By Richard Winters
My Rating: 6 out of 10
4-Word Review: Kidnapped by vampire cult.
Kate (Chantal Contouri) is an unmarried career woman living in Melbourne, Australia who gets kidnapped by a group calling themselves ‘The Brotherhood’. They take her to their isolated retreat where they try to brainwash her into becoming a bloodsucking vampire like them. She resists their pressure tactics forcing them to use even stronger psychological methods. Dr. Fraser (David Hemmings) is against this feeling it has have gone too far, which puts him at odds with Mrs. Barker (Shirley Cameron) who’s obsessed with trying any technique she can to break poor Kate down.
Shot on location in Montsalvat, which is a scenic artists community located in Eltham, this marks one of the first vampire movie to come out of Australia and for the most part it’s quite unique. The part that impressed me is the psychological angle that gets inside the head of the protagonist using her home as a motif and showing how the walls cracking during one of her hallucinations helps to symbolize the breaking down of her personality. So many other vampire films have a character transforming, but never the changing thoughts and attitudes inside their head that has to come with it.
This is also one of the first vampire films I know that has a sound connected to the bloodsucking. Most other movies emphasize solely the visual act, but here there’s a loud slurping noise, which is kind of gross, but also effective as it makes the act that much more vivid and thus more horrifying. My only complaint, which was a defect with a lot of films from that era, is the color of the blood, which here is bright red though in reality it’s much darker. It appears almost like Kool-Aid and probably was and there should’ve been more of it around her mouth when she sucks or drinks it and not just on her bottom lip.
The tone is a bit unstructured. At points it seems to want to aim for satire as it turns the vampire locale into a factory where is produces blood and packages it into cartons like a dairy does with milk. It even gives tours of the facility to the public, which is funny, but also perplexing. What are the people thinking when they see victims strapped to walls while big machines suck the blood out of them? Wouldn’t someone in the tour become alarmed by this and go to the police?
The same goes for Kate’s attempted escape, which comes off as too easy. There’s only one guard and the fence gate is wide open allowing her to simply walk out. Mrs. Barker and her gang do ultimately catch-up with her but why allow someone to roam the countryside so freely? What are the perimeters? Are they on some sort of island? It seemed to make more sense that there would be an electrical fence of some kind and armed guards standing outside, which would’ve made her escape more perilous and exciting.
Spoiler Alert!
There are some really cool deaths with the best being Henry Silva’s where he grabs onto a helicopter as it goes high into the air only to fall-off and get electrocuted on some power lines. Mrs. Barker’s demise, in which she falls into a vat of blood, comes as a close second. The Dr. Fraser character though kind of ruins things as his placement seems a bit too convenient. It’s his efforts that allow Kate to breakout, but it’s supposed to be her movie and therefore she should be driving the action and not allowing some supporting member to do it for her.
The final twist doesn’t work as it has Fraser, her supposed ‘savior’, taking her to an isolated cabin only to then turn on her, which I had already predicted was coming. Would’ve been more of a surprise if Kate had through her own fortitude found a way out and comes back to civilization and then seen in her home with a friend making it seem that everything was back to normal only to then have Kate’s sudden urge for blood consume her and she attacks her friend. This scene does come, but it’s much earlier and then she for whatever reason returns to the vampire place when it really should’ve been put in as the final twist.
My Rating: 6 out of 10
Released: September 28, 1979
Runtime: 1 Hour 33 Minutes
Rated R
Director: Rod Hardy
Studio: New South Wales Film Corporation
Available: DVD, Blu-ray, Amazon Video, Tubi
