NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/alt/vampyres/2063

Text File | 1992-12-30 | 3.4 KB | 69 lines

Newsgroups: alt.vampyres
Path: sparky!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu!usenet.ins.cwru.edu!agate!ames!decwrl!deccrl!news.crl.dec.com!dbased.nuo.dec.com!nntpd.lkg.dec.com!engage.pko.dec.com!milkwy.enet.dec.com!ed_eck
From: [e-mail]
Subject: Movie review--_Lenore, the Lady Vampire_
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Summary: one fang up. Good symbolism.
Sender: [e-mail] (USENET News Daemon)
Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation
Date: Wed, 30 Dec 1992 21:17:40 GMT
Lines: 57


    _Lenore, the Lady Vampire_

(No, I'm _not_ making this up. Another channel 64 (Boston, MA.) Late Movie.
Where do they _get_ these things?)

Starring nobody you've ever heard of. Directed by nobody you've
ever heard of. Produced by his brother...

Actually, this one is something less than horrible. It's obvious
that the movie is meant to be interperted at a symbolic level
and quite obviously the writer and director were influenced by
the Freudian theories of personality. I don't want to make the
movie sound better than it really was, but it did lead me to some
interesting reflections.

A barely postpubescent girl with a typical religous zealotry, obviously
in compensation for her inability to cope with others' reactions
to her sexuality, runs away from her foster home (her foster father
is a minister with his own sexual hangups) to find and forgive her
dying father.
Her journey takes her past an assortment of seedy leerers (good camera
work and casting here) until in the midst of a dark
Freudian/Dantian/LittleRedRidinghoodish wood, she is captured by
Lenoretheladyvampire, who proceeds to (rather tamely) debach her
sadomasochisticly. The girl puts up a token resistance, but obviously
accepts the process until she realizes its sexual components; Lenore,
of course, eventually vampirizes (of course it's a word!) her.

The acting is not quite passable--Lenore lacks the required magnetism
and presence. The girl is well cast for her virginal appearence, but
doesn't catch the tension between childhood and adolesence. Everyone
else is furniture and the plot is cobbled together ("...but last year,
everything _changed_. We don't know why!" And we never find out.)
and has major flaws and obvious backfillings.

Some of the symbolism is obvious--the woods as the sexual confusion
of adolesence, with the beasts in the woods symbolic of both her awaking
sexual urges and of the men who leer at her--but it is nicely done
and as with all good symbolism, can be read at many levels. It
_means_ much more than it _says_.
Other symbols are more disturbing. The final scenes, where the girl
returns home to first seduce and then kill the minister, then sings
in the church choir is obviously a symbol that she has intergrated her
sexual and spiritual natures; has her becomming a vampire led to an
intergration and maturation of her personality? What happened to her
original liefmotiv of forgiveness? Lenore the Vampire is
a symbol of the end of childhood innocence, of course, but could she
also symbolize the first menstrual period? (Are we on to a PHD thesis here?)

Bergman this isn't, but if you're the kind of person who enjoyed teasing
out the underlying themes of (whatthehell is the title in English?) _Tisningen_?
The Silence...? Or _The Hour of the Wolf_ (It's more like the them than
like _The Seventh Seal_), _Lenore_ is probably worth watching. Once.

Ed E.