This is it. We're hovering at around six in damned aye em. But I'm ready for the final film of the night and the entire festival. I'm nostalgic already. I should not leave out Quentin stomping onstage to tally up the best of the fest. I'll take a little credit for inspiring QT to start with the Best Title Scene since we talked much about them. COONSKIN won by nature of its proximity and would have been my second pick, but my shouts for PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW didn't convert the crowd. JUNIOR BONNER was also a deserved favorite. But Quentin wanted us to WANT IT, alright? For Best Moment, Harry Knowles called out for a pretty incredible dissolve between George Kennedy and Jim Brow in TICK...TICK...TICK. Good call. Quentin nodded, "Oh, going for the arty thing." Wish I could remember the rest of the best of the fest.
Tarantino set us up for the final movie. He was enamored of THE BLOOD-SPATTERED BRIDE from 1974 (so enamored he used it for a title card and main character in KILL BILL) and thought it sexy, subtle, bloody great Euro-trash. He said it was his favorite Lesbian Vampire Film. He warned us it started slow but would pick up and go to crazed places. He applauded us for making it through the night and the festival; then with a resonant THUD, Quentin dropped the microphone one last time.
I liked the desolate opening scene of a car driving through the woods, the red title card superimposed over a close-up of our heroine's face, a wedding veil drifting around her face. Susan is a young virgin freshly married to a wealthy brute. After she imagines (?) an assault in their hotel room, they arrive at the husband's atmospheric estate. Susan discovers a faceless portrait of a woman, who turns out to have murdered the great-grandfather after attempting "unspeakable acts" on her. As this faceless woman haunts Susan's bloody nightmares, her husband acts out his own domination fantasies onto her. The husband is such a bastard, even shooting a trapped fox (for real), that you can't wait for her inevitable revenge.
That comes in the form of the film's most indelible image, a woman buried in the sand except for her exposed breasts and scuba-masked face. Who is she? Carmilla, of course. The couple take her back to the estate, where she immediately assumes the ghostly aura of the Woman In The Portrait. She seduces Susan and thanks to Susan's disgust for her loutish husband, they become bonded in blood. Is Carmilla a vampire? That's what the husband suspects as the film's POV shifts to him, revealing of the film's own odd perspective.
What starts as a potential, albeit exploitive, feminist take on the vampire mythos (and lesbos) turns into a thriller about male castration fears -- and featuring a graphic shotgun emasculation. The husband is presented more sympathetically as he tries to rescue his wife from the clutches of the she-devil (so he can further abuse her?). This leads to a violent, dream-like climax and a terrific shock ending. Sadly, the film seems to espouse a Latino machismo by the end, making Susan's transformation into one of sexual transgression. And that ain't too cool.
Directed with erotic gothic panache by Spain's Vicente Aranda, THE BLOOD SPATTERED BRIDE unfolds at a leisurely pace, so much so that I drifted in and out enough to be as confused as Susan and her visions. The erratic shocking bits of sex and gore would pull me awake and I kept myself wide-eyed for the film's effective finale so as not to sleep through the festival's last minutes. But the crowd's energy was subdued after it ended, a fact which bothered Quentin so much he spoke of it years later at the Best of QT Fest and regreted showing this as the last film of the event. He would also eliminate the double marathon for future fests. He said it didn't work, but I think Quentin is 100 percent absolutely wrong. He programmed a fantastic night of horror films. But THE BLOOD SPATTERED BRIDE is a low energy cinematic blood-shake and needed to be shown upfront.
And that was it. Lights up. We survived the night. I bid farewell to Harry Knowles, walk over to Quentin, say hello to his mother and thank Quentin for the festival. He thanks me for sticking around. I exit to the Febuary 27th, nine am sunlight already bouncing off the Austin pavement. Slipping into the beamer, I crank up my festival anthem, "Chilly Winds" and drive through the empty streets of my present city. I feel complete, nay cleansed, after this nine-day movie baptism. I like the fact that Quentin was probably forming KILL BILL during this period and being at the fest was like the extended mini-series version. I discovered treasures such as PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW, JUNIOR BONNER, FREEBIE & THE BEAN, TICK...TICK...TICK among others now etched in my movie DNA. I also got to see what a true cineaste Quentin Tarantino is; I was altogether impressed with his deep knowledge and passion.
Crawling into the bed with the grateful prospect of sleeping all day, I reflect how lucky I am to be here in Texas on the edge of the 20th century after the greatest movie-going week of my life.
