One of the key works of Antony I. Ginnane’s wave of international audience-seeking Aussie-made horror movies of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, and a pillar of the genre today known by the playful name of “Ozploitation”, Thirst is well-produced, and has the benefit of an intriguing set of ideas animating its story. An international body of secretive vampires, providing a ripe metaphor for capitalist and colonialist abuse, keeping farms of human cattle, and trying to brainwash the heir to their founding member, Elisabeth Bathory, one Kate Davis (Chantal Contouri), who’s been brought up outside their ranks. Her persecutors include bitch-queen Mrs Barker (Shirley Cameron), Dr Gauss (Henry Silva), and his seemingly more conscientious colleague Dr Fraser (David Hemmings), whose job it is to render Kate a fit, sane inductee to their creed, so she can mate with the slimy Hodge (Max Phipps), the scion of another great lineage of the vampire world.
Cameron’s gloating, self-assured Barker walks off with the movie, as she and her fellows snatch Kate from her everyday life as a fashion designer and plunge her into a grotesque and bizarre situation. Director Rod Hardy mounts some effective suspense in moments like when Kate, having temporarily escaped the vampire farm, desperately trying to get a stalled truck going on a lonely road where the only people passing by are more haemovores she has to fake her way by, in a sequence that suggests Hardy learnt something from Hitchcock, and a lengthy, more spectacular scene in which Kate, under drug-induced hypnosis, recalls her abandoned childhood and is driven to blood-drinking by a barrage of spook-house tricks, including breathing walls and cracking mirrors.
The environs of the vampire’s farm, with its corralled, glazed-eyed residents being milked for their blood in sterile areas, dolorous compliance punctuated by momentary outbreaks of hysteria and terror, are cleverly rendered. Likewise the queasy moment when Kate is treated to the sight of the old farmer whose truck she stole in making her breakaway receiving the honour of being exsanguinated, as Barker proudly describes it, and the cheery tourist-guide explorations of the farm, possess a morbid satiric force in evoking exploitation. The film’s choice of bright sunshine and firmly, ironically solid and contemporary settings are a cunning twist on the gothic material. It’s also worth noting the film’s intriguing underlying commentary on the discomforting processes of Australia’s post-war immigrant assimilation, and the schism between the nation’s Anglo-centric, colonial past and its yearning, urbane, democratic present: heroine Davis, sporting an anglicised name that disguises her roots in the old world, with the lingering anxiety of those ties still binding, is inducted into a self-declaredly aristocratic world embodied by the pasty, self-satisfied, virility-lacking Hodge.
The problem is that the longer the film goes on, the less logical and interesting it becomes, until the final scenes reach an apogee of clumsiness. Clear story links and motivations disappear and opportunistic action and violence enter. Hardy’s direction constantly succumbs to a cheesy variety of modish hype, like the visions of eroticism with Kate and her magazine-ad architect boyfriend Derek (sex god Rod Mullinar) making love in front of the fire and in a park with gliding swans, joke-shop horror in the glowing red eyes that the vamps sport when the blood-lust is upon them, and tacky scares, like a milk carton full of blood and a shower of gore, stunts that seem rather unlikely to inspire the heroine’s latent vampirism. Late in the film, a villain is dispatched by being tossed into a vat of blood in what seems to be an empty factory, before revealing moments later it’s full of workers who somehow haven’t noticed this event.
Likewise, the reasons for Kate’s having been brought up outside the realm of bloodsuckers isn’t competently explicated, nor the reasons for the quiet war between camps of the vampires – Barker and Gauss on one side, Fraser and Hodge on the other – existing only to provide some tension in the ramshackle second half, with a final scene that’s criminally incompetent. Worse yet, the driving idea, the process of a thoroughly average young lady being steadily inducted into foul, inhuman depravities, is flatly handled, without any grasp on the necessary dark sensuality at the fantasy’s core, the evocation of increasing addiction and attraction to the dark side being entirely failed by the narrative.
Contouri, with her exotic, Barbara Steele-ish looks and malleable face, is well-cast, and, even if her acting is, to put it kindly, unpolished – her line readings are often very frail – she plays trembling fear and assailed conscience quite well. But there’s no dark revelry at all to her eventual transformation into what she loathes, and the film’s lack of contiguous, convincing narrative defines what went wrong with a lot of Aussie stabs at genre filmmaking, even if this Thirst is surely the most intriguingly conceived and one of the few tolerably executed instalments in the Ozploitation cycle.
