Jaromil Jires, 1970
I'm not sure what to make of this one. It's both stunningly beautiful and almost entirely incomprehensible. Well, on a literal level, it's incomprehensible. Thematically and subextually, it's pretty much puberty.
The principal vampire, the Weasel, is one of the more unsettling vampires in film, and borrows a lot from Max Shrek's Count Orlock. That's actually a term that could be applied to the majority of the film: unsettling. It's never really scary, but constantly creepy. I suppose the fact that it focuses on the sexuality of a thirteen-year-old girl contributes to that as well.
I should note my frustration with the subtitles on the DVD that I watched. They were somewhat rudimentary and occasionally misspelled ("sing" instead of "sign," for instance"), which is a little annoying but not anything I can't get past. The thing is, though, that they were also horribly, horribly mistimed. In many cases, the subtitle didn't even appear onscreen until the line of dialogue had been finished! Amazingly enough, this wasn't a technical fault with the DVD - the subtitles were burned into the film print. I cannot express fully just how obnoxious this was, and it's a testament to the film's quality that its strengths were able to shine through.
6/10
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