La sangsue

A Count in Ireland invites a troupe of attractive actresses to his island castle in the early 20th Century. Once there his guests literally lose their heads, one by one. Sadly this Count is no vampire, instead we have a murder mystery fashioned around Gothic horror. An Italian movie, this falls short of being a genuine giallo. This film is slow, dull and the English language version suffers with awful dubbing. We get day for night scenes, when a storm rages the film makers have inserted some stock footage - in black and white! Set in Ireland but obviously not filmed there. There is plenty of soft core sex and nudity (bums and boobs), but this is not enough to save this from boredom.

The Bloodsucker Leads the Dance - what a laughable title, it's so utterly misleading. It's not surprising that the film-makers try and mislead us though because this is one terrible movie.

The story basically involves a murder mystery in a castle on a remote island.

Very little happens in this film. And when something does wake the viewer from his stupor, it invariably is unintentional comedy in the form of atrocious dialogue delivered by a hopeless group of voice-artists. These guys are so bad they make the actors they deliver voices for appear like a group of remedial-level morons. It really is hard to determine how bad the acting is when you have dubbing this abysmal. But the voice-artists cannot be blamed for the script. It's a travesty. Unintentionally funny at best, pathetic at worst. The story in general is, to say the least, uneven. The women characters are particularly idiotic; the men are either creepy or tedious.

The whole enterprise smacks of pure exploitation of the audience. It doesn't remotely deliver what it promises and even when the murders (finally) start happening, they all occur off screen. All we get is a few half-hearted severed head shots.

A few people have said that this movie is a giallo. I cannot agree less with this opinion. Anyone who enjoys Italian thrillers should give this movie a wide berth as there is nothing remotely thrilling about it. It's basically a soft-core porn film with a horror angle. But it's not very erotic either.

I can't recommend this to anyone.

Strange, mediocre movie, a late specimen of the Italian gothic horrors that were very popular in the Sixties and early Seventies. More an excuse for showing what its ancestors couldn't (i.e., lot of naked female bodies, several love scenes, even a couple of lesbian ones)that a real horror, this convoluted tale revolving around a charming count and an old curse that stalks the women in his castle is very slow for more than a half of its total and in the end fails to deliver any chills and even the final explanation is boring and silly. This is very unfortunate as the male lead is Giacomo Rossi Stuart, that was very active during the Sixties in several interesting Gothic samples (like Operazione Paura by Mario Bava, the better of the Italian directors of this genre).

As I watched this film on Netflix, I was given the Redemption version with eight minutes of terrible introduction before the film even began. I would strongly encourage anyone who watches this to skip ahead to the film... (the DVD is probably the same, and there is no excuse for that).

Critic Robert Firsching said, "In the hands of a better filmmaker, it might have been an interesting pastiche, or even played as a clever spoof, but Rizzo appears to have made the whole thing up as he went along." That may be fair, as it seems to have very little plot and revolve around getting different characters in bed with each other.

Fans of Mario Bava might recognize a few faces: we have Giacomo Rossi-Stuart ("Kill, Baby, Kill") and Luciano Pigozzi ("Blood and Black Lace"). Those looking for horror will be disappointed, though. Despite the title claiming there is a "bloodsucker", this is not a horror film or a giallo in any real sense. It is an Italian sex comedy, and little more.

Alfredo Rizzo directed only eight films, but appeared as an actor in 97. He was certainly a better actor than a director.

The packaging for this film is quite misleading, which may account for all the ill will towards it: first the title itself implies this is a vampire movie (it's not) and the cover picture shows an actress (Krista Nell?) with a vaguely Bride-of-Frankenstein-esque hairstyle, which also gives a misleading impression of the subject of this film. And it must be acknowledged at the outset that "Bloodsucker Leads the Dance" is a trifle, more of an excuse to get its actresses naked than a serious attempt at filmmaking.

That said, however, I don't think the film is entirely without redeeming characteristics, especially for fans of giallo (Italian thrillers), the major characteristics of which this film displays in its plot (a murderer with supernatural overtones is stalking a bevy of sexy houseguests at the remote country mansion of a count) and its gothic setting. If you take it for what it is (a flimsy giallo made on a shoestring budget) and not high art, you notice a few fun things about this production while viewing it: a cool soundtrack, nice costumes and sets, a perverse view of human nature and of course lots of female skin. It can be a fun movie to watch if you approach it in the right spirit. Probably not for those not already "hooked" on giallo, though.