Wednesday 26 June 2013

Lust For A Vampire (1971)

Ahhhhhhhhh Yutte Stensgaard. Lovely, lovely Yutte Stensgaard.

Aaaahhhh Yutte. Yutte, Yutte, Yutte.

A Hammer vampire movie directed by Jimmy Sangster, and written by Tudor Gates (is that name real? I'm not sure, but I'll assume that it is), let me get through this proper bit of the review as quickly as possible before getting to the main reason I love this movie and rate it so highly. Though you might have already guessed what, or who, that main reason is.

Lust For A Vampire is not the best Hammer movie, not by a long shot. The tale, all about an infernal clan who can avoid death and then feed off the blood of the living, is nothing unique. Young women wander around at the wrong time, and/or in the wrong place, and start to turn up dead and rather pale. The setting (an all-girl school) is enjoyable enough for male viewers and the cast, for its time, even throws in something to keep the ladies happy in the form of dapper Michael Johnson. Others appearing include Ralph Bates, Barbara Jefford, Helen Christie and the very pretty Suzanna Leigh.


There ARE other people in this movie, but they're not Yutte Stensgaard.

But they are not the reason for me wanting to see this movie for years and years. Oh no, not at all. That dubious honour belongs to the one and only Yutte Stensgaard. A woman so beautiful that I pined for her long before my young mind knew quite what I was pining for (having only seen her in pictures - in The Dark Side Magazine, my only real source of all things horror when I was about 15 years old - and never managing to have caught her on screen). Her acting skills are quite bad, and she doesn't have much in the way of actual personality, but Yutte remains one of the loveliest women I have ever lusted after in movie form and is absolutely the right choice for a film with this title. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but it's my eye and my decision to rate this particular Hammer horror a 7/10 based on little more than my enjoyment of the woman I have been smitten with for many, many years.

7/10

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Vampire-Lovers-Lust-For-DVD/dp/B001AOHQ0M/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1370433547&sr=8-1&keywords=lust+for+a+vampire


 
Room for one more picture of Yutte? Of course there is.

2 comments:

  1. All this love for Yutte and you don't even post the famous blood spattered publicity shot??? WTF. ;-]

    Seriously though, gorgeous though she may be, she kinda cracks me up in this. It's like her fangs are falling out so she head butts them to death. And "Strange Love"? I mean, come ON.

    I've not seen this in a while, but I've seen it a couple times and it seems to deserve its low estimation in the Hammer canon. 7/10 indeed. She can have the 10/10 it's clear you feel she deserves, but the movie as a whole...? Eh, not so much.

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    1. That's it, back to Google+ only ;-)
      It's a fair cop, but I like the film more than most people, and then also LOVE Yutte. So it claws its way up to a 7 for me.

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