Mary (Cristina Ferrare) is a bisexual artist who picks up men, drugs them, slashes their throats, and drinks their blood. She finds potential love with a hitchhiking beach bum (David Young), but there’s always the danger her hunger might force her to turn him into a hot lunch. Complications ensue when a murderer dressed up like The Shadow (John Carradine) goes around killing people in the same method as Mary.
Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary is a relatively low key, but moderately effective entry in the ‘70s lesbian vampire subgenre. It’s not up to the lofty heights of Vampyres or beautifully shot like Daughters of Darkness, but it’s a reasonably entertaining chiller in its own right. The highlight is the lesbian bubble bath sequence where Mary is brought to tears when she realizes she’ll have to kill her lover in order to survive.
There’s also a great scene early on where a shark injures a fisherman and his buddies drag that fish out of the ocean, haul it onto the shore, and beat the crap out of it. I’m not one for animal cruelty or anything, but I do like me movies about vigilante justice. Imagine if they put these guys in Jaws. It could’ve been Death Wish with Sharks.
Ferrare (who was married to John DeLorean at the time) is pretty good in the role, which requires her to be seductive and tempting in her vampiric state, and sad and lonely in her artistic day job. Speaking of day jobs, this is another one of those vampire movies where the vampire is a “real” vampire. That means sunlight, garlic, crosses, and the like don’t have any effect on her. She just needs to feed on human blood periodically to stay alive.
Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary is more of a melancholy look at a lonely vampire life than a straight-up horror flick. Because of that, the kill scenes, car chases, and run-ins with the stranger in black (who may or may not be Mary’s father) lack sizzle. Had director Juan Lopez (Alucarda) Moctezuma been able to make these sequences crackle, it might’ve been a classic. Then again, the fact that he made the quieter scenes work better in comparison says a lot too.
In the end, it’s a toss-up. If you want a balls-out horror flick, you’ll probably be let down by Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary. If, however, you prefer a sad, bleak look at a vampire’s dreary day-to-day existence, it will be a somewhat rewarding experience.
AKA: Mary, Bloody Mary.
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