|
Available on DVD! To buy, click on link(s) below and help keep this site afloat (commissions earned) |
Always make sure of DVD-compatibility!!!
|
|
|
|
|
Somewhere in Europe, somewhen when people still lived in castles:
Wolfgang (Walter Brandi) and his wife Louise (Graziella Granata) are
giving a wonderful ball, but she seems to tired to join in the fun - until
she is seen dancing with a stranger (Dieter Eppler), after which she
immediately retreats to her quarters. The next few days she feels weaker
and weaker for no apparent reason, and the local doctor eventually runs
out of explanations - not the audience though, because we are informed
early on that the stranger Louise has been dancing with is actually a
vampire residing in her wine cellar. Upon advice of the doctor, Wolfgang
fetches Dr Nietzsche (Luigi Batzella) from Vienna, but when the two
return, Louise is already dead. When she returns from the dead to bite
Wolfgang, Nietzche sees his theories about vampires confirmed, and now he
uses Wolfgang as bait to lure the vampires into a trap, a plan that almost
backfires when Louise's gouverness is revealed to be a vampire as well,
and in the end, it looks as if Wolfgang has been turned into a vampire and
now wants to kill the young daughter of his servants ... but ultimately he
gets to stake the head vampire. On a story level, Slaughter
of the Vampires is an a tad uninspired retelling of Hammer's
Dracula, then a still relatively
fresh international success, and one of the movies that brought gothic
horror back to the big screen. And on a visual level, Slaughter of the
Vampires does its best to compete with the earlier film, it features
beautiful sets, was partly shot on authentic locations, and the camerawork
is positively elegant. However, when it comes to storytelling, the film
just doesn't cut it: The plot as such is told in a boring by-the-numbers
manner, the characters are hardly above cut-out-quality (not helped by an
underachieving cast), and there are simply no twists and turns to add some
flair to the story. To put it very bluntly, this is a disappointingly
boring film.
|