As this Hammer horror melodrama from 1972 opens, schoolteacher Albert Mueller (Laurence Payne) catches his wife (Domini Blythe) and one of the young village girls making their way through the countryside in what's apparently a quite unwholesome direction. He follows, but is unable to prevent their entry to the castle of Count Mitterhaus, a notoriously sexy vampire who holds the whole village under his sway. As the cuckold tries to marshal the shiftless men of the village for a rescue mission -- experience with the Count seems to have whipped everybody here into a sense of meek helplessness -- his wife offers up the young blond virgin to the vampire, who rips the girl's throat out. The woman tears her own clothes off and Mitterhaus makes love to her. When the villagers are finally coerced to make their way to the castle with torches and grim looks, they carry away the dead girl and do battle with Mitterhaus himself, who ends up impaled through the chest on a pointed wooden stick while cursing the village in a stage whisper. Albert's wife is brought outside and whipped as punishment for her betrayal, but finally runs back into the castle, which is set afire and burns into ruins. And then the opening credits roll.
Bad ass, right? Nothing else in Vampire Circus matches that 12-minute opening salvo of sex and violence, although it's not for lack of trying. There are a few more vampire attacks; a pair of creepy siblings; a strongman played by the musclebound David Prowse (who would wear Darth Vader's costume just a few years later); a dwarf in whiteface; a chimp, a tiger, and a polymorphous panther; a nude, tiger-striped erotic dancer; several more dead children; and one last, lovely maiden whose life is in danger of being snuffed out by the Mitterhaus curse if her boyfriend Anton (John Moulder-Brown), son of the village doctor, can't save her.
But it never recovers the concentrated erotic-violent high ground of that delirious overture, which stands as a wildly entertaining example of over-the-top horror filmmaking. The film quickly slips into more banal territory with scenes of deadly exposition among the four villagers who survived the siege, now 15 years older and not a lot wiser or bolder. (I badly wanted to see the cast of Monty Python playing this scene to the deserved accompaniment of a roaring laugh track just to tweak the tedium.) Their community is ravaged by plague, and they're cut off from the rest of the world by neighboring villages who man roadblocks on all paths of egress and take shots at anyone who tries to leave. But one day a little traveling circus rolls into town, run by gypsies (or are they?) who won't say why they've come or how they got into town. Let's just say that the villagers aren't the only ones who have long memories.
Vampire Circus was released in what's generally considered a downhill period for the legendary Hammer Studios, which was packing films with higher breast-to-blood ratios in an attempt to compete with the racy and gory genre entertainment being produced elsewhere on the continent. And it's true, I guess, that there's quite a distance between the old-school Hammer vampire popularized by Christopher Lee and this new breed of bloodsucker, played by Robert Tayman in a clean white shirt and diamond-studded collar, who looks like he's ready to go out clubbing.
It's difficult for any but the most willing viewer to take this seriously - unless you creep out more easily than me, the thrills Vampire Circus gives off are pure spectacle. It doesn't get under the skin. But what it lacks in creeps and pizazz, it almost makes up for in sheer imagination. Sometimes this feels more like a dark fantasy film than a horror story. The circus concept gives the filmmakers room to dodge many gothic-horror cliches, and although it does get a little tiresome seeing Emil (Anthony Corlan), cousin of Mitterhaus, just sink his teeth into victim after victim without much foreplay, there are some surprises along the way. It all builds to a climax involving the fortuitous appearance of lots of crosses (hisssssss!), the revivification of the old count, and an innovative use for a crossbow. But Vampire Circus suffers from a second half that isn't nearly as potent as the first. B-
Leave a comment