El vampiro sangriento

The impressively eerie opening scene of The Bloody Vampire—a creepy black carriage being driven by a grim reaper-style character across a foggy landscape while bells toll and wolves howl—lays on the atmosphere thick and fast, and the splendidly spooky trappings continue unabated throughout this cheesy Mexican horror, leaving virtually no cliché left unturned. Unfortunately, despite the potential for this being a frightfully fun slice of Gothic excess, director Miguel Morayta undoes most of his good work with a terrible script that is overly convoluted when it comes to its vampiric lore and which features far too much dreary conversation.

The occasional sight of evil Count Frankenhausen turning into a giant, hairy rubber bat with over-sized ears and fangs enlivens proceedings occasionally, and Latino beauty Begoña Palacios (second wife of Sam Peckinpah, no less) is easy on the eye as plucky undercover vampire hunter Ines, adding a little spiciness by briefly stripping to her corset and big 'ol bloomers, but overall the film is a frustratingly dull affair, one that all the shadowy corridors, caverns full of cobwebs, choral music, raging thunderstorms, secret passageways, and clocks chiming midnight in the world cannot save.

3.5 out of 10, rounded up to 4 for IMDb.

For my 100th commentary I picked this little film.Another south of the border flick snapped up for a few pesos by K Gordon Murray.According to some film books this film was hacked down from its original running time but not the dvd I watched.It could have used 15 minutes trimmed.I'll get to that in a moment.

This film starts out great.A coach driven by a skeleton races noiselessly through the woods. Rather spooky.In it is the dreaded vampire Count Frankenhausen.When the Count gets to his home we're treated to more fog and spookiness.

Then the yakking begins.One of the Count's idiot neighbors is his sworn enemy Count Cagliostro.They've lived nearby for some time and didn't even know it!Anyway Count Cagliostro babbles endlessly about a new method to kill vampires.It isn't even used in this film but is in the sequel, Invasion Of The Vampires.Then the Count Cagliostro goes to the capitol probably to filibuster and we don't thankfully see him until the end of the film.

His daughter and doctor fiance discover that the evil Count lives nearby.So Anna goes undercover as a servant to the Countess there.For some reason the Count hasn't fanged his wife but fangs servant girls brought to him by the sadistic Frau Hildegard.Well Anna turns on Frankenhausen and off we go.

But in the middle of the film the vampire and the doctor have a seemingly endless conversation about COFFEE!!ARRGGH!Cut this right out of the movie please!

There is some real brutality here with the whipping of servants and one has his tongue cut out of his mouth.The last twenty minutes pick up the pace and we're treated to a nice chase and some spooky shots of the vampire.When the vampire changes into a bat however he looks like a vampiric Bugs Bunny.Rabbit ears are on that bad boy!

In the end there is a climactic showdown in the cave of the vampires.

All in all some of the spooky scenes save this movie.The soundtrack switches from choral music to jarring electronic weirdness which is creepy.Stay tuned for info on the sequel, Invasion Of The Vampires.

A fairly bog standard Gothic horror entry from Mexico, filmed at the Azteca studios with a strong foreboding atmosphere and some great production design. Expect to see a film filled with classic horror images: the spooky old castle and crypts; vampires rising from their coffins in a cave; oodles of dry ice masquerading as fog filling the screen with an eerie chill and sense of the weird. THE BLOODY VAMPIRE also boasts one of the best openings I've seen in a Mexican horror flick: it involves a carriage (driven by a skeleton!) riding slow-motion through a spooky old forest, making no noise whatsoever as it travels by. It's just a shame that the rest of the movie can't live up to this classic horror imagery.

Instead, the film boasts smalltalk, smalltalk, and more smalltalk. Director Miguel Morayta doesn't seem to know what he's doing, as he films long static takes with little action or excitement to enliven them. Instead we get one long monotonously-dubbed scene after another which becomes a little wearing after a while. Conversations about a new method to kill vampires, boring romantic sub-plots between minor characters and even a discussion of the origins of coffee (!) threaten to drag this film right down to the ground and eventually lessen the entertainment value a great deal. Not so that the film is totally unwatchable, but it could have been a lot more successful with a little cutting here and there and a few more scenes of action to recommend it.

The special effects employed by Morayta and his team are largely amusing, if limited. The sight of the giant rubber bat (with huge ears) flapping around the sets is a cheesy delight for the bad movie buff. Otherwise most of the effects are of the sound variety – the film is chock full of weird moans, chanting, creaking doors and eerie winds. The sound actually highlights the horror in a number of scenes and adds to the watchability of the film a great deal. Cast-wise, the unpleasant Count von Frankenhausen is played by Carlos Agosti as a sneering Bela Lugosi variation, complete with (added in) pin-prick lights in his eyes and the trick of shining normal lights on his eyes to make them more spellbinding, again originally used by Lugosi. But Agosti just comes off as a thoroughly nasty fellow rather than a truly evil bloodsucking vampire.

Glamour content is added by the lovely Begona Palacios, as a purveyor of good who goes undercover as a maid and whose affections are hunted by the evil Frankenhausen (well, who wouldn't?). Bertha Moss is suitably hissable as the evil Frau Hildegarde but Raul Farell leaves a void as the uninteresting Doctor Peisser, supposedly the film's male lead. By far the best character is unlucky manservant Lazaro, who gets violently whipped by the Count for his insubordination. The biggest cheat of the film is there's no real ending; INVASION OF THE VAMPIRES, the superior sequel, followed.

Miguel Morayta wrote and directed this two part storyline shot back to back in Dec. '61-Jan. '62, concluded by direct sequel "The Invasion of the Vampires." Truth be told there wasn't enough incident for two pictures, and one may safely assume that at 99 often excruciating minutes "The Bloody Vampire" would have benefited had it been pared down to a more reasonable running time. The narrative focuses on Count Siegfried von Frankenhausen (Carlos Agosti), the feared vampire who has taken for his Countess Eugenia (Erna Martha Bauman), the daughter of Marques de la Serna, owner of the Haunted Hacienda near Dead Man's Lake. His mortal enemy is Count Cagliostro (Antonio Raxel), who possesses all the knowledge gathered by his ancestors on the destruction of the undead, using the black roots of a flower that only grows near a vampire's residence and beneath a hanged corpse, from which an elixir can be injected into the body to render it human rather than a victim of the cursed bite. None of this actually plays into this first chapter, which kicks off in fine atmospheric fashion with Count Frankenhausen traveling on a coach driven by the grinning skull of Death, after which it bogs down with expository chatter that really doesn't matter. Cagliostro's daughter Ines (Begona Palacios) is hired to be the new attendant for the Countess, aided by her fiancée Dr. Riccardo Peisser (Raul Farell), reluctantly welcomed by the Count as a way to keep his enemies closer. A protective servant gets his tongue cut out, and housekeeper Frau Hildegarde (Bertha Moss) throws a few tantrums when the Count shows an interest in replacing his wife with Ines as the new Countess. The Count's ultimate goal is to raise an army of the living dead but here there's no conclusion, escaping after putting the bite on the Countess, his comeuppance inevitably waiting for the sequel (Erna Martha Bauman returns not as Countess Eugenia but as her own daughter, who knows nothing of the undead state of her missing padre). The two features ambitiously combine for more than three hours, beginning in shuddery fashion and ending with two reels of spooky doings with an army of vampires emerging from their coffins, but in between it drags interminably with unceasing exposition that simply leads nowhere. Let's not even mention the bat on a wire with ears so large that one wonders how it can stay in the air!

Of interest to absolutely no one this is my 100th posted review and I thought I would choose a movie that is one of my wife's favourites. We both love Mexican movies but Count Frankenhausen is her absolute favourite villain. This movie, directed by Miguel Morayta, opens promisingly enough. A black coach rumbles silently through the night, its driver is a skeleton; its passenger is Count Seigfried von Frankenhausen and he musty reach his home, the forebodingly named Haunted Hacienda, before daylight. Bellowing "Whip the horses, for Satan's sake!" they proceed through the night. This movie creates its own lore about vampires and it all works very well. A Dr. Ulysses Albaran, student of Count Cagliostro, learns that a vampire can survive having a stake driven through its heart. the only way to really kill them is by injecting Clammic Acid into their veins. What is Clammic Acid, you ask? It can be distilled only from the black Mandragora flower that grows only on spots over which a man was hanged. Sounds like killing vampires is a tougher job then we thought! Count Frankenhausen is nothing if not an over-achiever. He wants to turn everyone in the world into vampires with himself as their supreme leader! But if everyone in the world is a vampire where will they get the blood they need to survive? I don't think the Count has thought this plan through very well. He might not get to try it out anyway, Dr. Albaran and the daughter of Count Cagliostro have determined to get into the Haunted Hacienda and put an end to the Count. They have a surprise ally in the Count's still human wife who hates her blood drinking husband and keeps a wooden stake by her bed at all times. Out of this surprisingly eclectic assortment of characters watch especially for Bertha Moss as Frau Hildegard. This is a cold hearted a witch as ever graced a terror film. She protects the Count jealously against everyone. She stomps about the castle barking orders and dolling out hideous punishments to servants who transgress, like cutting the tongue out of the footman because he talked too much, and letting the Count appease his thirst on badness knows how many chambermaids. So can this vampire be stopped? Not in this movie! A sequel, INVASION OF THE VAMPIRES, came soon after. The effects are cheap but good editing makes them look more effective than they should. The impressive castle set was also used in THE BRAINIAC. The studio, Churubusco-Azteca, guards the copyrights to its movies very well so expect to search hard for this one on VHS or DVD. This film and its sequel though are well worth the hunt. They are entertaining and scary too.