Nocturna, 1979

What a lot of crap! This film goes straight onto our Sandpaper Your Eyeballs List.

This vampire-dancing-queen film is just like a porno. The structure is just the same, it has just as little dialogue and plot as a porn film, the music is also just as bad. The sex scene is so appalling that it makes a porno look good. Nocturna’s departure from the porno genre is the early adoption of sparkle vision (a precursor to Twilight perhaps?), a uniquely 80s-ish feature; think music clips of the likes of Bonny Tyler and Roxy Music with a constant stream of soft-focus back-lighting, sparkling, twirling girls, namely the shapely female vamp Nocturna played by Nai Bonet.

The IMDB reviews are far too generous. Perhaps these reviewers saw a different version of the film, because in the version we saw there was not much to recommend it. Perhaps the reviewers are into meaningless dialogue interspersed between endless footage of Nocturna, prancing around to an appalling and interminable soundtrack, while bathing, striding along corridors, walking the streets of Manhattan, basically every thing she does is gratuitous self-promotion for Nai Bonet. The vamp wrote the script (with Harry Wurtz) which propels this film into a whole new world of nasty. These coma-inducing scenes are cut with snippets of a blossoming romance with a blonde haired, snappy dancing, Aussie bloke, who also happens to be mortal; something her ancient grandfather disapproves of.

And this is the plot, such as it is. Vamp girl falls for musician boy, grandfather (Dracula of course) disapproves. Vamp and human elope to Manhattan, Drac goes in pursuit, but is pursued in turn by an old lover who convinces him, in the end, to leave the youngsters to have some fun. This being 1979 much of the action happens at the DISCO making it a kind of Vampire Saturday Night Fever.

There is only one interesting aspect of this film, an unexpected fairy-tale element that is totally unexplored here and not seen in any other vampire film that we can remember. Like the story of the Little Mermaid who gives up her fishiness for a mortal lover, Nocturna also undergoes changes to her supernatural qualities as a result of her love for the muso. During one of Nocturna’s many and endless porn-like dance scenes, she begins to appear in the mirrors around the dance floor. There is no way to tell whether the dancing or the love-affair-with-a-mortal is the active agent in this transformation. The film’s makers were so gormless they do nothing more with this really interesting plot twist and so the viewer will never know.

So, this might be an inoffensive little salute to the disco era, it might be kind of entertaining if you love disco culture, but there is one element to this film that all the reviews we have looked at have omitted mentioning. The creepy little man, played so convincingly by Theodore Gottlieb, who pursues Nocturna from the beginning of the film until she leaves for Manhattan, is truly horrifying.

During Noctura’s bath scene (it seems to be a large part of the appeal of this film) Theodore spits out a monologue about how wants to rape her, kidnap her and force her to stay with him in Transylvania and conspires with her grandfather to bring her back home. Nocturna deals with him like you might deal with an annoying child; she basically dismisses his attentions out of hand which only serves to fuel his rage, in much the same way that a disco enthusiast blogger does in his review of the soundtrack.

Seriously, this script was written by a woman, perhaps the 70s women’s movement hadn’t penetrated Nai’s part of the world 'cause this is really so distasteful that any fun that might be had with the disco camp is totally lost on this humorless woman M!