This morning Gilligan at Retrospace, the best blog for looking at the world of my childhood, published another fantastic post called 1970s Grindhouse: You Can't Go Home Again. In between the newspaper ads for horror and sexploitation double and triple features, he speculates on the demise the genre and reasons why it has not experienced the renaissance many thought it would.
“ So, with Machete, Piranha 3D, and Drive Angry tanking at the box office, can anyone out there deny that the public at large does not want this kind of smut? Don't blame Hollywood. When it's offered in the theaters, no one goes to see it. It's a sad example of how you may want things to be as they were, but you can never go home again.”
I opened a door into my past when I wrote about The Kids are All Right, the 2010 tale of lesbian love, lust and infidelity in sunny California. While Juliane Moore has herself quick one while she's away, I found myself missing the music I listened to and loved when I was a teen-ager
Queen of Blood, Planet of the Vampires, and Life force are the three that immediately came to mind. I am sure there are plenty more out there (please feel free to add to the list in the comments).
I had to respond, but could not come up with anything more intelligent than my paltry list and that her mother smells like elderberry wine. To add insult to injury, she also made me a mix CD that is pretty rocking. I seldom get mixed CDs so it was a real pleasure to recieve it, but again, it left me creatively stymied.
Then I had an idea, solve both at once. Cheap, easy, and with a little luck, she would be pleased to have a CD that is the soundtrack for her own space vampire movie!
Laure und der Raum Vampire is a startling and original film. German science fiction films from the late sixties, especially with vampires, are a rarity, but writer and director Reid Hotz managed he create such a film
And what a movie! Visually rich in that mod sixties, won't the future-look-really-cool style and a swinging soundtrack by Clause Harmony (the Mozart of Porn), Laura and the Space Vampire is worth watching just for those alone. But has plenty plenty more to recommend it.
Starting off with an explosion on a space station at the edge of the Solar System the action doesn't let up until the breathtaking, for 1968, special effects blow out at the end of its 99 minute running time. Hotz's iconoclastic view of the future turns several genre conventions on their side. For example, the men are not square jawed, karate expert intellectuals and the women aren't, well, space stewardesses whose major purpose is to get rescued in the final act.
