Huievest Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

Aedonerre I gave this film a 9 out of 10, because it was exactly what I expected it to be.

Lollivan It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Ava-Grace Willis Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

frankgaipa Below is the first paragraph of my review of another genre-breaking film, Robin Campillo's Les Revenants (2004): My memory of the 1979 Australian film Thirst turns on a single misleading image: blood in milk cartons on supermarket shelves. Well-heeled shoppers push carts to and fro down spic-and-span aisles. Though the film's creators hadn't the nerve, or perhaps the imagination, to carry through -- their vampires are conventionally dangerous since the blood in the cartons is human -- that image broke genre. It suggested a maligned, maybe ghettoized yet worldwide minority not just making do but thriving. To analogize any of several possible real world minorities would be wrong, considering where the film goes. But if Thirst were newer, we'd wonder, is the blood in the cartons artificial, created humanely in a lab? Is it vampire "soy milk"? Are these vegan vampires? Whatever the answer, in that supermarket image Thirst's vampires are us. They're no more horrific than we are. The genre collapses.

Coventry "Thirst" is one of the rare Australian horror achievements that totally live up to the quality of its European competitors from that era when it comes to style, atmosphere and eccentrics. The tone is psychedelic and outrageous, while the premise is very imaginative even though vampirism is known territory for horror formats. Aussie hotness Chantal Contouri stars as a successful business woman who gets kidnapped by a cult of self-acclaimed superior beings because she's a direct descendant of the notorious Countess Elizabeth Bathory. She's kept prisoner at "The Farm" where followers' blood is being milked out the neck and served to drink as some sort of purification liquid. Our heroine is forced to undergo many barbarities by the fanatic blood-drinkers (like drugs and brainwashing) in order to make her realize she has a destiny to fulfill. The suffering of the main character is brilliantly emphasized and this results in beautiful and complex sequences of which you often don't realize they're real or part of Kate's desperate imagination. On more than one occasion, you get the idea that she managed to escape the nightmarish farm but, eventually, it comes clear that's only descending further into madness… The intensity and viewer's involvement definitely are "Thirst" biggest trumps, alongside the flawless acting performances by nearly every cast member. Several sequences are very suspenseful and the make-up effects, even seldom, are efficient enough to get remembered. The hi-tech process for draining all the blood out of the victim's necks is eerie, but old-fashioned vampire lovers shouldn't worry as sharp canine teeth are still well-presented too! As mentioned above, the acting is pretty much top-notch. The cast merely exists of average Australian TV-stars who all do a fairly good jobs but it's still the British actor David Hemmings (Blowup, Profondo Rosso, and Eye of the Devil) who impresses the most. There's a modest but neat supportive role for Robert Thompson who played the title character in the genuinely creepy film "Patrick" In my humble opinion, "Patrick" still remains the greatest Aussie horror film of all time, but "Thirst" definitely is a close second. Highly recommended!

j-thompson4 An Aussie vampire film? Never would have thought. Not to denigrate my country's film industry, but ... well, it's not known for producing bloodsucker flicks. The exception is this little oddity, released in 1979 and now hidden away in the 'horror' section of video stores across the country.Having heard of the film for several yrs, and seen the cover at my local video store (Chantal Contouri drenched in gore), I decided to check it out. The result: one of the most genuinely horrifying films to emerge from Australia in recent decades. Not horrifying in the sense of 'The Delinquents', where it's horrifyingly bad and let's just sit back and have a good laugh. I am talking, this film is a recorded bad dream. Reality and nightmare blur, blood spurts, and Amanda Muggleton sneers as one of our screen's most genuinely evil villains. Contouri was fantastic, too, as the hapless young woman abducted and brought to a blood farm and made to honour her ancestor, Elisabeth Bathory - bloodsucker extraordinaire, and the figure at the heart of those other 70s horror films 'Countess Dracula' and 'Daughters of Darkness'. The scene where she sprouted fangs and kills a colleague really jolted this horror movie afficionado.Visually, the film has dated: the hairstyles are tres out-of-date, and the colour cinematography was reminisce of those chocolate commercials I grew up watching on TV as a young boy in Melbourne. Problems also lay in the script's lack of depth. There was no psychological make-up to the characters, they had no history - and this made it very hard to relate to them on an emotional level (Contouri's character in particular). Nevertheless, this is an intriguing and eerie film that will appeal to fans of Australian cinema and horror films alike.

Rrrobert Terrible, badly-made modern-day vampire tale. Chantal Contouri plays a businesswoman kidnapped by a league of vampires who run a remote farm where mindless humans are routinely 'harvested' for their blood, which is then neatly packaged in milk cartons.The thinnest of thin plots is padded-out to feature length with endless chase scenes and incomprehensible dream sequences. In fact the entire plot is fully revealed within the first half hour, after which the film has nowhere new to go, so it constantly rehashes the same scenes of blood harvesting, the brainwashing of and hallucinations experienced by the film's heroine, and the spectacle of the sect's grisly ceremonies. The haste in revealing the entire plot so early implies that there will be a major plot twist in the film. None is forthcoming.Best part of the film is the wonderfully high-camp performance by Shirley Cameron as a sinister sect insider. Henry Silva and David Hemmings were clearly imported to help assure the film's boxoffice success but their presence does little to help the film itself. Meanwhile when Contouri enacts terror or anger it comes off looking much like the intense irritation she would experience on finding a parking ticket on her Mercedes sports car.