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Count Yorga, Vampire
[MGM Home Entertainment]
1970; color
Directed by Bob Kelljan
Starring: Robert Quarry, Robert Perry, Michael Murphy, Michael Macready & Donna Anderson
The Return Of Count Yorga
[MGM Home Entertainment]
1971; color
Directed by Bob Kelljan
Starring: Robert Quarry, Mariette Hartley, Robert Perry, Yvonne Wilder & Edward Walsh
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Ahhh… LA in the '70s; a town filled with every sort of person imaginable—even vampires. At least one, anyway: Count Yorga, Vampire (played by Robert Quarry). The count has set himself up in style in the City of Angels, and is passing himself off as a medium to the "beautiful people." With a secret agenda of assembling an entourage of undead female companions, the Count befriends a young lass named Donna who's recently lost her mother and is desperate to contact her in the afterlife. After a seance gone awry where Donna freaks out and is helped/hypnotized by Yorga, he gets a ride home from one of the other couples at the party. (And may I say, I find it prettydamn funny seeing a vampire reduced to bumming a ride in a VW minibus.) Yorga invites them in for a drink, an offer they decline. Within minutes their minibus gets stuck in the mud on the long and winding driveway from the "castle". They decide to rough it in the VW, hippie style, for the night, which leads to the girl getting the inevitable bite on the neck. Feeling sick the next day, she goes to her doctor, Dr. Hayes (Roger Perry), who tries to explain away the bite marks on her neck by suggesting her boyfriend got a little carried away during their makeout session in the minibus and recommends eating lots of steaks to recover the bloodloss she's suffered. The doc does some sleuthing on his own via conversations with a blood specialist buddy, who suggests it might be… a vampire. No shit. Incidentally, Yorga's adapted to the '70s nicely, and turns out to be pretty hip for a vampire; at one point he uses his vampyro-hypno power to get the first two slabbed girls (Donna's mom and another girl) to engage in some implied undead lesbo action while he watches intensely. Back to business… keeping in mind that this is Los Angeles, you just can't call up your local police precinct to complain about rampant vampirism in your neighborhood (they'll just dismiss you as one of the cities many varied nutjobs); the only way to handle things is to take the situation into your own hands, which the doctor does. Together with Donna and her boyfriend (by now the bitten girl has "disappeared" and her boyfriend is quite dead), they pay a visit to the Count. (Mention must be made here of Yorga's digs. His house appears on the outside to be a large, white, early/mid 20th century structure with nothing particularly special to distinguish it from any other house on the block. On the inside however, it's a full-on European castle straight out of Corman's Poe films or classic Hammer horror; massive rooms, endless corridors, hidden chambers… you know the drill.) Intent on keeping him awake until daybreak, the doc engages the Count in a long and boring conversation about vampires. It quickly becomes obvious to Yorga that they're on to him so he cuts things short, suggesting they return the next day. Which they do. (Bringing their pointy wooden stakes, too.) The guy who isn't the doctor sneaks in through another entrance—the plan is for one of them to end up nailing, or should I say impaling, Yorga—and runs into the Count's brutish assistant (who looks like a marginally inbred Tommy Lee Jones if he'd been hit in the face with a cinderblock a few times) who he stabs in the gut. After a series of twists, turns, choppy camera angles and edits, the doc winds up dead (courtesy a bevy of bodacious bloodsuckers baring cleavage and fangage). The other dude rescues Donna, by "killing" her now-vampiric mom and Yorga, only to be confronted by the remaining two female vampires. (Obviously the traditional lore - when the head vampire dies, all the people he's bitten are freed from his curse - has been thrown out the window here.) Then he somehow traps the vampire vixens in a closet (oh yeah, that'll hold 'em), but gets a surprise at the end that you don't necessarily see coming.
Regardless of his apparent demise in the first film, Yorga somehow manages to recompose himself from a well-dressed pile of dust about a year later for the aptly titled sequel, The Return Of Count Yorga. Reprising his role as the Bulgarian blood farmer, Robert Quarry is back, with an even suave-r wardrobe and more regal digs. Occupying what looks from the outside to be a (presumably abandoned) Spanish monastery, the Count has settled in next door to what's gotta be the world's, or at least Southern California's, smallest orphanage. After setting his sights on Cynthia (Mariette Hartley; in, presumably, one of her earlier roles) at the orphanage's Halloween party, Yorga unleashes his stable of ghoulish gals (who look much more zombie-ish and creepy in this flick, as opposed to the sexy undead girls in the first movie) on Cynthia and her family, who are all orphanage employees. Everyone except for Cynthia and a lone orphan boy are killed in a Helter Skelter-ish fashion—save, of course, the manner of death—and Cynthia winds up kidnapped by the girls and taken to the Count's pad. He does his hypno number on her, making her think a car accident in front of the his place is what brought her to him and that she needs to rest there for a few days. Meanwhile, someone discovers the bodies and calls the cops. (One of whom is Craig T. Nelson, also in a very early role.) Yet, when the cops arrive on the scene, the bodies are gone. Roger Perry (the doctor in the original) plays Baldwin, another orphanage employee, who quickly puts two and two together and ends up a vampire hunter. (Two scenes in this sequel are almost identical to the first movie but the rest of it is fresh.) This movie definitely outshines the first in a lot of ways, with better costumes and sets and loads more plot twists and subplot. I especially like the part where Yorga's hunting for a meal and first scopes out his victims by hanging out at a folk club/coffeehouse. Groovy, baby. The mood grows darker and darker at a very gradual pace and, before you know it, Cynthia's following and being followed by a taunting, giggling gaggle of Yorga's gals through the never-ending series of rooms in the mansion. The kid who was left unhurt in the murder spree eventually becomes a key player; he's sweet yet sinister—and fully under Yorga's command, like a poor man's Damien. The Count is definitely out for more blood this time around, and he's also more evil, unfortunately he's also in love with Cynthia so there's lots of built-in conflict there. Eventually everyone ends up either dead or a vampire except… well, I'll save that info until Yorga 3 comes out.
—the Kommandant
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