Kiss of the Vampire
In our continuing series of articles 'The bloke down the pub' will tell us all about his favourite Hammer Horror films. In his eighth weekly review he's wondering why he can't spend more time getting sozzled with the grumpy, mad vampire hunter in Kiss of the Vampire from 1963. Enjoy!
Sometimes I wish they’d stick the old, ugly, screwed-up people at the centre of the movie instead of the young, good-looking, innocent ones. You know what I mean? It’s just, God, more pretty people in peril - who needs it? Where are the bum-nosed grumpy people grappling with how tough it is just to be alive, never mind how to also survive the machinations of a castle full of blood-sucking fiends...
Take a film like Kiss of the Vampire; here’s a movie with a cracking opening and a terrific ending, but you do find yourself wishing that instead of spending the intervening screen time watching a couple of nice, polite dummies get fooled into being in mortal peril, you could instead hang out with the crazy old vampire hunter in the battered top hat. He’s grouchy, quite often drunk, and is the only occupant of a run down hotel in the middle of nowhere (and he’s staying in room 13 as well - when you first see that you think ‘room 13? Well he’s got to be a bad’un!’). And he’s also a vampire hunter who, in order to defeat evil, raises the effing devil to do it! There’s no inspiring speeches about purity of heart, salvation through courage, or even much in the way of reassurance. Nope, this bloke just wants to kill vampires. He can barely even be bothered to warn the two dummies of the evil trap they’re walking into. He only sort of does because he’s drunk out of his mind and it’s only when the movie’s over that you realise he didn’t want to warn them because it might spoil his plan if the vampires thought something was up. Now, that’s single minded. That’s the sort of bloke you could spend a movie with, agonising over the depths of evil he’s going to have to sink to if he wants revenge, killing the occasional vampire who wanders too far from the chateau, propping up the end of an empty bar, his only company a barman whose daughter may or may not be dead, may or may not be sacrificed on the crumbling alter of this old man’s twisted thirst.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty to like in between the bleakly beautiful windswept opening and the amusingly cruel irony of satanic justice at the end. There’s the handsome young vampire switching from playing Chopin on his piano to his own composition which couldn’t be more ‘A Hungry Vampire Wrote This’ if it tried, there are the only truly evil nostrils I’ve ever seen in a movie underneath the conk of the innkeeper’s daughter, and then there’s the vampires trapped by the vampire hunter who are quarrelling and squirrelly because they’re frightened - a roomful of scaredy-cat monsters! And also, in my opinion, you can’t beat a complicated ritual. Too often, the raising of the devil involves drawing on the floor with a bit of chalk and doing some chanting. This one needed a sword, a horn, mysterious liquid, an ancient tome… something people needed to write down not so any old future dimwit could just open up a page and start reading, but because they needed to remember what the bloody hell it was.
And then there’s a nice idle wondering what they’re trying to say by comparing this chateau full of vampires to a sixties Californian cult. Were cults really sweeping the globe in the early sixties? Can hanging out, smoking dope and doing a lot of bonking really be compared to a disease that gives you an insatiable need to feed on human blood? Or is it just that in the early sixties a lot of movies were still written by grumpy old men who didn’t understand why young people just wanted to hang out, have sex and talk bollocks (forgetting that that’s all young people have ever wanted to do throughout the ages) and so thought comparing the free-loading parasites to vampires didn’t seem like such a stretch? Or maybe it was just another one of those delightful ways that Hammer manages to work sex into vampire movies without having to have any actual sex, just a quietly stinky cloud of sensual abandonment that gets people all hot under the collar and so a little relieved when someone drives a stake through the tricky buggers’ hearts…
But by the end, when the evil cult is mocked to death by the devil, you can’t help wishing you’d spent more time with the utterly barmy, homicidal vampire hunter just to see what makes a man whose greatest ally in a war against evil is Satan, really bloody tick. Apart from the enormous quantities of alcohol he pours down his neck of course. Speaking of which…
Another pint?
