Fangs of the
Living Dead

The Movie

Two weeks before her marriage, Sylvia Morell learns she has inherited a castle in her mother’s will and travels to visit it. But there she learns that her grandmother Malenka was a dark sorceress and a vampire. Now her uncle Count Waldrick wants her to agree to never see her fiancee again and to become a vampire.

Directed by Amando de Ossorio

Starring Anita Ekberg, Gianni Medici, Diana Lorys, Rosanna Yanni, César Benet

Colour, Dubbed, DVD-Video, Letterboxed, PAL
1.33:1
Classification: R (Restricted)
Studio: St. Clair Entertainment

DVD Release Date: 24 Feb 2004
Run Time: 80 minutes

Review

This movie is a bit of a mixture; the first 20 minutes is really quite boring; library shots of Boeing 707 taking off, cliche stop at the village inn, to show us that the villagers are frightened of them folk up at t'castle (yawn). Indeed, the highlight is the macho manservant taking a cheeky peek through Our Heroine's bedroom keyhole (no, lads, nothing). let's face it, no self respecting Igor would have stooped that low. Well, okay, they all stoop that low - but not to leer through keyholes.

As we near the 30-minute marker (yes, I noticed every minute!), the movie livens up with a flashback to Granny Sorceress being dragged off by the mob. A real mob, let me tell you, complete with flaming torches, pitchforks and the occasional stripey hat.

At the halfway mark, we are treated to the cliche that separates the bad vampire movies from the very bad: the silhoutte of the plastic vampire bat outside the window. In traditional style, it both preceded and followed by wolf howls. Go figure.

Now that we have a dead villager, the jokes come thick and slow - and I mean slow. But our trusty hero, arrived too late to save the villager, but just possibly in time to save Our Heroine, is whisked off to the local doctor's laboratory. Of course he has a laboratory; haven't you been concentrating?

Anyway, that turned out to be a complete waste of time - we never find out what happened there, other than a refilling of hip flasks. And then the whole movie slides slowly and confusingly to its end, with lots of speechifying, and precious little action of any kind - except the she-vampire fight, in which one of them forgot to put her fangs in.

The final joke is quite neat - but hardly compensates for the rest.

The DVD

No Special Features