Black Candles

A young couple go to stay with the man's sister, only to slowly discover that the sister is part of a coven of witches trying to ensnare them.

I knew I had to see another Jose Ramon Larraz movie after watching his Vampyres last year. Vampyres was a strange and slow horror/softcore porn movie that should have been terrible except that it had an effectively haunting, dreamlike atmosphere and some legitimately hot sex scenes. Although not exactly scary, or gripping as a story, it was artful horror and decent pornography. It felt sort of like a Jean Rollin movie, only well-made and watchable.

Black Candles is not Vampyres good, but it shares some of the same qualities. It might even be a less eventful and more sex-filled movie, straying even further from full-blooded horror, but manages to evoke some of the same weird, hard to define atmosphere. It's a story about passive protagonists sloooooowly being ensnared by the world's least pro-active villains, but I found it weird enough to enjoy the ride.

The sex is is still pretty good and more plentiful, but Larraz threw me a pretty fucking major curveball during the surprisingly graphic (though not hardcore, thankfully) and really long bestiality sex scene between one of the witches and a goat. Nothing else about the movie is particularly disturbing and the rest of the sex is, I think, supposed to be hot, so I was not really sure what was going on here. Hopefully he didn't put that in there thinking it would turn his audience on.

Rating: B-