A small village in 19th century Spain: When young Myriam dies from anaemia
& the corpse is publicly staked, with the consent of her father, the
mayeor, & the local priest, the local doctor Patrick (who moved here only
recently) is shocked about this superstitious behaviour ... he doesn't know of
course that there are really vampires about the place, who don't even have much
troubles raising the staked Myriam, it all goes back to Count Rudolph, the
benign ruler from a hundred years ago, who was turned into a vampire for a
night of sin ... Myriam's sister Katherine's (Emma Cohen) health meanwhile is
steadily deteriorating, & she seems to have lost ll willpower to live on,
which drives her lover John into a servant girl's rms, & it drives her to
see vampires at night, including her sister ... One day, when mum & dad
are out, a stranger knocks on Katherine's door, claiming he had an accident
& won't be able to make it home this stormy night ... & she readily
offers him shelter, even though he indeed is Count Rudolph - yes, the same from
a hundred years ago -, & he makes constant allusions to himself being a
vampire. However, when Katherine is asleep & Rudolph sneaks up to her
bedside to suck her blood, he is driven away by a cruzifix she wears around her
neck ... the Count then leaves in a hurry. Seeing her guest gone the next
morning, Katherine feels more than a little disappointing, & when she finds
one of his gloves he has left behind, she decides to bring it to his home - the
haundted castle on the other side of the valley. There she is almost attacked
by Rudolph's vampire servants, but he holds them back as he has fallen in love
with Katherine (& she with him), & invites her to this night's vampire
ball. For the ball, the vampires have abducted many villagers whom they
prepare now to suck dry ... including Katherine's ex John. When the Cont
notices John is (or was) her lover, he offers to let him go, but Katherine asks
Rudolph to kill John ... The morning after the ball, Katherine wakes up in
her own bed, still not vampirized, while the villaggers, seeing that many of
them are killed, decide to go to the castle to rid themselves of the vampire
brood once & for all, & when they can't find any vampires there they
decide to defile all the graves in the local cemetary, to drive spikes through
all the corpses' foreheads - the only way to really kill a vampire. Katherine
meanwhile - identified as a traitor to humankind by her own father - is put
under house-arrest. But while at the graveyard sudden nightfall turns the
tables against the villagers as the vampires valiantly fight back all of a
sudden, Katherine seduces & kills the servant who was to guard her &
heads for the castle & her vampire lover Rudolph. In his arms, she dies
from whatever she was suffering from. Struck with grief, the Count does not
search a hide-out with his people, but waits to see the sunrise one more, one
final time, & turns to dust. Eventually, director Klimovsky
could make rather inspired films within the very narrow constraints of genre
& low budget. This film however is not one of his better ones: Despite the
novel twist of presenting the vampires as victims rather than bloody beasts,
the movie turns into a tiresome succession of horror clichés, not at all
helped by a rather cheesily told love story that has a very disappointing
solution, as the ending of the movie as such does only dd to the dullness of
the movie.
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