Today's Feature: The Playgirls And The Vampire (1960)
In 1957, a small British studio called Hammer Film Productions changed the horror landscape forever with the release of The Curse Of Frankenstein, a lurid color re-imagining of the Frankenstein story, the first of many motion pictures from the studio that helped to redefine many classic cinematic monsters for a new generation and transform Hammer into a worldwide brand synonymous with things that go bump in the night. Hammer Films pushed the envelope with their depictions of violence, shocking audiences with vibrant crimson blood seeming to drip from the screen. They also understood the value of catering to their core audience of young males with a generous measure of titillation by filling out their supporting casts with nubile young women with heaving bosoms in varying states of distress.
The "Hammer method" became the de facto template for horror cinema both in Europe and in America for nearly a decade, with numerous small-time production companies throwing money at unproven writers, directors and actors in an effort to cash in on the new horror craze, sticking to a loose formula of spooky castles, enigmatic gentlemen with dark secrets, and vulnerable damsels nervously straying from safer spaces into dimly-lit corridors where danger lurks around every corner.
One of these formulaic riffs on the "Hammer method" was a 1960 Italian production called The Vampire's Final Prey, repackaged and redubbed for American audiences by producer Richard Gordon under the title The Playgirls And The Vampire. Richard Gordon was a pretty interesting figure in cinema history, forming an independent production company called Gordon Films in the 1950's that specialized in importing foreign B-movies in the science fiction and horror genres. He also produced many original genre productions like 1958's The Electronic Monster and The Haunted Strangler (starring Boris Karloff and released on DVD by the Criterion Collection several years ago as part of a quartet of films produced by Richard Gordon and his brother Alex), and is admired by many camp aficionados for his extensive filmography of entertaining schlock cinema. And although his contribution to The Playgirls And The Vampire consists almost entirely of a new, goofier title and a passable English language dub, this movie definitely fits the "entertaining schlock cinema" bill.
The Playgirls And The Vampire follows a quintet of catty song-and-dance gals, their greasy manager Lucas, and their resident pianist/driver (name withheld upon request) as they cruise around the Italian countryside in a busted up old bus searching for their next paying gig. This troupe of vivacious show girls is having a little trouble earning a living at their chosen vocation, and they like to blame their jackass pervert manager for their woes, mostly because he doesn't seem to be very good at his job, but they also can't dance for shit, which I think is the biggest problem.
Dancing is half of their act, and they have absolutely no rhythm, and that seems like a real kiss of death for so-called "professional" dancers, but the other half of their act involves stripping down to their silky underwear (and beyond) for the pleasure of their leering audience, and that shtick is pretty evergreen, so I don't understand why they're not pulling in bigger crowds. Nobody goes to strip clubs because they admire the art of the dance, after all, so how are these five enticing beauties not earning a decent living? Are there a bunch of prudes in Italy? That doesn't sound right to me. Maybe the ineptitude of their dancing completely negates the allure of their stripping, actively repelling their intended audience. That theory might hold water, because a sequence inserted into the middle of the film purely for the purpose of sexual stimulation falls completely flat on its face, but I'll get back to that.
A severe thunderstorm washes out the roads, forcing our five beauties, including heroine Vera, callous Katia, and three other girls who never figure into the plot and serve as nothing more than window dressing, to make a detour from their intended route, taking refuge in a creepy old castle inhabited by Count Gabor Kernassy, a mysterious and well-dressed gentleman harboring a dark secret. That first night, Katia ignores her host's warning not to wander the dimly lit corridors of the castle in her sheer nightie after dark, and turns up dead the next morning. The caretaker just shrugs and proclaims that Katia must have fallen out of a high window and broken her neck without even examining the body, and everybody else just sort of accepts this unprofessional diagnosis, and they hold a quick burial service, wrapping things up before lunchtime because who even has time to mourn?
This leads to the bizarrely limp sequence of erotic arousal I mentioned a moment earlier, with the girls practicing their gormless dance routines in an effort to get their minds off the death of one of their own. One of the girls begins gyrating lustfully with a vacant expression on her face, slipping off her clothing in a most apathetic manner while the bus driver pounds out a bluesy, only slightly off-key number on a convenient piano. This sequence lasts nearly three minutes, and it grinds the movie to a screeching halt purely in the name of titillation, but there's absolutely nothing sexy about this stuff. It's just a goofy little misfire of a scene that misses its mark so completely that it actually becomes funny, because everybody involved in these shenanigans thinks this is all perfectly normal.
It's an amusing attempt by director Piero Regnoli to not only match the sexuality found in your average Hammer production, but to surpass all of that by taking things to the next level with an extended striptease. The film already has plenty of sequences involving scantily clad young women wandering around a drafty old castle. In fact, I believe footage of scantily clad young women wandering around a drafty old castle might make up as much as a third of the total movie, and I must admit these ribald scenes of mild fright were effective enough, so Regnoli had that base covered already. But that wasn't enough for the exploitation-loving filmmaker who would go on to write such early 1980's genre classics as Nightmare City and Burial Ground, so he upped the ante with one of the most shockingly uninspired striptease set pieces ever captured on film. Bravo, Piero Regnoli.
After Katia's mysterious death, Vera finds herself drawn to the inscrutable master of the house, as the film implies that Vera is the reincarnation of the original Count Kernassy's beloved bride, Margherita. She doesn't even seem to mind that the Count has disinterred the body of her gal pal Katia, placing her ex-dance partner in his mysterious basement laboratory to perform some sort of bizarre experiments that he refuses to elaborate upon, even making out with the Count in the body's presence, which makes Vera a special kind of kinky. :
Later that night, scuzzy manager Lucas, who sleeps with his favorite girly magazine tucked under the covers right next to his head, is visited by the very un-dead Katia, who apologizes to her boss for never succumbing to his sexual advances in the past before trying to drink his blood. Lucas, confronted by the dead girl he buried that morning now standing naked in his bedroom, brandishing a pair of huge fangs and lunging for his neck, is completely overwhelmed by this paradoxical situation and faints dead away. The other girls rush into the bedroom to see what all the fuss is about, but Lucas is unharmed and Katia is gone!
This particular scene is notable for prominently featuring actress Maria Giovannini topless as she looms over actor Alfredo Rizzo, which the Hammer pictures could never hope to get away with in 1960. There's a vast difference between suggestion and declaration, at least as far as mainstream censors are concerned, and this scene was heavily edited in many markets when Richard Gordon released The Playgirls And The Vampire in the United States.
Later, Vera is attacked by a bloodsucker that looks suspiciously like Count Kernassy and learns that the original lord of the manor has endured the centuries as an immortal bloodsucking motherfucker, and he wants Vera to join him as his eternal bride in his spacious fixer-upper castle. The old Count's descendant, his doppelganger Gabor, has devoted his entire adult life to finding a cure for his ancestor's vampirism, which the old Count had endorsed 100%, until he spotted Vera and decided that being un-dead was just peachy keen as long as he had a special somebody to snuggle with in his coffin built for two. Jealous Katia doesn't take this news well, preferring to have her lovey-dovey Count all to herself, so she pledges to kill Vera before she can become a vampire herself, and as the sad realization that a slammin' vampire three-way is forever out of his reach finally sinks in, the dejected old Count jams a still-burning torch into his meddling girlfriend's heart, putting her out of his misery so he can focus all of his attention on the new arrival.
Luckily, Gabor arrives in the nick of time to slay his wayward ancestor and save the day, pledging his eternal love to the very confused Vera, who just saw the man she loved murder a man who looked exactly like the man she loved, then watched the body of the man who looked like the man she loved shrivel up like a prune in the sun and fade away into nothing before her very eyes. But it's fine! Everything's fine, because that's the end of the movie and everything has to be fine because that's how this stuff works!
The Playgirls And The Vampire is a pretty good time, all things considered. Some sequences following our heroine Vera as she roams the halls of Castle Kernassy in the dead of night actually manage to evoke some of that classic horror suspense, captured in moody black-and-white cinematography by director of photography Aldo Greci, who also lensed one of my favorite exploitation classics, 1979's Play Motel. But overall, the movie fails to hold a candle to the films of Hammer in their prime, instead inadvertently slipping into the deep end of the schlock pool, which I think works in the film's favor, because The Playgirls And The Vampire is a lot of fun to watch.
Between the at-times flaky English dubbing, the often oddly charming wooden acting on the part of the principal cast, and the endlessly endearing sequences following young women in nighties timidly exploring the winding corridors of the spooky old castle which cross the line from ribald to boring to avant-garde as the narrative unfolds, the final film is really a fascinating little camp classic. It drags at times, to be sure, but most films of this ilk suffer from this issue in their second act, and it's hardly a deal-breaker, so I'm not going to hold that against this movie, especially after some of the unadulterated crap I've suffered through over the past week. The Playgirls And The Vampire is a dopey slice of camp melodrama, and I love it just a little bit. I can think of no better way to wrap up this year's SCHLOCK-TOBERFEST!!! series than that.
In other news, today is All Hallows Eve, which means it's time for a brand-new installment of this blog's long-running seasonal podcast, The Horror Show!
This final episode, entitled Un-Dead & Buried, features the best moments from previous installments, as well as a collection of never-before-heard segments that were originally left on the cutting room floor. This episode has it all. Literally. So give it a listen:
The Horror Show: Un-Dead & Buried
That's all I've got to offer for you ghouls and goblins this year. Thanks for reading and have a happy Halloween!
 |
| ANY QUESTIONS?! |
No comments:
Post a Comment