In short: La llamada del vampiro (1972)

aka (The) Curse of the Vampyr

aka Curse of the Vampire

aka Crypt of the Vampire

aka Horrortrip

After the death of the village doctor, enthusiastic fighter of superstitions (or so she says) Dr Greta Materlick (Diana Sorel) comes to a small rural town in Spain(?) with her nurse Erica (Beatriz Elorrieta) to take over the local clinic and fight the mysterious illness that’s hitting the town. It’s a peculiar kind of anaemia that only shows its symptoms on the nights of the full moon, curiously, and if you are now thinking werepires, you’re exactly right, dear reader.

The good doctor can’t quite reopen the clinic yet, though, for there’s some sort of equipment missing, apparently. Which makes it all the easier for the doctor/nurse duo to stay at the castle above the village to treat the weak heart of Baron von Rysselberg (Antonio Jiménez Escribano), and flirt with his son Karl (Nicholas Ney). Karl only seems to communicate in bad Byronic monologues and surely can’t be the film’s main vampire, no sir. There’s also a lot of time for the women to get into one’s underwear and flounce around in negligees, for in the world of this movie, there’s basically nothing a woman won’t wear only her underwear to.

Nominally, the plot is about Greta investigating the vampire problem, even fetching another woman of science to get naked a lot help her, but in practice, director and co-writer José María Elorrietta has no interest whatsoever in silly things like plot and investigations. Many of his peers in European horror of this era could get away with that sort of thing by their ability to create dream- and nightmare-like moods spiked with some (or a lot of) eroticism and making films that don’t work as logical wholes but very much demonstrate an aesthetic unity as well as one of mood. Elorrietta, alas, mostly presents scenes of occasionally lesbian vampires flouncing about in their see-through nightgown (seen better in the works of Pauls Naschy, and even better in those of Jean Rollin) about a hundred of actresses dressing inappropriately for any situation, a horde of characters that are in the film for no discernible reason, and dialogue scenes that seem to come from a couple different movies, until he ends the film on a sort of inexplicable semi-stylish psychosexual freak-out.

Which does of course mean that La llamada is a pretty terrible film by most people’s standards, and even of dubious quality for the connoisseur of 70s European cult cinema. Yet it also means the film is never boring: there’s just too much ridiculousness going on for the viewer to ever get bored. From time to time, the film does even stumble onto a good idea or two, like mixing vampire and werewolf lore to weird effect, or letting Ney’s vampire version (unlike all the sexy girl vampires) go full on Dwight Fry as vampire on us instead of trying to make him suave and sexy. I’m still not sure if I’d include the film’s bizarre ending in its good ideas, for I’d need to have any idea what the hell is actually supposed to be happening there to decide.