cult film freak: INGRID PITT STEALS HAMMER'S EXPLOITATION 'THE VAMPIRE LOVERS'

Ingrid Pitt with Kate O'Mara & Madeline Smith THE VAMPIRE LOVERS Year: 1970 Rating: ***1/2

At one point in THE VAMPIRE LOVERS, Ingrid Pitt's central vampire Marcilla (then Carmilla) turns to the young, innocent and naive Madeline Smith's Emma and shouts, "You must die... Everyone must die!"

What sounded like a threat was really a kind of arthouse philosophy lesson... making THE VAMPIRE LOVERS more a Bergmaneque lesbian-fueled melodrama than the harsher followups LUST FOR A VAMPIRE and TWINS OF EVIL... later deemed The Karstein Trilogy... that brought Hammer Films into the naked-sexy 1970's...

Madeline Smith and Ingrid Pitt in THE VAMPIRE LOVERS

Although we begin with the kind of all-out Victorian (ballroom) splendor that made the studio famous... with Peter Cushing taking in former Hammer starlet Dawn Addams' virginal daughter, Pippa Steel (engaged to Jon Finch), who, during the first act, goes through exactly what young Emma would later, getting sick while being seduced: punctuating the trope of not letting a vampire into your home...

Much different here since Ingrid Pitt's scene-stealing lesbian seductress Marcilla/Carmilla makes herself a welcomed guest, twice, and what carries the suspense is how far she'll get with either young prey...

Madeline Smith and Ingrid Pitt in THE VAMPIRE LOVERS

And for fans of lesbian flicks, they never go beyond quick kisses... but the kind of heated, simmering passion that Polish actress Pitt carries through (even onto a governess and then an actual man) is what really matters — while first-billed Peter Cushing really only bookends the beginning and end...

Peaking with his usual vampire-hunting self, it was probably both a reminder of what Hammer still needed, and what it was trying to shed for the lustfully risque drive-in era that Ingrid Pitt, while either surrounded by frightened or possessed victims, often seems all too alone completely inhabiting.