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Vampires'
Night Orgy, The
(1972) |
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This early 70's offering has been released by the Pagan label that has to be admired for their devotion to discovering and making available some of the worlds most obscure as well as most fascinating cult films. This particular DVD is their best seller due to a catchy four-letter word in the title that tends to attract the browsers attention. The film will disappoint those fooled by the "Orgy" in the title but those looking for atmosphere drenched euro horror in the classic Tombs of the Blind Dead tradition should find much to satisfy them.
The film begins with a group of travellers winding their way through a tiresome journey on a bus that looks like it is about to expire for good at any moment. The grumpy travellers are in for a rude surprise when the bus driver suffers a sudden fatal heart attack that leaves them in the middle of nowhere, utterly clueless. They manage to drive a little further down the road before coming to a sign for a nearby village where they decide they should head for to find some food and shelter for the night and some clear directions for the rest of their journey. Instead they are met with an eerily empty village without any sign of any inhabitants even though it seems clear that people do live here. The travellers are later met and welcomed as guests by the local villagers who were apparently attending some festival and therefore the place had been deserted. The hosts seem so full of warmth and appear to be going out of their way to please their guests yet below the surface something about them appears to be very sinister indeed. The village is presided over by a serene Countess who is as generous as she is deadly. One by one and indeed two by two the guests discover the ghastly truth about the village as they meet their grisly end. The film is stylishly directed by Klimovsky and beautifully shot to present the village as though embraced by a thick deadly blanket of gloom. There is a murkiness that prevails in the village and even at noon it is as though it were late at night. Some of the scenes where the villagers seem to emerge from the cracks in the walls to slowly engulf their victims evoke memories of the Blind Dead series though the background music is not in the same class as composed for Blind Dead. However there are enough memorable scenes to keep the euro horror connoisseur smiling like the shocking scene when a finger is discovered in the bowl only for the charming host to attempt a most appallingly grisly cover up. There is also an excellent cameo performance by the countess' executioner-cum-butcher who pops up from time to time to relieve unfortunate souls of their limbs in order to keep the carnivores content. A delightfully morbid cocktail of gruesome events; shuffling cadavers, blood-lusting beauties (but no orgy), cannibalism, murdering and murdered children……..a heady mix of horror, laced with touches of humour and shot very effectively evoking a ghostly apparition of a village where gloom and evil permeate to the core. If there is one weakness it lies with the pseudo jazzy background music which is jarring rather than menacing but even that is being nit-picky. The sequences without any music at all are far more effective. Klimovsky scores points over Ossario in that unlike the latter, he doesn't feel to pad his movie with large chunks of infantile comedy. Vampires' Night Orgy is yet another stylish slice of the macabre from Spain further enhancing that countries horror credentials. Not quite as mesmerizing as Tombs of the Blind Dead was but a chilling entertainer all the same. A must see for genuine genre fans.
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