1962's "The Invasion of the Vampires" was the direct sequel to "The Bloody Vampire," a low budget epic storyline filmed in two parts by writer/director Miguel Morayta, with many of the same cast members, among them Carlos Agosti as the vampire Count Frankenhausen, Erna Martha Bauman as Countess Eugenia Frankenhausen in the first, daughter Brunhilda in the sequel, Bertha Moss as Frau Hildegard, and Enrique Lucero as manservant Lazaro. At the conclusion of the previous entry the Count had put the bite on his beautiful Countess then disappeared, leaving his daughter Brunhilda at the Haunted Hacienda owned by her grandfather, Marques de la Serna (Tito Junko). The old man has never informed the young girl of her undead parentage, and the arrival of Dr. Ulises Albarran (Rafael del Rio), skilled in the teachings of Count Cagliostro, means that Brunhilda has another protector to watch over her during nights of the full moon. Count Frankenhausen remains at large, using his lovely daughter as a lure for young men to meet their doom at his fangs as she wanders out to Dead Man's Lake in a hypnotic trance, but the doctor needs help in gathering the proper roots to put a stop to the growing cult of vampirism. Just as much bogged down with dialogue as its predecessor but definitely an improvement for a climax worth waiting for, once the Count perishes in hilarious bat form and all his previous victims (including his Countess) subsequently rise from their coffins to walk again, an army of the undead preying upon anyone venturing out in the darkness. Only by restoring the bat corpse to its previous human state via the scientific method prescribed by Cagliostro in the first film will the evil be stopped once and for all. This time a mostly silent Count Frankenhausen appears only sporadically, and in one chase sequence foreshadows Robert Quarry's better known Count Yorga in two AIP classics from the early 70s, while both the Marques and Brunhilda were mentioned yet never seen in the initial chapter. Had the convoluted storyline been pared down to a tighter single feature it would have been hailed an atmospheric masterpiece of Mexican horror cinema, but as it is there are many who champion both pictures despite their faults.
