Year released: 1972
THE CHARGE: Bringing a circus full of vampires to town. But in all fairness, I guess they're not any scarier than clowns.
THE EVIDENCE: Vampire Circus opens with vampire Count Mitterhaus killed by local townsfolk. Not many films have the nerve to kill off their most important character in the first five minutes, but there we are. But before dying, he curses them, swearing that their children’s blood will return him to life. Just like when Dick Cheney was kicked out of the White House.
Fifteen years later, the town is in crisis, being devastated by a plague. Despite the presence of roadblocks to prevent any spread of the contagion, a small circus manages to roll into town to offer the residents some light relief. Soon afterward, local children start disappearing and are later found drained of blood.
The titular circus is, of course, working for the deceased Count. The circus acts include an evil midget clown, a strongman and vampire siblings who have a Corsican-like ability to feel each other’s physical pain. There’s also another vampire in the crew who, rather than turning into a bat, prefers to morph into a panther. Oh, and then there’s an act that starts off looking like a lion tamer’s performance but turns into an interpretive dance with a fully nude woman in tiger-striped body paint.
Undead... and fabulous!
With Vampire Circus, the noted British studio Hammer Films abandoned their classic and somewhat subdued horror formula and decided to throw a party full of carnality and carnage. The end result is one of the most gloriously WTF flicks I’ve seen in ages. If you want T&A, there’s enough here to make the flick border on softcore porn at times. If you want graphic violence, you’ll be just as happy. Not only do we get the standard stake-through-the-heart required in all vampire movies, we get burnings, crossbow shootings, shotgun blasts and decapitations. There’s even an uproariously hilarious scene reminiscent of Monty Python in which several people are mauled to death by the aforementioned panther - or rather, a giant stuffed panther doll with ping pong ball eyes.
Yes, the film is outrageously cheap and silly at times. Aside from the mutilation by stuffed animals, there’s also embarrassingly bad animation and green screen work involving bats. And in true 70’s fashion, all the vampires look like a cross between Jim Morrison and Liberace. Even the strongman rocks an Elvis pompadour and sideburns to go with his Hercules loincloth. Double-you, tee, eff.
It's a crossbow. Get it? Cross? Bow? Oh never mind...
But for every minute of film that’s jaw-droppingly bad, there’s another minute that’s jaw-droppingly good. A scene where a vampire grabs the lit end of a flaming torch with his bare hand made me wonder “how the heck did they do that?” In another scene, an amazingly well done squib shot appears to explode out of bare skin. And there’s some nicely gruesome make-up work, most notably when one character’s face is burned and partially melted in an inferno.
Parts of Vampire Circus are terrible. Parts are fantastic. But amazingly, no matter which extreme it goes to, the movie is always entertaining. And isn’t that why we watch these films in the first place - to be entertained? Go find a copy, slap some old Peter Frampton on the turntable to get into the appropriate 70’s vibe, then wallow in the film’s bizarre combination of excrement and excellence, and enjoy.
THE VERDICT: Vampire Circus is NOT GUILTY by virtue of vampire batshit crazy insanity.
