Telling the tale of a sexy doctor (Diana Sorel) and her even sexier assistant (Beatriz Elorrieta - any relation?) who travel to a remote town afflicted by an outbreak of vampirism and soon agree to move into the local castle to care for the bed-ridden Baron and hang out with his feckless, would-be Byronic son (Nicholas Ney in his only screen credit), it’s probably fair to say that ‘La Llamada del Vampiro’ often feels quite a lot like an early Paul Naschy movie, minus the unique sense of imagination and enthusiasm which the great man brought to his productions.
In fact, I’d go one further and humbly suggest that quite a lot of what goes on in ‘La Llamada..’ comprises a direct imitation of the preceding year’s smash hit ‘La Noche de Walpurgis’ [aka ‘Werewolf Shadow’, aka ‘The Werewolf vs The Vampire Woman’].
Qualified professionals who clearly don’t let their intellectual acumen prevent them from expressing their femininity and indulging their fondness for wearing baby doll nighties and/or hot pants, Sorel and Elorrieta’s characters are clearly modelled on the glamorous archaeological researchers at the centre of Naschy and León Klimovsky’s film, even to the extent that, in both cases, one half of the learned duo gets romantically involved with a moody, black-clad fellow who wonders the woods bemoaning his cursed lineage, whilst the other instead becomes enslaved by a predatory lady vampire.
Meanwhile, in the course of presenting Ney’s scraggle-haired, “moping teenager” type character as an extremely unconvincing stand-in for Naschy’s Waldemar Daninsky, the film even manages to bungle things by getting its vampire and werewolf mythos all mixed up, presenting Ney (and, by extension, the other vampires) as folks who are pretty normal most of the time, but freak out, grow fangs and set off against their will to seek the blood of the living whenever the moon is full.
As if all this didn’t constitute enough of a ‘homage’ to ‘La Noche de Walpurgis’, ‘Llamada..’s debt becomes blindly obvious later on, when we’re treated to slo-mo shots of the vampire women dancing around in flowing night gowns, showing off their fangs - an effect shamelessly cribbed from one of the more memorable images in the earlier film.
Furthermore I might add, ‘Llamada’ even has the gall to shoot in many of the same locations as ‘..Walpurgis’, with both the Castillo de la Coracera and the familiar Monasterio de Santa María de Valdeiglesias once again pressed into service.
(Very much hallowed ground for Spanish horror, the extraordinary ruins and imposing castillos in the province of San Martín de Valdeiglesias near Madrid have provided a home for everyone from The Blind Dead to The Blancheville Monster, making it difficult to imagine any fans being unfamiliar with them by the time they get around to a lower tier picture like this one.)
Even leaving aside the issue of plagiarism in early ‘70s Euro-gothic though, suffice to say that we’re looking here at a pretty run-of-the-mill example of the genre - but, the thing is, I like the genre, so still managed to have a lot of fun with it regardless.
Indifferently directed, blandly photographed and entirely lacking in originality though ‘La Llamada del Vampiro’ may be, the simple pleasures of looking at the pretty ladies in their groovy costumes, taking another tour of the spectacular locations, and hearing some way-out bits of canned music from the CAM archives provided my refined sensibilities with all the stimuli required to keep me happily enthralled through the film’s double bill friendly 84 minute run time.
Speaking of the pretty ladies meanwhile, it’s also worth noting that the version of the film screened by good ol’ Channel 18 appears to have been the international export cut, complete with a variety of easily snippable naughty bits clearly intended to entice us saucy foreigners into the (presumably very few) cinemas which played this thing in territories beyond the reach of the still highly censorious Franco regime.
For the first half hour or so in fact, I thought this was going to be a pretty chaste, old fashioned exercise in gothic horror, notwithstanding a few of our heroines’ fashion-forward costume choices. But then, without warning, we start to get a few surprising flashes of full frontal female nudity, before, during the final half hour, we’re suddenly hit with a pretty full-on softcore lesbian scene, followed by some extended kinky business with chains and feathers in the castle dungeons, as the ever-growing legion of vampire ladies titillate their victims in the lead up to the film’s agreeably action-packed and chaotic finale.
All of which serves, I suppose, to belatedly edge the film into the ‘erotic horror’ category, although viewers approaching it primarily for this reason will be in for a good long wait before getting their jollies, that’s for sure.
Commentators of a more cynical disposition may be apt to question exactly what else anyone might want to approach it for, but personally I’d advise shunning such cynicism and embracing the half-hearted vision of le fantastique sloppily conjured up here by Elorrieta and his time-pressed collaborators. As outlined above, I still found plenty to give me a warm glow within this almost reassuringly routine and unexceptional addition to the Euro-horror canon.
Though certainly not any kind of overlooked classic, ‘La Llamada del Vampiro’ is definitely worth seeking out and saving up for that moment when you find yourself jonesing for another dose of that very particular ‘70s Spanish horror vibe, but have already seen all the good ones too many times.
No comments:
Post a Comment