Sunbathing With the Undead: Jess Franco’s Vampyros Lesbos Rises From the Cult Fiction Underground This Weekend

Countess Nadine Oskudar has a great racket — especially since she’s a bloodsucking lesbian vampire. Her erotic nightclub act on a remote island in the Mediterranean lures lovely damsels to her boudoir where she can chow down to her unbeating heart’s content — whenever she’s not soaking up some rays with a little nude sunbathing.

That makes sense, doesn’t it? Ah, but this is a Jess Franco film and on Franco-World the only constants are ample supplies of nude beauties and bright red blood. There’s probably no more polarizing figure in the cult cinema world than Spanish horror director Jess Franco, and his 1971 erotic horror film Vampyros Lesbos (which is often cited as one of the best of his almost 200 films) is a classic example of why. Some consider Franco a Eurotrash schlock-meister churning out bloody soft-core porn like a sausage factory, while others regard him as the ultimate misunderstood auteur with an amazing body of work that has been hampered by the often crushingly low budgets he has been forced to work with.