Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural

1973 ***1/2

Started out with this one based on the review of a Mr. John Pants. Conked out last night after 25 minutes or so, spent the day crazy to get back to it, ultimately was a little disappointed.

Lemora starts with the high, thoughtful flute music that tells you a movie is starting about a young girl who is about to go through some sort of sexual awakening. You probably saw such a movie on Cinemax once, staying up for the scene depicting two European school girls lying around naked and smiling at a point on the ceiling, while layers of peach gauzy bedcurtains waft between the subjects and the camera.

We meet Lila Lee, a thirteen-year-old girl who's spurned the evil of her parents (Hitman, Slut) to become the best ward of The Church ever. She gets a letter from Lemora, who's tending Lila's fugitive and nearly dead father, begging her to come see him, even though she lives in the middle of a reeking salt marsh.

Right away the "sub" falls off the subtext of this movie and rolls under the fridge and is never seen again. The moment Lila leaves the house, every character she sees is jamming on sin so heavily it's downright allegorical. Most often it's lust; everyone she speaks with lusts after her with barely-concealed zeal.

These scenes have a heightened unreality, as if they're scenes from a play performed in front of a dark, empty stage. Lila boards a claptrap bus for a drive through the dark, falls asleep, and awakes to the spectral sight of several white-skinned figures lurching through the woods, stalking the bus. Soon Lila is behind the wheel, trying to steer a runaway bus down a dark hill -- this for me was the most evocative piece of the movie; because that was just like scary driving dreams I had as a kid.

At the bottom of the hill Lemora comes into the picture to work on her barely-concealed agenda. This involves a lot of minor-delinquifying talk about Being Free and Your True Nature and stuff, which is naturally heading towards a big Lesbian Vampire Satanic bonding ceremony of some kind, and to hell with the Vampire/Zombie Vampire war that seems to be going on.

While it sounds like it can't miss, I must admit I had a hard time staying engaged with this flick. Like lots of vampires, Lemora really likes to talk, and the early scenes of her seduction were chatty indeed. Later, while the movie was showing me some more eeire, dreamlike images, there was a fair share of dragging and another fair share of cutting from so many bits of footage I could no longer tell what was actually happening. I started to really wish for some more plot to hold it together. This is probably best watched in a group, so you can crack wisenheimer and keep everyone interested.

Then again, I'm freakin' tired most of the time. I must admit that, as I've been writing this and thinking about some of the visual moments this movie has, I decided to bump it up half a star.

Either way, a good one to start on.