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A cheap German movie, from a British director, starring dubbed Polish, Swedish, Austrian and American actors in it. Why Freddie Francis? Why?

When watching this movie you would think that Freddie Francis must have been a horrible director, whenever he did a movie outside of the safe confinement of the Hammer studios. This movie is really all over the place and truly going nowhere with its story, even though this is of course the type of movie Freddie Francis was familiar with doing.

Don't even ask me what this movie is all about. It's basically a huge mess and it doesn't really seem to worry about following a main plot line. All of the stuff happening and characters are all very random and don't really serve a purpose for its story. Even when you take this movie as just an exploitation flick it simply isn't good enough because it really doesn't offer enough fun and entertainment.

At times the movie is trying to be just like a Hammer production, while at others it's going for a very straightforward comedy approach. It was confusing because the movie seemed like it wanted to be taken seriously, while at the same time it was going over-the-top with its comedy. It has a more awkward type of comedy in it, that seems out of place and even inappropriate. Seriously, why involve monks into a sexual orientated subplot. I just don't know how to take this movie. It's not a genre parody because it clearly wanted to be too much just like a normal genre movie but for a normal genre movie it just really isn't serious- or even good enough. Just having vampires, a castle and some naked women running around is not enough to make a good genre movie with of course.

But aside from its story, it also really is a poorly told and done movie. Perhaps you could mostly blame the budget for this but as a viewer you at least expect to get some entertainment out of this movie, which this movie however just never really provided enough of.

Perhaps you could also simply blame it on the fact many different nationalities were involved with making this movie. Perhaps because of this the actors couldn't really understand the director, the director couldn't understand the cinematographer, the editor didn't knew what the director wanted, the director couldn't understand the script. The movie really feels like one that got put together by a bunch of people who didn't know how to work together and everybody just simply did their own thing.

On a positive note: I kind of liked the music though. Why didn't Jerry van Rooyen work on more movies? It was some perfectly suitable genre music, that actually sounded too good for this movie and even sounded to be somewhat ahead of its time.

Really a movie that is going nowhere and it even doesn't seem to know itself what it wants to be.

3/10

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About Frank Veenstra

Watches movies...writes about them...and that's it for now.
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