The Blood Spattered Bride

I'll be perfectly honest with you. I don't remember every little detail about The Blood Spattered Bride, and I just watched it last night. There are a few reasons why this film didn't stick to my ribs. For starters, I dozed off once or twice. I only missed a split second, but that's beside the point. I wasn't tired, I wasn't drunk and unfortunately, I wasn't post-coitus. No, I was simply bored. Bride didn't grab me at all. That's worth mentioning because I was really looking forward to popping this deviant, heteromorphic vampire pic into my DVD player.

Bride falls into the same category as Daughters of Darkness and Vampyros Lesbos. You know the drill...a shallow script is ensepulchered beneath naked women and European pretense. This isn't my kind of flick, but at least Daughters of Darkness was stylish enough to distract my feeble mind. Bride is rather plain to look at. As expected, the characters are flat (emotionally, that is...schwing!). The cast is stable, but how am I supposed to warm up to such an imbecilic heroine? After marrying her beau, Susan decides that she doesn't care for her husband's rape fetish. Apparently, she's down for anything during a courtship, but once you walk her down the aisle, she figures that you'll leave the chloroform behind.

The narrative itself is clunky. Susan befriends Mircalla, a blonde bloodsucker that joins the film after she is found on a beach buried in the sand (snorkel in tow). Don't ask. Her character might as well be named Elizabeth Bathory. She's a generic specter, hypnotizing Susan and coercing her to do violent things. One dream sequence is particularly gory, although it's the only moment where I can say that I was truly entertained. For a vampire, Mircalla is pretty goddamn dull. She doesn't even have fangs! Christ, Rockula had fangs. Jim Carrey had fangs in Once Bitten. Why doesn't this bitch have fangs???

I already said that I was bored with Bride, but that's an understatement. The pace is slower than an elderly woman crossing the street. Strike that; it's slower than an elderly woman climbing the oatmeal staircase at the end of A Nightmare on Elm Street. I did enjoy the ribald, scabrous elements of The Blood Spattered Bride. That's not saying much, though. Nudity in an exploitation film isn't a big deal, unless that's the sole reason why you spent money on it. In that case, just watch free porn on the Internet. I wanted more out of this one, and I didn't get it. If Mircalla was played by Amber Heard, this would be a very different review, ya dig?