From Blind Dead director Amando de Ossorio comes this voodoo vampire tale of a group of explorers in present day Bumbasa looking into the preservation of animals. Out in the back jungles they encounter a local who warns them that this is not a safe area and to stay in doors at night. Under no circumstances should anyone venture into the jungle location of the ancient altar where blood sacrifices and murder were once practiced. With plenty of stock footage added in to give it that African flavor, the rest of the picture sure looks like it was filmed down by the river I used to go trout fishing at.
Pretty straight forward so shouldn’t be a problem I would think. Hold on, this is a horror film and a mid seventies Spanish import to boot so there is no way anyone in this group of explorers are gonna heed the warnings of some crazed unsavory character behaving like George Zucco. So with 4 attractive women in camp who just can’t seem to keep their shirts from coming unbuttoned we get plenty of “skin” for the drive in crowd along with whippings, blood dripping fangs and beheadings from the newly risen dead. These genre imports always had me wondering if gorgeous blonde haired women just naturally take a naked sponge bath in front of their roommates?
Films like these don’t pretend to be the next Citizen Kane but are fun drive in fare. Somewhere in the vampire film makers handbook of the 1970’s there must be a line about capturing a female vampire in slow motion running through a forest with barely a stitch of clothing on. Appearing in the film we have lovely Loreta Tovar who had worked previously with the director in Return of the Evil Dead and other horror titles of the era. Also in the cast is Jack Taylor who seems to have worked with practically everyone overseas including Jess Franco and his exploitation films to Conan the Barbarian and is still active today. Lastly I can’t talk about this film without mentioning the funky soundtrack which reaches a level of hilarity during a riverside love scene.
Don’t expect too much from this vampire tale after all it’s not a Hammer Film. Other than some eye catching scenes for us guys in the audience it’s not bad considering you could do worse with some of these “horrific” seventies imports.
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