In a remote 19th century Mexican village, a series of mysterious murders that fall during the full moon attracts the attention of a renowned expert on the occult, so he dispatches his top student, Dr. Ulises Albarrán (Rafael del Rio), to investigate. The student knows his shit and in no time deduces that the town is in the grip of the vampire lord Count Frankenhausen (Carlos Agosti), who plans to reanimate his victims as his personal army in a bid to wipe out humanity. With the reluctant aid of assorted superstitious villagers, and met with resistance from the local head of the Catholic church, the student must find a way to put the Count out of commission for good, but the Count and his minions do not necessarily abide by the usual tropes for vanquishing undead suckfaces...
One of the multitude of cheapjack badly-dubbed flicks imported from Mexico by K. Gordon Murray — who also brought us THE ROBOT VS THE AZTEC MUMMY (1957), SANTA CLAUS (1959), and the epochal THE BRAINIAC (1962) — THE INVASION OF THE VAMPIRES is a lot of fun, with its distinctly Mexican and very Catholic take on vampirism. It adheres to most of the established rules from American and European vampire cinema, but every now and then it throws in a curveball with little or no explanation, but you won't care because it's all just so out of its mind.
There are several crazy highlights, but the real showstopper is the battle between Dr. Albarrán and Count Frankenhausen, which occurs some five or ten minutes before the real climax of the film. The Count, arriving ahead of his army of the undead, confronts Albarrán in his makeshift lab, fighting the doctor in gloriously phony bat form.
No lie, the giant puppet bat is largely immobile and obviously suspended in the air with a length of fishing wire, and when Dr. Albarrán engages with it, it's akin to the moment in BRIDE OF THE MONSTER when Bela Lugosi grabs the tentacles of a "menacing" rubber octopus and does double-duty by providing it with movement.
It's laugh-out-loud ludicrous, which only added to the fun factor, and the Count/bat ends up hilariously impaled to the wall, looking every bit like a remainder item from an end-of-season Halloween Experience clearance sale.
As previously mentioned, the film owes a great visual/tonal debt to the classic from the Universal horror cycle, early Hammer films (specifically its vampire entries), and Mario Bava, as it cribs a bit from the look and feel of BLACK SUNDAY.
Those are all good influences to wear on one's creative sleeve, and the film knows what to do with them. The nighttime shots are invariably punctuated by the full moon, wailing winds, a thick shroud of fog, a female vampire wandering the night in a diaphanous gown, and the shots of Frankenhausen's army of the undead especially resonate by being quite eerie, as the revenants roam about with their torsos transfixed by wooden stakes, a usually surefire deterrent that serves little purpose here.
(Also,
considering the Count's nasty-looking piranha-like row of teeth, don't
ask me how the bite marks that he leaves are the familiar two-puncture
configuration.)
THE INVASION OF THE VAMPIRES is available in its
entirety on YouTube in a washed-out dubbed print, and I wish I could
see it in a pristine transfer with quality subtitles. The dubbing (when
not randomly switching to Spanish mid-sentence) is awful and spoken at a
wholly unnatural breakneck pace, but I have endured worse. In short,
this is a fun obscure undead suckface flick that delivers in a
family-suitable manner. RECOMMENDED.
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