A misleadingly titled vampire romance in the Anne Rice, er, vein. After meeting a handsome stranger called Vlad at a gallery showing,a beautiful L. A. artist is commissioned to fly to Europe to restore an old painting, supposedly a portrait of Vlad The Impaler. Once there she is hounded by two warring vampires, the boring but romantic Vlad (a dull Christopher Atkins, who reminded me of David Peel in BRIDES OF DRACULA) and a goateed, evil bloodsucker who has lured her there so she can be turned into a bloodsucker too. Overlong flashbacks show that, in a previous life (groan...), she was a starving peasant girl during the black plague who had fluffy blow-dried hair, glamorous makeup, clean new-looking clothes and her own horse. Both of the melodramatic guys were monks back then, but the blond Vlad, who is one of the sons of the original Count Dracula, was tempted by her beauty, moving his intensely jealous (possibly homosexual) bearded buddy to beat him with a whip and have the girl burnt at the stake as a witch. Some people have to overreact to everything.
The bereaved Vlad then turned his back on the Church, became a vampire, and watched as his undead Dad turned the other guy into one too. For the last three centuries the two former friends have been pestering each other while Vlad awaited the girl's reincarnation. The two vampires finally face off in a berzerk finale that looks like it's taking place on an alien planet set left over from STAR TREK and has the "bad" vampire throwing glowing red and purple rays at the "good" vampire sort of like the way the Emperor throws handfuls of lightning around in the STAR WARS movies. Sharp camerawork and crisp colorful lighting keeep this watchable, but the material is overly familiar and none of the characters are particularly interesting. In one scene the heroine runs through a maze of tunnels populated by laughing vampire women who pop out and hiss at her every now and then in the manner of actors in a Halloween haunted attraction. (I'm not sure how the undead gals manage this, since the place is decorated with dozens of crosses!) The love songs on the soundtrack have a distinctly fifties sound that makes them seem jarringly out of place. Probably the movie's worst misstep is its ludicrous depiction of the "original" Dracula, who is seen briefly as a scuzzy, dumpy old man with male pattern baldness, an outlandish studded leather outfit, blisters around his mouth (a reference to STDs?), and a dopey face plate that looks like Hannibal Lecter's cannibal restraint mask after being left on the dashboard of a car on a very hot afternoon. One could read much more into the sexual angles here, but I don't know why anyone should bother. Roger Corman produced, and since the bigger and better known Dracula movie by Francis Ford Coppola made around the same time used the slogan "Love never dies", the ad artwork for this one settles for "Passion is immortal". It's heavy-handed and never very persuasive, but it has great Bulgarian location shooting and it's at least as good as some of Hammer's later, lesser vampire efforts like THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA and TWINS OF EVIL.
