Thirst

Deep Red and Blow Up actor David Hemmings stars in this amusing late 70s Australian vampire offering that predates the Blade movies in it's portrayal of blood drinkers as a well organized society, building human farms for harvest.

Returning readers may have read about my love of Near Dark, which portrays vampires as trailer trash predators in contrast to the high born sophisticates of most vampiric cinema. Normally, I'd side with the Deep South bloodsuckers of that movie every time, but there's something about late 70s/early 80s Ozploitation flicks that's so outlandish and bizarre that I'm torn between Near Dark and this quirky offering as my favourite Vampire movie.

After a genuinely horrifying shock sequence involving awakening in a coffin, the film settles into a nicely kitsch groove as a direct descendant of Countess Elizabeth Bathory is kidnapped by the gore farming cult of self-professed superman behind the human harvest, who try and persuade her to join them...

This is the kind of idiosyncratic horror yarn that major studios just don't make these days, preferring instead to keep those good looking healthy teens in peril while borrowing from underground torture horror films in their quest for second hand shocks. Although Thirst is dated, it's a fine example of the weird stuff that filled video shop shelves in the early 80s before the studios got their act together and stopped seeing home entertainment as a threat. Austraiiia was a hotbed of strange horror then, look out for Anyone with a love of 70s horror and low rent thrills will want to own this.