Woodyanders Review of Grave of the Vampire

Grave of the Vampire (1972)

A splendidly nasty'n'gnarly 70's drive-in bloodsucker nugget

[9/10 · 15 January 2006]

This unjustly overlooked low-budget 70's drive-in fright pic jewel starts off with an alarmingly savage and startling opening sequence: smarmy malevolent age-old bloodsucker Cleb Croft (a spirited, wonderfully rancorous turn by unsung exploitation film fave Michael Pataki, who not also appears in such grisly goodies as "Dead and Buried," "Graduation Day," and that deathless Grade Z woofer "Dracula's Dog," but also directed both the creepy "Mansion of the Doomed" and the incredibly asinine soft-core sex musical version of "Cinderella" for Charles Band) assaults a libidinous young couple making out in a cemetery; he breaks the guy's back by bending him over a tombstone and tosses the hapless screaming woman (excellently played by Kitty Vallacher, who's tastefully listed in the opening credits as "the reluctant mother") into an open grave so he can ferociously rape her! The result of this terrible tryst is one James Eastman (a most sympathetic performance by legendary biker flick icon William Smith, who's perfect in a rare excursion into the horror genre), who grows up from a sickly baby who drinks blood from a bottle into a shy, soft-spoken, muscular half-man, half-vampire being who obsessively tracks down his evil undead old man -- Caleb works at a local college university as a nighttime professor of a class specializing in the occult! -- and engages in a shockingly brutal bout of no-holds-barred fisticuffs with the pernicious bastard in the film's amazingly violent conclusion. 70's soap opera star Lieux Dressler, who portrayed Claudia Jennings' brassy, domineering mother in the T&A drive-in hoot "Truckstop Women" and the folksy innkeeper in the bang-up revenge-of-the-animals winner "Kingdom of the Spiders," cameos as a batty asylum inmate. David Chase, who later wrote several teleplays for the fantastic, sadly short-lived "Kolchak: The Night Stalker" TV series and most recently created the hit cable TV show "The Sopranos," penned the hip, clever, very twisty and surprise-laden script. John Hayes, who also did the excruciatingly woeful zombie stinker "Garden of the Dead" the same years as this pip and went on to helm the laughably lousy sci-fi clinker "End of the World" (another Chuckie Band gem), masterfully creates a grim, creepy, totally sober mood and makes the most out of a conspicuously paltry, but well-spent budget, thus giving this singularly warped and downbeat humdinger the necessary gloom-doom edge required to make it a genuinely good'n'ghastly little sleeper.