AndrewRGray

The movie gets off to a good enough start, with Price's character waking for a "typical" day as the last man on earth: He marks off another day on his handwritten calendar, checks the generators which supply his hideout with light and power, drags away the vampire bodies which appeared overnight. But once the film drops into flashback mode all bets are off: The rest of the cast is God-awful, the script is deliriously bad, and the movie declines into a hoot-fest. This is the kind of picture that needs Tom Servo and Crow to serve up the zingers.

While Price acquits himself well enough in this film, over all this is an extremely weak production. There are a few atmospheric moments worth seeing -- the pit where the vampire-zombie bodies are incinerated is creepy -- but mainly this is a poor script filmed for cheaply a few thousand lire in Italy. If you like lines like "the best brains are running through this thing with a fine tooth comb!" you might enjoy watching for the laugh value. Romero's "Dead" movies and "The Omega Man" are far better examples of the genre.

This is a film that works on many levels. It's a great movie about movie-making, telling you all you wanted to know about silent filmmaking in the Weimar Republic. It's a bleak and black comedy, laugh-out-loud funny in places. It has its moments as a genuinely spooky horror film. It's a movie about addictions -- parading through the picture are alcoholics, morphine addicts, laudanum addicts, all surrounding the greatest addiction of them all: A vampire's addiction to blood. It's a movie about obsessions, and how they make us inhuman in our desires. Lastly, it has great performances and, filmed in Luxembourg, looks fabulous. Highly recommended.