Final Verdict: Mayyyyybe worth a watch if you’re curious about a fairly corny, occasionally inspired cult erotic sorta-horror flick.
When you combine being sick in bed on a Sunday with Shudder’s unique streaming alternatives, you can easily find yourself watching something you ordinarily wouldn’t. You ou see, while Shudder’s service has the familiar “watch what you want any time you want” option of every other streaming service, it also has what basically amounts to four “channels” that feature unalterable, programmed content. There’s “Slashics” which–you might guess–runs slasher movie classics. There’s “Wicked Grin” that features more comedic or lighthearted horror / thriller fare. There’s the “Psychological Thrillers” channel, which doesn’t have time for any cute name shit. And then there is the primary channel, “It Came From Shudder” which, near as I can tell, just plays whatever the hell it wants to.
It’s a pretty cool option to have, I think, as it has the potential to introduce you to flicks you’ve either never heard of or seen before, or at least wouldn’t have been searching for at that exact moment. Sometimes those flicks are little gems, like the surprising German zombie flick I’ll be writing about in the future1. Otherwise, well, let’s get into Daughters of Darkness.
First off, I was surprised at how well-received this movie was and, to some extent, still is. Admittedly, I’m not up enough on my 70’s Euro-arthouse cinema, so I can’t offer any counter to the reviews that note it as a strong example of that genre merged with horror. And to be clear, the film doesn’t have a unanimous, outstanding reputation, so much as a generally solid rep as a cult / underrated near-classic. I almost see what some of the positive reviews are getting at when they call it an “exercise in mood [and] tone” or “fairly stylish” (the latter from Roger Ebert’s curiously non-committal review that’s mostly just a rundown of plot points). Ultimately, though, no, I don’t see it. The movie has some lovely moments here and there, but not nearly enough to make up for the clunky campiness that makes up the bulk of the film
The story is very straightforward and the plot eschews any attempts at mystery. Two newlyweds–an unfortunate young woman named Valerie and her untrustworthy, murder-and-torture obsessed new hubby, Stefan–stop over at an old hotel when their planned train trip meets an unexpected roadblock. The newlyweds happen to be placed in the favored royal suite of Countess Elizabeth Bathory, a woman who hasn’t visited the hotel in 40-years, who checks in with her female companion just after the married couple arrive.
In case the Countess’s name was too much of a dead giveaway as to her true nature and eventual motives–and a glowing neon clue as to who’s behind a spate of murders committed in the area–the hotel porter tells her right to her face that he remembers her from four-decades prior, when he was but a bellboy. Only she hasn’t aged at all, he claims! She looks just as she did all those years ago. And she just sort of semi-coyly plays along and before denying she is the same woman. This all happens less than fifteen-minutes into the movie.
Not very long after–but longer than you think, given how little actually happens between scenes–Bathory introduces herself to Valerie and Stefan, and wastes little time in regaling Stefan with the sexually torturous exploits of the Countess of legend while groping him right in front of his wife, as is customary in Europe, I presume. Valerie is more horrified by the explicit descriptions of torture that are very blatantly arousing Stefan than she is upset with this woman having her hands all over her husband, and I can’t tell if that’s absurd or understandable because the scene is so bizarre you can’t expect her character to behave like a normal person.
Tempted as I am to turn this entire write-up into a plot-recap highlighting one silly moment after another, I don’t really want to do that (anymore than I already have). Hopefully what I’ve written already gives you an idea of what you might be in for if you chose to watch Daughters of Darkness. If not, I will add that it has two death scenes that are inept enough to lift an eyebrow, but not quite baffling enough to be full on laughable. They involve sharp-but-not-sharp-enough instruments falling in impossible ways to stab or cut people in fatal ways that defy what you’re seeing.
I can’t say I regret having watched Daughters of Darkness, but there’s no way in hell I could recommend it. The writing is thin, the characters may as well be aliens, the handful of lovely shots are undermined by the barrell-full of overwrought, corny moments, and the interesting score is rendered ineffective by a comical overuse of dire-strokes punctuating any moment that might be remotely seen as sinister and several moments that aren’t close to being sinister. And I suppose, once-upon-a-time, this movie was erotic, but even the “seduction” and sex in this film is rudimentary.
