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Review by Jeff Hannah ★★★

Surprisingly well-made but kind of boring when people weren't having sex or murdering each other. Just like real life!

7

Needed more vampirism and gay shit and less dreary annoying main dudes who kiss by just opening their mouth as wide as it goes and sticking their tongue out and rubbing it all over fran's face – that was the most disturbing part of the film

3

Atmospheric, transgressive, psychosexual vampyre romp filled with blood, and set in the perfect foggy crumbling castle via the hemmed in English countryside. Surprising final act took me off guard, a deliberately paced hypnotic ride filled with cloaked companion lovers hunting playboy men via hitchhiking deep within the wood—and the wine cellar. 

Right there with Symptoms as my favorite Larraz, I need to explore his earlier work more often.

Review by Nick Rattigan ★★

People didn’t learn how to kiss until the 80s

7

Wow! What a film. Iconic imagery. One of my fave discoveries of 2020.

Watched the Arrow Video Blu-ray (part of the Blood Hunger: The Films of José Larraz box set)

VAMPYRES

- Brand new audio commentary by Kat Ellinger
- Brand new interviews with producer Brian Smedley-Aston, actors Marianne Morris, Anulka Dziubinska, Brian Deacon, Sally Faulkner, makeup artist Colin Arthur and composer James Kenelm Clarke
- Reimagining Vampyres – a brand new interview with Larraz’s friend and collaborator Victor Matellano, director of the 2015 Vampyres remake
- Extract from an archival interview with José Larraz
- Jose Larraz and Marianne Morris Q&A at 1997 Eurofest
- Image Gallery
- Trailers

Review by Kap 🏳️‍🌈 ★

Remake this with a lesbian director

5

they shared the pleasures from the flesh and the horrors of the grave. a duo of feral blood-hungry bisexual vampires prowl the British countryside luring men back to their gorgeous candle-lit gothic castle, the men think they’re in for a good time, the women on the other hand, have an entirely different idea of fun; capture and consume their blood; never letting a drop go to waste.
atmospheric, blood soaked, and ravishingly erotic, it all feels like a mixture of Fascination from Jean Rollin and ultra-sleaze from the likes of Jess Franco; that pairing makes for José Ramón Larraz's psychosexual fever-nightmare that is Vampyres, full of sex, lust and murder—and awful kissing. 
I’m an absolute sucker for sequences of women lurking…

Review by Willow Maclay

This is better lit than like 99% of what gets made these days and it is mostly just vampires and boobs.

9

Hooptober X: Now With 20% More Horror!

“This is my lucky day.”
“Don’t ever say that.”

On one hand, sex with gorgeous bisexual vampires. On the other, certain death. I call that
High Risk/High Reward!

Usually, British + Gothic = Snoozefest for me. Stuff like Hammer has never been my jam, but this film is much more in line with something Jesús Franco would make. It avoids the rigidness I find in so many of those films and instead exists purely on vibes.

And there’s a plethora of boobs. So that helps too.

I wouldn’t say the film has much of a plot, I said the film is pure vibes and I meant that. It’s essentially scenes of softcore sex…

12

A savage wildness beset and surrounded by a befogged melancholy and quiet coziness, hemmed-in by trees and meadow, a ceiling of thunder. Trapdoors within trapdoors hold a fastness of void, a fortress built outward from nothing and planted within, to sleep and to dream.

Larraz's 'Vampyres' is a hybrid vampire-ghost haunted house/vampire den movie, inhabited by a loving couple whose lives have been unutterably altered by sudden, invasive violence. The film is about their efforts to re-establish domestic equilibrium and safety in the wake of this violence, which has infected them also. In order to remain, they must consume the blood of others. This is a long-standing tradition, going back to at least Ancient Greek Mythology and certainly long before,…

13

There's nothing sexy about José Ramón Larraz's version of vampirism. There is seduction, certainly, and a degree of eroticism, but the central trope of the myth, the feeding from the neck of a mostly willing victim that people like Christopher Lee made so alluring, is nowhere to be found. Instead, there is carnage: screams of pure terror; bodies hacked with knives, or torn apart with teeth and hands; delirious, brutal devouring of living, fighting human beings. It's jaw-dropping and terrifying, an interpretation of the legend that stands out for its originality and, oddly, realism.

Even when the vampires are controlled — thinking, seducing, toying — their reality remains disorienting and uncomfortable. Yes, the male victim who becomes their captive enjoys…

Review by Graham ★★★★ Liked

they sure don't build horny english bisexual female vampires like this any more, which is perhaps a good thing