The creepy Reverend Ford (Gavin Reed) and his weird, whispering wife Alicia (Susan Heard) purchase Carfax Abbey with the intent of fixing it up. If you ever saw Dracula, the mere mention of Carfax Abbey should send off the warning bells that these two are actually vampires. Unlike most screen bloodsuckers, these two can only drink from members of their family tree. They can also only mate with each other, which has severely weakened their bloodline over the years. Because of that, the duo, along with a little help from their hunchback servant Spool (Berwick Kaler), kidnap distantly related relatives Susan (Jackie Skarvellis) and Candace (Emma Jones) and use them for feeding and breeding purposes.
Like the majority of writer/director Andy Milligan’s movies, The Body Beneath gets bogged down at several junctures. Fortunately, there aren’t as many extraneous, awkwardly acted, longwinded dialogue scenes here compared to the rest of his oeuvre. That’s due to the fact that Milligan delivers a handful of surprisingly effective sequences. The opening scene, which signals the appearance of the Reverend’s three blue-faced vampire brides is especially memorable. In fact, any time they are on screen, it’s a damned good time as their appearance and trancelike state make them look like extras from a dime store version of a Jean Rollin flick. Heck, even the “Vampire Gala” finale has a cool, dreamlike Rollin feel to it.
Fans hoping for another gore movie may be a tad disappointed as it’s not as grisly as some of Milligan’s other efforts. (Vampires by their very nature don’t exactly lend themselves to a gore flick.) However, it still has its moments. There’s a good knitting-needles-to-the-eyes scene, a leeching, and a crucifixion. This is the only area in which The Body Beneath suffers comparison to something like The Ghastly Ones. Despite that, it’s a significant improvement in just about every other way.
Sure, there’s still all the things here that make a Milligan movie a Milligan movie. Namely, overly theatrical and amateurish acting and staging, scuzzy sex scenes, soap opera plotting, and costumes right out of a high school play. This is also one of the films Milligan made during his London period and it feels a lot more authentic than the usual Staten-Island-standing-in-for-London shenanigans. It also continues the theme started in The Ghastly Ones of relatives being lured into a home under false pretenses and being trapped by someone with a deformed manservant.
AKA: Vampire’s Thirst.
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