I Watch Films: Vampira

 

Vampira

Count Dracula (David Niven) is reduced to renting out his castle for vampire themed holidays. He’s trying to find the right blood to resurrect his wife, Vampira. When a group of Playboy (tm) Playmates (tm) come to the castle to do a photoshoot, one of them turns out to be the right one, but due to some sloppy laboratory organisation he doesn’t know which. To his surprise Vampira (Teresa Graves) turns from ice white to black (Graves is whited up briefly before spending the rest of the film in her natural skin colour). After a moment of hesitation he decides to go to London, find the Playmates and experiment to try and turn Vampira white.

He hypnotises Marc, the writer of a book on the occult who had been with the Playmates in Transylvania (writing the article to go with the photoshoot I think - the film takes Playboy magazine seriously). He uses him to seduce and get blood samples from them. Meanwhile Vampira, last awake in the 1920s, learns about swinging London. Dracula, focussed on trying to get the blood, is not a fan of how it has changed.

There’s some good jokes though the central and plot-driving one – it’s attempt to deal with race – is completely incoherent. David Niven as an old-fashioned vampire out of time does a fair job, though as he is the most English gentleman who has ever English Gentleman-ed he does not convince as a central European noble.

Watch This: A camp 70s fish-out-of-water vampire film
Don’t Watch This: It gets very uncomfortable when a hypnotised man is assaulting women and thinking he’s losing his mind then we cut to 70s Vampire London hijinks!