Classic Horrors Club

After watching only 30 minutes of Blood Suckers (1971), I stopped the Blu-ray and turned off the television. I wan’t enjoying it at all and I simply could not continue. The next day I awoke knowing that I had to finish it. I figured there would be either another 50 minutes to grin and bear it, or I might perceive it as better than the first 30. Surprisingly, the resulting experience fell somewhere between the two extremes.

Following a first act that includes a seven-minute orgy scene with scantily clad or naked women and men, accompanied by a frenzied fusion of 1960s music and song, the film settles into a quieter incoherence. The producers must have sensed potential confusion about the plot, so inserted narration from a character named Tony Seymour (Alexander Davion.) It didn’t help me, force feeding information too quickly for me to comprehend.

It’s not that the story isn’t simple. Seymour and his colleagues, Derek Longbow (Patrick Macnee), Bob Kirby (Johnny Sekka), and Penelope Goodrich (Madeleine Hinde), travel to Greece to locate their friend, Richard Fountain (Patrick Mower), who has apparently gone off the rails and joined a cult where impotent men achieve sexual satisfaction by drinking the blood of other cult members.

So sloppily put together, director Robert Hartford-Davis (Corruption) disowned it and some versions have been released with a pseudonym, Michael Burrowes. It’s disjointed with no connective tissue between scenes, but there’s something compelling about it. I think it’s the concept that may have been better realized in the source material, the novel “Doctors Wear Scarlet” by Simon Raven.

Dr. Walter Goodrich (Peter Cushing) doesn’t make the journey to Greece. He stays home at Oxford where he can direct the faculty in an organization that doesn’t appear to be much different from a cult itself. He appears in only one scene in the first act and four scenes in the third. As expected, as always, he shines, especially during the climax.

That’s the thing; you should never play down. If you’d only got a scooter, you’d pretend it was a Rolls Royce, wouldn’t you?

Peter Cushing

There’s repeated mention of homosexuality. Bob tells his friends that he’s not gay and the gang questions Richard’s predilections. They all seem to know he’s impotent, but they also seem to need a reason to explain why. I believe it’s all part of the idea introducing a new and different kind of vampire. It’s one that can run around in daylight and may or may not actually be supernatural.

In the end, though, they don’t die, and in a final shot that I liked a lot, a character raises a wooden stake and mallet. It’s way too little way too late, even though it’s preceded by arguments over belief in the supernatural. Maybe it was added after-the-fact to try to make it a horror movie. Otherwise, it is not. It’s barely a thriller, but two literally cliff-hanging scenes try to make it suspenseful.

Technically, Blood Suckers is not a well-made film. I’d need to hear a thoroughly-considered defense from anyone who thinks it’s “good.” Nevertheless, there’s something about it… Late in the game, I became interested in its disparate components. If you connect it’s factual chaos to the fictional madness of the aforementioned seven-minute orgy, it might even make a little bit of sense.