Fangs for the hospitality.

GroovyDoom

BEWARE: SPOILERS

This is a gleefully illogical late-night chiller with loads of atmosphere and some genuinely creepy moments.  The plot concerns the plight of a group of travelers on some kind of tour bus.  As they discuss their desire to make it to their intended destination, the bus driver suffers a sudden heart attack and dies.  Despite the fact that they are now carrying a man's dead body, the remaining tourists decide to forego their journey in order to follow a road sign to a nearby village, in hopes of finding some food and a hotel where they can sleep.

Don't expect it to make a whole lot of sense.  The travelers, whose number contains the prerequisite vivacious 70s babe, stumble upon a deserted inn. Well, it's almost deserted--they find a man there who has, rather coincidentally, stumbled upon the village while out driving.  Even though nobody's around, they help themselves to the booze and the beds, forgetting all about the corpse in their tour bus.

One boozy guy stays up alone, nodding off at one of the tables while drinking the local wine, and when he stumbles out into the streets at midnight, he's attacked by the vampire Welcome Wagon.

As one would expect from a movie titled "Vampire's Night Orgy", our heroes have stumbled upon a nest of bloodsuckers, helmed by a vampire known as "the Countess".  Even though the vampires vastly outnumber the mortals, they do not choose to just ambush them all at once, concocting an elaborate ruse to get the travelers to stay for a few days.  In one of the movies more grotesque plot points, the vampires are faced with the predicament of a lack of meat to serve to the travelers, so they solve the problem by hacking off the limbs of various villagers (vampire? non-vampire? who knows?) and serving them up as dinner.

Additionally, the Countess decides to get a little action from one of the guys in the traveling party, insisting that he stay behind with her to recite Shakespeare while the others go back to the Inn.  After a roll in the hay, she bares her fangs, nips him on the neck, then tosses him out her window to a mass of hungry vampires waiting below.

This movie's got a nasty edge that just won't quit.  The guy that has to save the damsel in distress is a leering creep who watches her undress through a convenient hole in the adjoining wall between their rooms.  The entire party seems to forget all about the fact that their bus driver's rotting corpse is lying unburied in their tour bus.  One of the more despicable characters bitches at the Countess when she offers them money and a place to stay until their broken-down bus can get fixed.  Also, make sure you watch for the barkeeper who beckons to one of the other vampires using his middle finger!  Even funnier, it later gets hacked off in order to explain away the fact that one of the guests gets a human finger on their plate at dinner time.

There's a great deal of camp, but there's also some really weird stuff here too.  One of the travelers is a little girl named Violet who has a series of encounters with a ghostly little boy who disappears at random.  One creepy scene involves the boy luring Violet to a cemetery, where they bury her doll with some freshly upturned dirt.  The vampire attacks are also eerie in their own right, avoiding most of the usual fangs-in-the-neck business and having the villagers attack the travelers by descending on them en masse, fixing their mouths over any body part like hungry dogs.

Like I said...it won't make any sense, but it's not a disappointing film in the least.  Lots of great sets, bizarre characters, and creepy sequences. Just don't ask what kind of meat is on the plate if you stop at the Inn for dinner.

score /10

GroovyDoom 11 June 2002

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw0125204/