Movies
[BD Review] ‘Female Vampire’ Kind Of… Bites
Reviewed by Patrick Cooper
The folks at Kino and Redemption Films have been showing the maestro of soft-core sleaze Jess Franco some love on Blu-ray lately. They released a humble disc of his 1975 sadomasochist horror film Exorcism with no features besides the alternate cut (Demoniac). For his 1973 film Female Vampire, they’ve included some special features as well as the less-explicit alternate cut. It’s a nice package for his fans, but the film itself suffers from the drawbacks of nearly every Franco film.
The filmmaker’s muse and late wife Lina Romay stars as the Countess Irina Karlstein, a mute woman who lives with her family’s curse of having to drink bodily fluids to survive. Not blood, cum. Both male and female. She feeds by going down on her victims and once they orgasm she drains them of their fluids and they die. It’s not explained how this kills them, but this isn’t the type of film to sweat over details.
The Countess returns to her ancestral home on the Portuguese island of Madeira, making the locals wary and the men horny. There she lurks around all sexy like, usually with just a cape and boots on, engaging in sexual relations with men and women alike. She finishes them off in more ways than one, if ya catch my drift. She even has a dopey assistant who lures victims to her home. That’s really about it as far as the story goes. There is a weak sub-plot thrown in concerning a writer (Jack Taylor) who falls in love with the Countess, but that flaccid emotional story quickly finds its boner and devolves into a round of deadly oral sex.
The erotic scenes in Female Vampire are excruciatingly long and make up about the first hour of this 100-minute movie. There’s one solo scene with Lina where she’s writhing around on a bed for something like seven minutes. This is after she performs fellatio on the bedpost. Franco films these scenes very clumsily. He erratically zooms-in on crotches and butts like he just hit puberty. As sexy as Lina is, these scenes are nothing but tedious.
Luckily Redemption has included the 70-minute cut of the film, titled Erotikill. This version cuts out much of the sex in exchange for more violence. This version also seems to imply that Countess Karlstein feeds on blood like a normal ass vampire.
For Franco fetishists, this disc is a must-have. It’s a well-made package with some brief, but well-produced features. For those unfamiliar with Franco, you might want to check this out via your preferred method of rental.
A/V
Redemption Films presents Female Vampire in 1080p from a print containing an abundance of scratches, specks, and sporadic brightness fluctuations. No digital tampering has been done, which honestly may have weakened the film’s foggy, natural look. There are audio tracks in English and French, both in lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0. The English dubbing sounds silly, so I recommend watching it in French with English subtitles.
Special Features
Erotikill – a 70-minute, less explicit cut of the film.
Destiny in Soft Focus: Jess Franco Remembers Female Vampire (13:00) – Franco reminisces on the film and his relationship with Lina.
Words for Lina (13:00) – a nice tribute by co-star Jean-Pierre Bouyxou. He tells some anecdotes about Lina, always stressing how great her sense of humor was. He calls her a “guttersnipe.”
Trailers for Franco’s Exorcism, The Nude Vampire, The Rape of the Vampire, Female Vampire, and Requiem for a Vampire.
This week kicked off with the release of hippo horror movie Hungry at home, and four more horror movies have arrived for at-home viewing as we head into the final weekend of June.
Here are the new horror movies that released on Friday, June 26, 2026!
The Halloween season can no longer be contained to the months of September and October, with “Summerween” becoming a thing in recent years. Essentially, it allows for Halloween to bleed into the warmer Summer months, and the first ever Summerween movie has arrived.
The Asylum released Summerween onto Digital outlets today.
In the film from writer/director Ryan Ebert, “On Summerween, a former circus clown escapes a mental institution to return to his abandoned mansion and hunt the teens partying there.”
Cole Chapleski, Chase Breithoff, Logan Roe, Sophia Sabol, and Clint Morrison star.
Director Ryan Ebert is the man behind a string of recent indie horrors we’ve covered, including Shark Side of the Moon, The Jolly Monkey, Jurassic Reborn, and Predator: Wastelands.
A witchy coming-of-age story from Dark Sky Films, Camp is now playing in select theaters.
Check your local listings to find a theater near you.
Camp is from writer-director Avalon Fast (Honeycomb, The Serpent’s Skin).
“Emily is the root cause of two devastating tragedies very early in her life, and she feels the weight of these accidents as though cursed. At her father’s suggestion, she takes a position at a summer camp for troubled youth to ease her guilt. When Emily arrives, she is welcomed by the other counselors, who accept her as she is and surround her with peace and forgiveness.
“As Emily begins to believe in a new kind of life, she starts to hear a voice whispering from deep in the woods — one that urges her to go home, and one that may be impossible to ignore.”
The film stars Zola Grimmer in her screen debut alongside Alice Wordsworth, Cherry Moore, Lea Rose Sebastianis (Castration Movie Part 1 & 2, In A Violent Nature), Ella Reece, Austyn Van de Kamp (This Too Shall Pass), Sophie Bawks-Smith (Honeycomb), Izza Jarvis, and Aiden Laudersmith.
Producers Tyler Perry and Jason Blum have joined forces for Peacock Original Strung.
The film is now streaming only on Peacock.
“A talented violinist takes a prestigious job as a music tutor for the gifted daughter of an influential and enigmatic family. As she becomes entangled in their opulent world, unsettling secrets begin to surface, forcing her to question her safety, her dreams, and even her sanity.”
Malcolm D. Lee (Scary Movie 5, Space Jam: A New Legacy) directs from a script written by Alan B. McElroy (Wrong Turn, Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers).
Chloe Bailey (“Swarm“), Lynn Whitfield (Jaws: The Revenge), Lucien Laviscount (“Scream Queens”), Anna Diop (Us), Coco Jones (Vampires vs. the Bronx), Langley Kirkwood (“Banshee”), and Romy Woods star in Peacock’s Strung.
Produced by Diablo Cody, director Meredith Alloway’s Forbidden Fruits brought a new coven of witches to the big screen earlier this year, and it’s now streaming on Shudder.
Lola Tung (“The Summer I Turned Pretty”), Victoria Pedretti (“The Haunting of Hill House”), Alexandra Shipp (Tragedy Girls), Gabrielle Union (Breaking In), and Emma Chamberlain star in Forbidden Fruits, released by IFC and Shudder.
Free Eden employee Apple secretly runs a witchy femme cult in the basement of the mall store after hours. But when new hire Pumpkin challenges the group’s ‘girl boss’ ways, the women are forced to face their own poisons or succumb to a bloody fate.
“Forbidden Fruits grabbed me by the neck the very first time I read it,” Diablo Cody said. “It’s one of the craziest, most creative, beautifully bonkers projects I’ve ever worked on.”
Meagan Navarro writes in her review for Bloody Disgusting, “Forbidden Fruits may not necessarily forge new terrain in the teen satire space, but Alloway brings so much style and energy to her well-cast single-location stage play adaptation for the Gen Z crowd.”
The film is an adaptation of playwright Lily Houghton’s stage play Of the Women Came the Beginning of Sin and Through Her We All Die. Alloway and Houghton co-adapted.
This week’s new release roundups are presented by HUNGRY.
All aboard the swamp tour from hell – this hippo isn’t playing games…
HUNGRY is now available on Digital. Watch it now!
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