or suggestion that the cycle is going to end here, making the ending especially bleak… at least in the cut presented. Arrow base their presentation here on the 84 minute US theatrical cut, which has 10 minutes of cuts from the so-called European cut. The latter doesn’t seem to have been an officially endorsed cut reflecting Larrez’ intentions – it circulates most widely as a poor-quality bootleg, originally sourced from a VHS of dodgy and quite likely unofficial origin, and for quite some time it was the only way to see Whirlpool
A featurette on the Arrow disc breaks down the differences between the US theatrical cut and the 94 minute version, and in particular showcases how some of the scenes got moved about in the US version. They had wanted to include both cuts, but no decent source for the footage unique to the European cut could be found – hence including the featurette as an alternative to putting out a version where the picture quality goes to trash from time to time. (The UK theatrical cut, by contrast, runs for some 70 minutes, cutting out heaps and heaps of explicit material. You’d wonder why you’d bother releasing it at that point. The only improvement is the somewhat more awesome title – She Died With Her Boots On – and Arrow don’t even bother attempting to provide a version of this cut.)
For the most part, the US cut reduces its running time by ditching lots of “inconsequential padding” (Arrow’s words), but it also removes a voiceover epilogue at the end where the police talk about how they’ve arrested Theo off-camera. One suspects that the voiceover was added at the insistence of distributors who balked at the downer ending and who wanted something, anything, to suggest that Theo might be brought to justice, but to my mind this blunts the power of the conclusion.
By and large, I am inclined to say that the US cut is superior anyway – most of the trimmed material genuinely is padding (including some totally superfluous driving sequences), and that voiceover ending pointlessly undermines the film. The shifts in scene placement appear to enhance things too; the scene where Mr. Field (Edwin Brown), a businessman Rhonda had a fling with gets quizzed by the police shows up substantially later and that seems a sound move to me, since Mr. Field doesn’t show up in the woods and start poking around until fairly deep into the movie and there’s no point introducing him at the start. (Keeping back the revelation that the police are looking for Rhonda is also helpful.) Unbelievably, it even tightens up the strip poker game – already tedious in the US cut, in the European we are treated to the full process of Theo dealing out the cards each round.
That said, Tulia’s motivation seems to go astray a little in the US cut. The scene which makes it clear that her vision of Rhonda and/or Theo in her room was a nightmare of some kind is gone, making it a little incongruous that she doesn’t mention it the next day, though ultimately you can infer that it was a dream or vision. It also cuts out Tulia asking Theo some germane questions after Mr. Field confronts Theo about Rhonda.
What does surprise me is that there’s no apparent scene – at least not in the extant materials – where Tulia in credibly persuaded to stick around after Theo’s dirtbag friend assaults her. Regardless of the cut you watch, this aspect of the movie feels bungled. The end result is a promising start for Larraz as a director, which works at its best when it exploits the full potential of the autumnal British woodland it takes place in, but enough aspects are bungled to stop it being an outright classic.
Vampyres
John (Brian Deacon) and Harriet (Sally Faulkner) are on a caravan holiday and happen to park up near the gothic mansion where two naughty bisexual vampires, Fran (Marianne Morris) and Miriam (Anulka Dziubinska), enjoy their frolics with the mortals they lure in to bang, drain, and kill, when they’re not flouncing around the countryside in big gothic dresses and cloaks preying on passing motorists. Matters are complicated when Fran decides she wants to keep Ted (Murray Brown), a businessman who she picks up using the old hitchhiker gimmick, as her long-term lover rather than a quick bite to eat. As Harriet observes more of the comings and goings at the mansion, she becomes curious, and soon enough she and John are drawn into the vampires’ relationship mess too. As a result, sexy peril ensues.
Shot in 1974, Vampyres is Larraz going deliberately sleazy. Whereas both Whirlpool and The Coming of Sin have elevated notes amidst the titillating material, here Larraz, working from a script by his wife Diana Daubeney, simply decides to be as horny, violent, and weird as he wants to be. The very subject matter seems to have been chosen for the sake of hopping on commercial bandwagons; whilst “lesbian/bisexual vampire women want your blood” is a theme as old as Carmilla, the 1970s saw a flood of movies combining softcore and implied lesbian action and vampire narratives. Hammer had opened the floodgates with the so-called Karnstein Trilogy of The Vampire Lovers, Lust For a Vampire, and Twins of Evil, each of them an increasingly distant riff on Carmilla.
These movies were a big enough success to slow (but not reverse) the decline that Hammer was experiencing at the time, and inspired a swathe of imitators – just in the gap between The Vampire Lovers and Vampyres emerging you had stuff like Daughters of Darkness, The Velvet Vampire, The Blood-Spattered Bride, The Bare-Breasted Countess, The Devil’s Plaything, and the magnificently titled Vampyros Lesbos. This latter was by Jess Franco – like Larraz, a Spanish director who’d left Spain to evade Franco-era restrictions and made a name for himself as an exploitation director.
Franco was more prolific than Larraz, and tended to be vastly more unsubtle; his output generally ranks among the sleaziest of any exploitation genre he put his hand to, and frequently the cheapest too. You can’t really imagine Franco making something like Whirlpool or The Coming of Sin – that level of subtlety isn’t what he’s known for, and bear in mind that Whirlpool had an overlong strip poker scene. You can, however, absolutely imagine Larraz going full Jess Franco on a production; any of the movies in this box set could have gone in that direction, and Vampyres is the one that did. Put it this way: we get our first lesbian sex scene mere seconds into the running time, and after Fran and Miriam have some softcore fun someone comes in the bedroom and shoots them dead, with outright absurd amounts of blood strewn everywhere as the two fall back onto the bed.
This is in keeping not just with the Jess Franco playbook, but the approach of a lot of Hammer’s European competitors. Although Hammer had a modest hit with The Vampire Lovers, this was a tactical success pulled off in the midst of a strategic error; they’d made the movie as part of a deliberate plan to up the sexual content of their output to match the sort of material which European competitors were putting out. The problem with this plan is that those competitors were willing to go more sexually explicit and more overtly violent than Hammer was, which means that they’d always make Hammer’s output in this vein seem tame by comparison.
Basically, everything the more coy studios were teasing us with, Larraz is willing to dial up to 11 here, whilst at the same time pandering to look and style of Hammer’s 1960s heyday, even making extensive use of regular Hammer shooting location Oakley Court. The end result is very, very silly compared to Whirlpool, what with the heavy-handed use of gothic tropes and aesthetics, right down to Fran and Miriam wafting about like proto-goths sadly waiting for Siouxsie and the Banshees or Bauhaus to put out their first albums.
The sex scenes here are dwelled on to the point where they go beyond typical movie sex scene parameters into the sort of clumsy softcore that 1970s exploitation movies liked to dip into, and once Fran lures Ted into the house any semblance of pacing largely goes to shit. There’s that It’s Always Sunny bit where Dennis talks about his movie concept which devolves into a cycle of “crime, penetration, crime, penetration” which keeps going “until the movie just sort of ends”, and that absolutely fits this, if the crime is vampirism and if the penetration is also, quite frequently, vampirism.
Late in the movie, something resembling an actual interesting backstory to contextualise everything peeps forth; the opening shooting turns out to be a flashback, not a flashforward as I initially interpreted it, and Fran and Miriam are the victims of what was presumably either a homophobic murder or a jealous male partner’s revenge or both and now haunt the place, but that’s really too little too late. I’d be tempted to compare this to a Michael J. Murphy movie if he had decent cameras and film stock and actual actors, except Murphy never went this exploitative on the sex side of things and always had a better plot than this. Maybe I’ll give this another go one day, but I’d need to be several drinks down and have friends to mock it with.
The Coming of Sin (AKA Violation of the Bitch, AKA Vice Makes a Visit)
Triana (Lidia Zuazo) is a strange, unworldly 18 year old, illiterate and from a Romany background which meant she’s faced a certain amount of prejudice. She works as a domestic maid for a middle-aged couple, Malcolm and Sally Grainger (David Thomson and Monserrat Julió), but they have to go to the UK for a business trip during which it would be weird and awkward to bring Triana. So they take her to the home of their friend Lorna (Patricia Granada), a young artist who lives alone in a remote country house, the idea being that Triana can still get paid while the Graingers are overseas, Lorna can enjoy having help around the house, and the Graingers can count on her being available to work when they get back.
Or maybe they can’t. Things get a little intense between Lorna and Triana, as Lorna first tries to do the whole Pygmalion thing and invest Triana with a bit of education and fine manners, and then the duo begin banging because it’s a Larraz movie and we know his speed at this point.
Moreover, some very strange things are going on with Triana. She has recurring nightmares of a nude youth on horseback pursuing her – and tells Lorna that it’s been divined through palmistry that if Triana and the lad on the horse ever become lovers, someone will die tragically. And the man on the horse has started appearing in waking life, eventually introducing himself as the wild, rootless Chico (Rafael Machado) – though Triana insists that she knows him as Rafael. Lorna makes a unilateral decision to expand her polycule, setting the scene for disaster…
This 1978 effort from Larraz was based on a script co-written by himself and the mysterious “Monique Pastrynn”, who has no other credits to her name, to the point where I kind of suspect she doesn’t exist. It was released in the UK under the title of Violation of the Bitch, which might well deserve a prize for the sleaziest movie title ever. It’s a bit surprising that, with a title like that, it didn’t end up on the video nasty list, but perhaps nobody bothered to attempt a home video release.
Equally, however, the content here is a bit more low-key than typical for the video nasties. We’re much more towards the Whirlpool end of the scale here than Vampyres, to the point where one could regard this as a reimagining of Whirlpool. The plot goes in different directions and the character interactions and chemistry shift in light of the different premise, but you still have a bisexual throuple in a lonely country house gearing up for a murderous disintegration.
Chico/Rafael, in particular, has similar “weird primal nature spirit” vibes around him to Theo in Whirlpool. That he shows up riding nude on the back of a horse – I guess his junk just plain doesn’t hang that low, otherwise that’s a recipe for a seriously bad time – emphasises this from the get-go. By the end it’s apparent that he lives as a modern-day primitive, in a hastily lashed-together hut down by the river which Lorna ends up visiting when she decides she wants to indulge her primal instincts. Though it’s evident that Triana and Chico/Rafael have some manner of history together, but the film plays coy with it. Could they be brother and sister, or otherwise related? Are they former criminal accomplices, Triana trying to make good whilst Chico/Rafael tries to lure her back into all that? We are flatly denied any pat explanation.
Lorna, for her part, seems to be intent on unpacking both of them – treating them both as objects of amusement and puzzleboxes to be solved. In one interesting scene, she susses out that the tension between Triana and the Graingers came about because Triana and Mrs. Grainger had an affair, and the conversation suggests a fairly unconservative relationship between the Graingers. Lorna specifically says “Green almond eyes have always been one of Sally’s weaknesses” and scoffs at the idea that Malcolm might have been jealous. This not only suggests that the Grainger marriage was polyamorous, or at least open to an extent, but also implies past interactions between Lorna and Sally (and, perhaps, Malcolm too, since Lorna doesn’t seem repulsed by the nude man on the horse), but also suggests that something is wrong. If Malcolm wanted Triana out of the house that badly, and he’d never been jealous of any of Sally’s other partners before, that implies something else was going on beyond Sally getting a bit of action to alarm Malcolm.
Lorna talks up how Chico/Rafael has “lovely eyes” and compares them to Triana’s, but then talks about what a lovely couple Triana and Chico/Rafael would make. Is Lorna oblivious to the incestuous implications of what she’s saying – for who’s more likely to have highly similar eyes than blood relatives? Or is she all too aware, given the penchant for old-school artists like her for classical allusions? For a significant span of the movie Lorna seems intent on nudging Triana into banging Chico/Rafael for aesthetic reasons – because she just thinks they’d look good together, and because Lorna doesn’t entirely believe in consent as far as Triana goes.
Yeah, about that. This is another movie where there’s an attempted rape that gets kind of brushed off, but the handling of it this time is somewhat better. Chico/Rafael, prior to showing up (clothed for once) to introduce himself to Lorna, attempts to rape Triana by the side of the river; Triana escapes by clonking him on the side of the head with a big rock, and the next day confides in Lorna about what happened. Chico/Rafael shows up then, and Lorna not only knows full well that he’s the nude rider but also sees he has a head injury in line with what Triana described, but absolutely does nothing about it, and ruthlessly shuts down Triana’s objections.
Under such circumstances, why would Triana expect that further objection would help? Moreover, Lorna’s agenda seems to be to nudge Triana into the same sort of bisexual openness Lorna enjoys – whether or not that’s what Triana wants. She outright shames Triana at one point for not being receptive to men as though that were a personal failing. A weird dynamic is established shortly after Chico/Rafael introduces himself; Lorna starts giving Triana orders and that, plus the shutting down of Triana’s objections, gives an air of Lorna and Chico/Rafael exerting dominance over Triana in an almost collaborative sense, a dynamic that continues for much of the remainder of the movie. This is undercut by an odd scene where Triana and Chico/Rafael tie up and assault Lorna after she gets blackout drunk, but that comes immediately subsequent to a scene where Lorna is apparently trying to exploit Triana and Chico/Rafael in turn.
There’s some unfortunate homophobic or biphobic implications here, especially in light of Whirlpool as well. An entirely legitimate reading of the movie would be that it’s about Triana having to choose between homosexuality and heterosexuality, eventually opting for the latter by default as a result of Lorna, as a result of being bisexual, being unable to commit entirely to Triana and trying to force a polyamorous arrangement Triana couldn’t cope with.
Then again, there’s a scene where Triana and Lorna watch a traditional Spanish dance, with women taking both the female and male roles, suggesting a deliberate queering of Spanish culture which would of course have been nigh-blasphemous at the height of Franco-era restrictions. This is not the only respect in which Larraz offers up some compelling visuals. There’s a scene in the wake of the attempted rape where Chico/Rafael is washing his head wound in the river and then the camera pans to the background, where the horse is rolling about in the mud. Is the horse’s, er, horseplay intentional, or was this a lucky accident? Either way it’s a great image.
The dream aspect of the movie is most successful around halfway through, where Triana dreams of squatting inside a hollow golden horse statue as Chico/Rafael rides his horse around it purposefully, this in itself being something of a classical allusion. That this is followed by a scene of Chico/Rafael training Lorna to ride his horse shot as though it is a dream when in fact it is a real scene Triana is watching has its own implications.
On the whole, however, The Coming of Sin feels like less than the sum of its parts as I pick it over in retrospect. It’s certainly more competently executed than Whirlpool, but at the same time the central narrative overemphasises questions that it isn’t actually interested in answering. Larraz strings together a series of compelling moments, but they don’t add up to a narrative which is very coherent, but at the same time he doesn’t lean hard enough into the dream aspects of the story to get a surrealism pass. It’s fine to tell a story which doesn’t make much linear sense if you’ve persuaded the audience to treat it that way, but Larraz doesn’t pull that off.
Jumbled Thoughts of a Fake Geek Boy 