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.
