While this movie is 2 years older than I am, I still decided to sit down to watch it. Why? Well, because it is a zombie movie, and I am a huge zombie afficianado. Anything even remotely zombie, and I am there.

It turns out that "A Virgin Among the Living Dead" (aka "La nuit des étoiles filantes") was a rather boring and uneventful movie. Who could have guessed?

The story seemed pointless, to be bluntly honest, and it was really hard to immerse oneself into the movie and absorb it.

The characters are one-dimensional and you don't really take a particular liking to any of them.

I was unfortunate enough to watch an English dubbed version, which was just awful as dubbing usually is. Per default I try to avoid dubbed versions because a movie should always be enjoyed in its original language. And then when you have questionable dubbing, like it was here, it just worsens the movie experience.

"A Virgin Among the Living Dead" was hardly a memorable movie or an outstanding movie. I have now seen it once and can check it off my "watched movie" list, and I know that I will never return to watch it again.

Surreal, dreamlike, lyrical, macabre – words you may have seen used to describe this slice of Gothic Euro-horror from prolific Spanish director Jess Franco.

Having just watched the 'uncut and uncensored' DVD of Virgin Among The Living Dead, I would personally use words such as boring, stupefying, incomprehensible and pretentious to convey my feelings about this dreadful film.

Jess Franco's employs his usual 'stylish' flourishes (ie. awful zooms, extreme close-ups, bad editing) and throws in a fair amount of nudity, to tell the tale of Christina (played by the gorgeous Christina Von Blanc) who travels to her ancestral home to attend the reading of a will. There she meets the other members of her family for the first time – a group of weirdos and lunatics who spend the rest of the film stripping off, drinking blood and generally acting freaky.

Christina witnesses many bizarre events during her stay and is eventually found delirious, wandering in the woods, and is taken to the hotel where she stayed the night before. Here, she is seen reaching out to a woman, who leads her into a lake where she disappears under the surface. Is this a dream? Reality? Is she actually dead? Do we really care? By the end of the film, I was struggling to keep myself awake. As I was reaching for the 'stop' button, lo and behold, a whole slew of 'bonus scenes' popped up on my screen, featuring some of the worst zombies in cinematic history (apparently the work of French horror auteur Jean Rollin – nice job, Jean!).

Now I don't want to sound like a philistine – after all, there are plenty of people out there who laud this as a classic – but 'Virgin Among The Living Dead' really stands out as a low point in my horror-viewing history. Bar the naked chicks and one groovy scene featuring a man floating backwards with a rope around his neck, I really found this 'classic' to be a chore to watch. You have been warned.

The student Christina Reiner (Cristine von Blanc) travels from her boarding school in London to the castle of her family in Montserrat for the reading of the will of her father that she has never known and recently committed suicide. On the arrival, she spends the night in an inn and people tell that nobody lives at the castle. On the next morning, the mute servant Basilio (Jesús Franco) brings Christina to the Montserrat castle, where she meets her weird Uncle Howard (Howard Vernon) that is playing waltz on the piano and her cousin Carmencé (Britt Nickols) that is painting her nails and they tell that her stepmother Herminia (Rose Kiekens) is on the deathbed. She visits Hermínia that tells her to leave the castle and dies. Christina also meets her Aunt Abigail (Rosa Palomar) and a Blind Girl and while waiting for the attorney, she entwines daydreams and nightmares with reality. When she has an encounter with the spirit of her deceased father Ernesto Pablo Reiner (Paul Muller),he tries to warn her to leave that place that is evil, but it is too late.

"La nuit des étoiles filantes" is a stylish and senseless trash by Jésus Franco. The story has a promising beginning, but suddenly the plot seems to be incomplete and does not make sense at all. I believe that the problem is the different versions of Jésus Franco's feature. The DVD released in Brazil, for example, has audio only in English and Portuguese but the introduction is written in French; the lead character is Christina Reiner, and not Christina Benton; there is Death, and not The Queen of the Night; the raping scene is totally mutilated. Therefore, his movies are edited in the most different ways and this procedure certainly makes the story senseless. My vote is two.

Title (Brazil): "A Virgem e os Mortos" (The Virgin and the Dead")