El mundo de los vampiros

After viewing some of Paul Naschy's jolly Spanish horror flicks, I expected to enjoy this routine vampire flick. Unfortunately, I was left disappointed by the film which manages to add nothing whatsoever to the vampire genre, merely content with copying content from previous vampire films. The film strides hard to achieve a Gothic atmosphere, which it partially does through some nice castle scenery, but a lack of originality - and indeed, pacing, make this one a bit of a bore.

The stilted acting is to be expected, but the dubbing here is far worse than in many other Italian and Spanish films I've watched. Absolutely no attempt is made to sync the words and the lips together, resulting in a surreal viewing experience. The threadbare plot consists of women running around in negligees, and nobody else doing very much. There's some mumbo-jumbo about a aristocrat's son falling under a vampire's spell, but the film is so badly acted that you don't really care what happens next. The violence content is low, as is the bloodshed, somewhat surprisingly. As this is an exploitation film, I would have expected lots of gory goings-on a la Naschy, but instead the film makers opt for plenty of totally gratuitous and superfluous nudity to spice things up, which I personally could have done without.

The vampires in this film are some of the worst I've ever seen. With gigantic fake fangs sticking out of their mouths and funny expressions, they're laughable instead of horrific. You'll find together looking at the clock as this film trundles along, it feels like double the actual running time. And what's with the tacked-on dream-like ending which seems to have been added to up the nudity and violence content? Out of place, and a bit silly really. The best I can say about this film is that in places it builds up some atmosphere, such as in the surreal and spooky scenes where we see two vampires dancing around, but it's still a far cry from the Italian gothics of the early '60s. CURSE OF THE VAMPIRE makes for cult viewing, but set your expectations low to enjoy this one.