I’ve said it before and it bears saying yet again, but if you’re going to make an exploitation flick then make a gatdamn exploitation flick! That’s all I’m saying. ‘Eternal’ is a movie that boast sex clubs, lesbians, bondage, hot vampire chicks, sex parties, infidelity and horny vampires chicks yet I’ve seen episodes of Law and Order: SVU that were more salacious than this. Next time either make a straight mystery thriller or pull your foot off the brake and get busy. Don’t stand in the middle of the road, because as they say, that’s a sure way to get run over.

In our film based in Montreal Canada, we meet Ellen (Sarah Manninen) who is on her way to a rather gothic looking mansion as she has made a new internet buddy. Once in the house Ellen meets the hostess of the glorious estate in one Elizabeth Kane (Carline Neron) who is quite the triple threat being tall blonde and beautiful, not to mention rich – though she does have her issues. Elizabeth likes Ellen, asks her a few questions, gives her glass of wine then slips on this weird looking finger dagger, stabs Ellen in the neck and drinks her blood.

When Caroline’s husband, Vice Detective Raymond Pope (Conrad Pla) gets the call that his wife’s abandoned car has been found, he happens to have a belt tied around his throat and a gun to his head while his partners wife is riding him cowgirl style. So in the first ten minutes of this flick we have a lesbian scene and a bondage sex scene featuring a total of three beautiful women and yet I haven’t seen naked woman the first.

Detective Pope is not too terribly concerned with this situation because his wife has run off before but when his young son doesn’t know where mommy is he decides perhaps its time to do some police work. He tracks down where his wife was last seen and confronts Elizabeth who admits that she had seen the woman but that she left

under her own power, and perhaps she wasn’t getting the good stuff she needed at home. Well Detective Pope ain’t trying to hear none of that and starts to dig deeper into the life of Elizabeth Kane and he ain’t liking what he’s finding. Worse still, the more he digs, the more bodies start to pile up and damn if all of the evidence isn’t pointing straight to him. It doesn’t help that the word ‘detective’ is simply a title in front of Pope’s name because the only thing that makes Pope remotely cop-like is the fact that he drops F-bombs in every other sentence. Sherlock Holmes this dude isn’t. Regardless, with his ass in a sling and the evidence mounting up against him, Pope has to find a way to clear his name and stop the immortal menace that is Elizabeth Kane.

A couple of SPOILER things about this movie which I find curious. So the baby sitter gets killed and dumped in a lake, meanwhile Pope is inexplicably having some illicit sex with Elizabeth, with both fully clothed by the way. They fish the baby sitter out the lake and the cop investigating Pope asks him ‘How did your semen get out of your dick into your babysitter?’ I wanna know how Elizabeth did that too. I mean that’s a helluva trick right there. The whole setup for that scene was pretty stupid anyway.

One of the problems with this movie is how stupid a character they made Raymond Pope out to be. We know that the beautiful Elizabeth is evil incarnate and the dude that finally captured her gave Raymond one simple instruction when he went to see her in her jail cell and that was ‘don’t accept anything she offers you’. That was it! That’s all you gotta do man. And what does he do? Drink from a glass she gives him through the bars filled with blood. What kind of sense does that make? Truth be told not a hell of a lot made sense in ‘Eternal’ which is alleged to be based on the true story of the Countess Elizabeth Bathory who bathed in the blood of virgins. This seems like it would make a great setup for a sordid little horror movie, but the narrative that they encased this legend in was jumbled, meandering and unfocused.

It’s too bad really because this was one fine looking well shot movie as directed by Wilhelm Liebenberg and Federico Sanchez. Conrad Pla made for an interesting hero with some charisma to him, despite how lousy a detective they wrote him out to be, and the statuesque sharply featured Caroline Neron certainly looked the part of a blue blooded regal bloodsucking princess but by attempting to straddle line between a fast moving thriller and an erotic potboiler we ended up with neither.

‘Eternal’ is a great looking movie with good looking people in nice clothes and exotic locations, but it moves to slow to be an action movie, is far too stupid to be thinking thriller and not nearly erotic enough to be a titillating time waster.