Le viol du vampire

Plot synopsis:
Three strangers--Thomas, Marc, and Brigitte--are coming to cure four sisters (for want of names, I shall call them Catherine, Nicole, Sylvie, and Marie) of their vampirism. Legend has it that vampire hunters ran a sword through Catherine's heart during the reign of Louis XV, and villagers raped Nicole and blinded Sylvie with a pitchfork. But they neglected to cut off their heads, and so the sisters survived. Today, they live on a manor, surrounded by crosses and protected from the villagers. Thomas, Marc, and Brigitte don't buy the legend. They think the sisters are simply humans who have been driven mad by years of persecution and villagers who think of them as monsters. Curing them will require only dispelling the sisters' belief that they are vampires. The first step is to burn all the crosses around the house. Catherine succumbs to Thomas' promise to cure her, but Marie feels that this is a betrayal and that Catherine must die to protect the other three. Catherine and Marie stage a sword fight, but it is Marie who gets stabbed. The next morning, Catherine goes off with Thomas to see if she can get over her fear of sunlight (she can't).With the crosses removed from around the house the sisters are free to roam. This causes fear among the villagers, and they gang up to search for and kill the sisters. When Nicole goes wandering in the village, the villagers get her. They also kill Brigitte, who happened to be standing nearby. The villagers then storm the manor. Sylvie is wounded. Thomas tells Catherine that he doesn't think she is a monster and asks for 'the kiss of the vampire.' Catherine obliges. When Thomas comes to, he has been turned into a vampire. So the legend was true! To escape the angry villagers, Catherine takes Thomas through a secret passage leading to the beach. Marc follows and, knowing that Thomas is now a vampire, he shoots both Thomas and Catherine, leaving their dead bodies on the beach.As the lord of the manor checks the dead bodies of Thomas and Catherine, he is surrounded by a group of vampires wearing long robes with hoods. They present him to the Queen of the vampires who, angry at the lord for failing to protect the sisters, kills him and licks his blood from her knife. "Now we have to start all over again," she says. The Queen orders that the bodies of Thomas and Catherine be destroyed, but her subjects disobey her and leave them lying on the beach. Eventually, Thomas and Catherine awaken.Marie's body has been taken to a clinic where she awakens. The Queen orders her to find Sylvia and also to bring her the body of a woman who recently died a violent death (turns out to be Brigitte). Brigitte's body has been placed in a crypt. The blind Sylvie has opened Brigitte's coffin and is singing to her. A funeral wagon flanked by vampires makes its way to the cemetery. They take the body of Brigitte away and transfer it into an ambulance just as Marc arrives with an armload of flowers. When he discovers that Brigitte's body is missing, he first knocks out Sylvie and carries her body outside. Then he jumps into his car and pursues the ambulance. He catches up with it, jumps from his car into the ambulance, but the driver knocks him out and takes him back
to the clinic. As the vampires pass the cemetery, they find Sylvie sitting on the ground. She has had her eyes gouged out and apparently is insane, believing that she's about to be married. The vampires take her to the beach, strip her naked, and leave her to wander in the waves.Meanwhile, back at the clinic, Thomas and Catherine have somehow made it there. Dr Semski asks Thomas for his help. At first, Thomas refuses. The doctor's assistant/lover explains how the Queen turned them both into vampires and then forced them to work in the clinic so that she could carry out research on vampires. But Dr Semski has been working on an antidote. Thomas finally agrees to help. Unfortunately, the Queen has learned that the doctor's assistant has betrayed her. The Queen has the assistant brought to her, where she is stripped, tied up, and beaten with seaweed.Thomas and Dr Semski are now performing in autopsy on a vampire. They find a reduction of the stomach and small intestine and enlargement of the heart. The doctor decides to test out the antidote on the autopsy victim (who is still alive) but, before they can finish preparing it, they are attacked by two of the Queen's vampires. Thomas is tied up and left on the floor in the autopsy room. When the autopsied vampire wakes up, she cuts Thomas loose.Marc has gone home and gotten some sleep. When he wakes up, he finds Brigitte in his living room. He can't believe his eyes but knows that she must be a vampire. He and Brigitte go to the Queen's house/clinic where they find some of the subjects in a lab, hypnotized, being brainwashed by a tape made by the Queen while they are hooked up to large cylinders that are either draining their blood or feeding them (it's hard to tell). Marc shuts off the tape, and Brigitte dies in his arms.There is to be a wedding. The queen has chosen Dr Semski and his assistant to be united in "the imminent triumph of the immortal race...the wedding of blood that will open the doors to the world." The doctor and his assistant are nailed into a coffin together. As the Queen revels in her triumph, Dr Semski suddenly breaks out of the coffin, and Thomas and Catherine appear and start shooting the vampires. The Queen escapes into the research lab to take a drink from a canister of blood. Unfortunately for her, someone has poisoned the blood. She dies in agony. The doctor decides to try out the antidote on his assistant. It works! She is no longer a vampire but, as a human, she is also dead. An unfortunate side effect.Marie runs down to the beach to escape in a boat, but she is attacked by Sylvie. Thomas and Catherine enclose themselves in a tomb to await their true deaths. Marc is last seen carrying the dead Brigitte from the Queen's house while crying out, "All the vampires are dead! Chere, chere, chere Cordelia." [Original Synopsis by bj_kuehl].

Tags: psychedelic, gothic

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