La llamada del vampiro

No doubt buoyed by the tremendous international success of Naschy's immortal 'werewolf Shadow' Spain began to produce a remarkably vivid series of lurid horrors and one of the more gratifying examples is 'Curse of the vampire', a gloriously giddy slice of sapphically-inclined Gothic horror that has no qualms about pilfering ideas from all in sundry and generously adding its own florid flourishes of idiosyncratic insanity!

'La llamada del Vampiro' myriad strengths reside not in its bold cinematic uniqueness, but in its plentifully unique strangeness and director Elorrieta's avid appreciation of the female form, and the film's not infrequent displays of aesthetic nudity, bared bloody fangs, bouncing bosoms has an appealingly ribald Jess Franco quality that does much to enliven the creaky Gothic frolics of this small isolated village, with its ancient shadow-steeped castle, the no less decrepit Baron and his profoundly demented son and heir who invites the beautiful Dr. Greta Materlick (Diana Sorel) and her stunning brunette nurse to stay at this benighted castle until his troublesome medical condition finally stabilizes. And it is while the pulchritudinous doctor and her delectably nubile nurse uncomfortably settle into this greatly unsettling, doom-laden domicile that all the truly monstrous machinations of the benighted curse that has fallen upon the vampire-fearing villagers is grimly revealed.

Being a sucker for full-blooded, voluptuously mounted, terminally titillating, erotically eerie Euro-cult sinema featuring salacious, sinful succubi and their nasty, nocturnal need to make their quarry bleed has driven me to dig ever deeper into the crepuscular celluloid crypts of forgotten fright to unearth this darkling B-Movie beauty! Nothing is tomb much trouble for inventive film-maker Elorrieta and his toothsome terror-flick 'Curse of the Vampire', as sublime, scantily garbed, graveyard haunting horrors abound gruesomely in their unholy quest to slake the uncommonly macabre, morbid lusts of the damned. Fangs of Jean Rollin's sensual succubi will have much to sink their teeth into with the lusty, fleshly-fabulous blood-spiller 'La llamada del Vampiro'.