LIke many other Euro porn features by the team "Moire Candy" (Louis Moire and Max Candy), Dorcel's "Ritual" gets extraordinarily high user ratings in IMDb, most likely a gaming of the system. It's a pretentious, overproduced junker that detracts rather than adds to the voluminous body of vampire cinema.
Laborious voice-over narration spoon-feeds the confusing and contradictory story line, immediately dispensing with all the familiar vampire legends and tropes. Director Moire also discards violence, likely to avoid the modern censorship that opposes the mixing of sex and violence in a XXX context.
Lovely Melissa Lauren is the chief protagonist, seen in a series of arbitrary flashbacks living a bored existence for 500 years after being converted to the undead vampire state by Olivier Sanchez. She enlists his son, played by Brit Porn icon Lee Henshaw, to try and escape her immortality, and along the way we are treated to orgy scenes, thrown in merely to satisfy what the Moire Candy team thinks audiences want to see.
The only scene I enjoyed comes late in the show, a lyrical lesbian tryst of Lauren with beautiful blonde actress Gina, in a period setting as they travel the countryside by carriage. The more relevant (to the story) scenes are poor, and the whole package is presented in a color-drained, near-monochrome style that reeks of pretentiousness.
