Country: Spain
Language: Spanish
Release Date: 16 December 1972 (Spain)
A small rural Spanish village of the present is haunted by vampires. Dr.Dora Maeterlick is called to a nearby castle to cure the father of Baron Carl von Rysselbert who suffers from a strange blood disease. Erika, assistant to Doctor, falls in love with Carl. But Carl is a vampire and pretty soon he makes Erika his vampire bride. From now on Dr.Maeterlick plunges into a nightmarish whirl of dark happenings...
An enthusiastic fan of European Gothic Horror productions, I was quite disappointed in the first film by José María Elorrieta I saw, the overall boring "Las Amantes Del Diablo" ("Feast of Satan", 1971), and my expectations for this film, "La Llamada Del Vampiro" ("The Curse of the Vampyr", 1972), were therefore considerably low. But while this film is pretty far away from being a masterpiece, of course, (in fact it is incredibly nonsensical and silly), at least it isn't boring, and I enjoyed it quite a bit more than the aforementioned other film by Elorrieta I've seen.
"La Llamada Del Diablo" looks quite amateurish, and mostly doesn't make the slightest sense, but it is entertaining enough for my fellow Eurohorror-fans to check out without feeling regret for the wasted time. The film is set in a remote village, which is haunted by vampires (though the mayor and a Baron living in the village are denying their existence). When the village doctor doctor dies, a new foxy female doctor (who goes by the beautiful name 'Dr. Materlick') arrives with an even foxier female assistant... there are also a bunch of weird characters, the weirdest being the Baron's son Carl (Nicholas Ney, who has never been part of another film). Then, the vampires begin to fill people's hearts with terror again... This may not sound like a proper plot description, but fact is that "La Llamada Del Vampiro" is a very confused little flick with an extremely incoherent storyline that hardly makes any sense.
Still, the film has a nice atmosphere at times (though it never gets even slightly creepy, let alone scary). The lack of sense is a likable one, and in spite of the incoherence, the film didn't bore me. The female cast members are entirely hot, the most prolific one being sexy Loreta Tovar, who plays a female vampire here, and whose filmography includes roles in Narciso Ibáñez Serrador's masterpiece "La Residencia" ("The House that Screamed", 1969), as well as the second part of Amando De Ossorio's "Blind Dead" saga, "El ataque de los muertos sin ojos" ("Return of the Blind Dead", 1973). Funnily, two of the female cast members (one of them Trovar) are suddenly fully naked for no reason, whereas the camera fades out when other female cast members strip for specific reasons (such as taking a shower). In nice early 70s tradition, some Lesbian Vampire action is thrown in.
Nicholas Ney, who gives his only performance here, plays one of the weirdest characters ever, who sports one of the weirdest hairstyles ever, which makes it even less understandable that a really hot chick would fall for him. The film was obviously shot on an extremely low budget, but director Ellorieta still managed to build up some nice Gothic atmosphere and throw in a bunch of stylish sequences (though none of them are remarkable).
Overall, this film isn't nearly as terrible as I feared it might be, and it is quite a bit better than "Las Amantes Del Diablo". Still, it is a bad, and very substandard example for Spanish Gothic Horror. My fellow fans of low-budget Eurohorror can give this a try, but if you're not too familiar with the genre I recommend to skip it, as there are about 5.000 European Gothic Horror flicks that are 5.000 times better. For good Spanish Gothic Horror Exploitation, check out some of the many films starring the late Paul Naschy, or any of the countless other European Gothic masterpieces. This one is just for my fellow Eurohorror-fanatics, and even those may well skip it unless there's really nothing else to watch.
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