Not owning the rights to the Bram Stoker creation, AIP decided to invent their own vampire myth: the result is Dracula-in-all-but-name, being suave (sporting gracefully graying hair), cunning (even when caught off-guard, he manages to assert himself and turn the tables on interlopers), psychic (amusingly, he doubles as a medium at private séances!) and feral (his creepy dashes for prospective victims, seemingly out of nowhere, with blood-red eyes and arms outstretched actually gave me a jolt on a couple of occasions!). As played by Robert Quarry, he is quite creditable and effectively gave Christopher Lee (Hammer Film's Dracula incarnate) a run for his money.
Incidentally, he anticipated the other Count's transition to modern times by 2 years and actually managed it a whole lot better (with, thankfully, little resort to Camp). That said, in the attempt to look at the phenomenon with a contemporary mindset, we get a contradiction – people repeatedly scoff at the idea of vampirism in our age, claiming it is a fabrication of literature and cinema, which rather suggests that they are aware of what it entails
and, yet, they are still surprised at what should be its predictable outcome and are required besides to pore over ancient tomes in search of a way to fight it! Though the film was given the alternate title of THE LOVES OF COUNT IORGA, VAMPIRE {sic}, which is actually borne by the copy I watched (for the record, this had been shown on local TV in my childhood but I first caught it years later on British Cable TV), it does not overstress the romantic angle. Indeed, one girl is shown quenching her unnatural thirst for blood by literally draining the life out of a kitten! The presence of a sinister (that is to say, hulking and deformed) acolyte is, admittedly, a bit of a cliché – but Yorga himself seems to have moved with the times (in spite of his traditional attire), since he is shown jadedly presiding over a lesbian vampire show in his living-room!
The stylish film was produced by Michael Macready (who also assumes the requisite heroic persona on-screen, though the doctor-turned-vampire-hunter played by Roger Perry actually has an even more central role!), son of distinguished character actor George Macready (who generously supplies the portentous narration here and which, at the start, erroneously refers to vampires as "The Living Dead"{!}: indeed, the whole film – scripted by Kelljan himself – aspires to a certain literariness but often merely results in being verbose
which, however, it often works around by having characters conversing about the unusual events in which they had been thrust presented as voice-over laid on exterior crowd scenes!). The climax is a downbeat one: while Yorga is almost comically disposed of by being pierced (typically, through the heart) with a splintered broomstick, the lone-survivor hero sustains a vampiric attack from his own girlfriend (herself newly-inducted into the ranks of the Undead)! AIP presumably turned a fast profit with this one, seeing how they immediately commissioned a sequel (and whose own viewing followed that of the original in the current "Halloween Challenge"). However, they would soon come up with yet another (and even more outrageous) variation on vampire lore with the cult Blaxploitation offering BLACULA (1972) – which, in turn, led to the as-yet-unwatched SCREAM BLACULA SCREAM! (1973; helmed by Kelljan himself!)...
