Better than it should be

slayrrr666

"The Vampire's Night Orgy" is an enjoyable and fun European vampire entry.

**SPOILERS**

Traveling through the Spanish countryside, tourists Alma, (Dvanik Zurakowski) Raquel, (Charo Soriano) Marcos, (Manuel de Blas) Cesar, (David Aller) Godo, (Luis Ciges) and Ernesto, (Gaspar Gonzalez) breakdown in a small town and decide to get some help for the night. Stumbling across American Luis, (Jack Taylor) in the same situation, they decide to spend the night in the abandoned town, only to awake the next morning to find the Mayor Boris, (Jose Guardiola) is there to offer them his hospitality. Deciding to carry on with their trip instead, they decide to leave only to find themselves stranded in town under the help of The Countess, (Helga Line) a mysterious loner who lives in a castle nearby. When they start to disappear one-by-one, they realize that the whole town has become infested by vampires and have to quickly leave the town before they become a part of the vampire gang.

The Good News: This here is one of the more watchable European-horror entries. One of the best parts is that the film is filled with a sort of macabre and unusual atmosphere that makes it so entertaining. The main example is the cinematography here, which is actually quite impressive in its own way. It couldn't have been easy to successfully create an environment where the sun never really shines and everything seems to be black, gray or brown, while also keeping things on the visible side of murky. emphasizing in your face shocks over slow-motion, dry-ice driven atmospherics, creating a really nice sense of eeriness that is always nice to have in a horror film. That also applies to the few special effects, especially with the grotesque physiognomies of many of the villager extras who with the lighting and shadows on display along with the usual evil vampire grin makes them look really good, and the different amount of time that the other areas give to it through the lighting is great. The offbeat nature of the film is also illustrated by it's unusual choice of hero. Here, the lead is an unusual combination of romantic action hero with outright pervert. It just seems typical of warped European-Horror sensibilities that, throughout the entire film, he's caught spying on the female lead undressing through a hole in his bedroom wall, openly flirts with others and even has another undress in front them, but is still portrayed as the unambiguous hero of the film. There's also the several other scenes in here that have the whole package come together with bewildering effectiveness. There's even some more goodness to be found from the rather unusual events, such as the vampire getting passionate with one of the travelers in her bedroom, only to suddenly reveal those massive fangs and hurling the unfortunate victim through a window to the zombie hoards waiting below, a weird dreamlike scenes of the zombie villagers attacking some of the tourists on a bus, and a giant who selects villagers to have a limb chopped off to provide meat to feed the tourists at the inn, which also includes a rather unique revelation sequence involving a finger found on a plate, but for the most part, this one is played really straight, and there's really a lot of great atmospherics to be found. A particularly distressing scene involves one of the female passengers who gets turned into a zombie and is later seen exhuming the body of her dead daughter and mournfully dragging it away with her introduces an unexpected note of poignancy just when you think you have the film pinned down as an enjoyable but lightweight piece of b-movie fun. These here are the film's best parts.

The Bad News: There wasn't a whole lot here that doesn't work. The biggest example of this is the rather diligent pacing. The vast majority of the film is much too slow and a large number of the scenes found within should have been trimmed or cut out altogether. Far too often there's scenes which either go on way too long, don't have any sort of interest about them or just take up space in the film's running time. A great one is a scene where two children are playing a game of hide-and-seek. There's nothing wrong with that, and this little game of theirs does serve a purpose in the grand scheme of things, but there's no need to see the entire game from start-to-finish. Other scenes, as the ending in the police station and the confrontation in the maid's quarters are just like that, taking up too much time getting to something that could've been done much simpler. In the beginning, there's a reason why the characters wouldn't know what was going on, but it takes a long time to eventually get to that point when it could've been an incredibly-shortened form in the film. That's the film's real flaw.

The Final Verdict: A rather fun and enjoyable Spanish-vampire entry with a couple mild flaws, this is a highly watchable entry. Give this one a shot if you're into the Gothic-era vampire films or a big 70s European-horror fanatic, while those who don't really enjoy this kind of film should seek caution.

Rated R: Graphic Violence, Nudity and some Language

score 9/10

slayrrr666 6 August 2008

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1925349/