Monday, September 29, 2025

Vampiress Review: Beyond the Rave



The Gist: A Soldier goes to find his missing girlfriend before heading off to war just to find that she is at a secret rave and has caught the eye of the vampire hosting it. 


Female Vampire Factor:  There are 4 in the film but only three have a significant role.  The main vampire Melech has two vampire hench women who lurk in the background jealous of the soldier Ed's girlfriend getting the attention from him.

They get a couple of fang moments once the vampire portion of the film starts.


Then you have the vampiress Lilith.

She gets revealed as sad and lonely and just looking for the right human to love which ends up being the soldier Ed's best friend Necro.  She gets super depressed when she reveals that she's a vampire and he gets scared.


The fourth vampire is just a background character during a rave scene who we see bite one of the party goers after retracting from the ceiling.

The significance of her is she is played by Sadie Frost who is probably best known to readers of this blog as Lucy from the 1992 Francis Ford Coppola film "Bram Stokers Dracula".
 

Final Opinion:  So, this film is infamously the last vampire film made by Hammer Horror.  For those not aware the studio with the help of former star Ingrid Pitt (who is in this film in a deleted scene) attempted to make a comeback and this film was its attempt to embrace the digital area.  It was original launched in 20 separate chapters uploaded to MYSPACE (yeah remember that).  

 From a story standpoint it's not bad.  As mentioned, a guy has to save his girlfriend from a rave run by vampires.  It's eventually revealed that the Raven is just a ploy to trap humans so the vampires can kill, drain and store their blood for a long boat trip they plan on taking and the soldiers girlfriend Jen along with his best friend Necro end up catching the eye of the head vampire and one of this females who plan on turning them both and taking them along. My biggest complaint is the way the film is broken up and with how dark it is at times it's hard to really know what's going on a lot of the time. I give it a Vampire Beauty Rating of 3 out of 5.  Considering the complete lack of female vampires in Hammers last official vampire films in the late 70's this is a definite step up from that but not quite what I would call a true Hammer experience and instead more of a lesser version of the film Lost Boys the Thirst that was heavily inspired by this that would come out two years later.