JAKOB’S WIFE **** USA 2021 Dir: Travis Stevens. 98 mins
Writer-director Travis Stevens follows up his superb feature directing debut GIRL ON THE THIRD FLOOR (2019) with this witty, gruesome genre piece set in the knowingly named Kinski County.
At the core is a bravura transformation from Barbara Crampton – no stranger to such extremes, having transitioned from the repressed, buttoned-down woman of science in Stuart Gordon’s FROM BEYOND (1986) into a dominatrix straddling Jeffrey Combs. Here, her once adventure-laden life has settled down into something altogether more stifling with preacher-husband Larry Fessenden. Old-flame businessman Robert Rusler’s reappearance in town rekindles old passions – but, in the process, she is attacked by a Nosferatu / Mr. Barlow-esque “Master” vampire (Bonnie Aarons) and her life is transformed…though not necessarily in a bad way.
Crampton has perhaps her best latter-day role here, capturing Anne Fedder’s initial distress at returning home with a blood-caked blouse to her miraculous liberation: new hair style, nice dresses, drinking blood from wine glasses in the afternoon, enjoying a luxurious bubble bath and rejuvenating her sex life. Her blissfully oblivious husband inadvertently nails her pre-vampire misery when he notes, with a creeping sense personal terror, “40 years I’ve known this woman – everyday the same” and looks suitably horrified when he catches her in an act of glorious self-pleasure.
The movie delivers graphically messy, impressively staged scenes of huge arterial spray, broad laughs (“it wasn’t me!”), a suitably queasy trip to the dentist and bittersweet observational humour as Fessenden talks, without irony, of killing the Master and changing his wife back to the way she was. We’ve seen repressed married women relishing the escape (sexual and otherwise) offered by vampirism before – perhaps most powerfully, Barbara Shelley in DRACULA PRINCE OF DARKNESS (1965) – but how fabulous to see a horror film about a sexually liberated woman in her sixties. Fessenden has the far less showy role, but deadpans superbly: “This is what I was trained for – to fight evil!”
Review by Steven West
JAKOB’S WIFE is available on Amazon