Very Cool!!!

Gripping story with well-crafted characters

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

French-Italian-Spanish co-production has widower in 18th century Europe remarrying but unable to forget his first wife Leonor, who died a young beauty after being crushed by her horse (her doctor--a butcher-- believed "bleeding her" was the cure for her comatose state). 10 years pass before the husband believes he has seen Leonor standing by the river. After her crypt is opened, he and his beloved are reunited, but Leonor appears to be in a hypnotic trance until the blood of an innocent child suddenly restores her spirit. Co-written and directed by Juan Buñuel, this mercilessly slow yet intriguing drama has many unusual and unsettling moments. The English dubbing on the US print is stilted, though one can still perceive that the lead performances by Michel Piccoli and Liv Ullmann (and also by Antonio Ferrandis as the wise gardener) are deeply felt. The finale feels truncated--the continuity in the third act is choppy in general--though that may be the fault of the American distributor. Ennio Morricone's lovely title theme is quite similar to his theme two years later for "Exorcist II: The Heretic". ** from ****

If anything, LEONOR is a very Grimm fairy tale of love, loss, sorrow, and horror set in the Middle Ages during the time of the black plague but unfortunately, it's also less than the sum of its parts. Feudal lord Richard (Michel Piccoli), mad with grief over the death of his beloved wife Leonor (Liv Ullman), tries to assuage his torment by marrying a village girl (Ornella Muti) who eventually bears him two sons. Ten years pass but the pain doesn't ease and when Richard gets the chance to bring his lost love back, he takes it. His dream comes true but soon animals can't be tamed, crops won't grow, and children begin disappearing from the village...Filmed among the mountains and crumbling castles of Spain by Luis Buñuel's writer/director son Juan (who worked mostly in TV after this), LEONOR is a vampiric variation on "The Monkey's Paw" and "could have been a contender" since dark romantic horror can be just as potent as erotic horror in the right hands. The sweeping vistas and medieval tableaux by Dario Argento's SUSPIRIA cinematographer Luciano Tovoli and the moody Ennio Morricone score both serve the story well but the Gothic, Poe-like tale (based on a 19th century work by J. Sheridan Le Fanu contemporary Matthew Gregory Lewis) is slow moving and the horror implied rather than explicit. Both factors work against the film but the casting of Liv Ullman in the role of "Leonor" is the final nail in the coffin, so to speak. Ingmar Bergman's muse may be a very good actress but as someone quipped to Katharine Hepburn when she said she wanted the part of Scarlett O'Hara, "I can't see anyone chasing you for ten years" and if Liv and ravishing Ornella Muti had switched places this would have gotten a 8/10 from me. As is, it's a 7.

There are no vampires here, the synopsis given here is incorrect. What you get is a devastating film that details a love lost but never forgotten, and what happens when that lost love returns 10 years later resulting in murder, chaos and violence. Even more impressive, the film does not resort to nudity or gore to keep the viewer's attention. The cast is excellent, the script and story are fresh and inventive, and the direction hits all the right notes. Truly a one of a kind horror film, absolutely NOT for the slasher / torture porn crowd. The Magnetic video from 1980 contains the 85 min English dubbed version. The IMDb lists 100 min for the Spanish version, which is set for DVD release in June 2008. The dubbing is above average and nothing seems missing from the 85 min version, but I'm curious about the Spanish DVD when it comes out. This could be the ultimate art house horror!

Don't expect 70s Eurohorror in the vein of Jess Franco and the like, and don't expect anything ingenious like the efforts of the director's father. It's a loose adaptation of motives by early romanticist Ludwig Tieck, and since there was no vampirism in literature back then, THERE ARE NO VAMPIRES IN THIS MOVIE EITHER! Just Liv Ullman coming back from the dead after 10 years and strangling children. Great locations, good acting, but neither a convincing drama nor a satisfying horror film. But I've seen much worse than that and young Ornella Muti's a treat. And I like the fact that some screenwriters of the seventies got back to classic seldom filmed literature (like Ado Kyrou did in the far superior 'Le Moine') instead of copying plotlines, themes and motives that have been used a thousand times before.