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Blood Flood
[Retromedia]
Grave Of The Vampire
1974; color
Directed by John Hayes
Starring: William Smith, Michael Pataki, Lyn Peters & Diane Holden
House Of Evil
1968; color
Directed by Jack Hill & Juan Ibáñez
Starring: Boris Karloff, Julissa, Andrés García, Angel Espinoza, Beatriz Baz, Quintín Bulnes, Manuel Alvarado & Arturo Fernández
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Grave of The Vampire is an interesting vampire tale set (mostly) in the swingin' '70s, and placing our vampire—variously identified in this as Caleb Croft, Professor Adrian Lockwood and another name or two I can't recall—as a night school scholar who lectures on the occult. Collegiate blood has kept Lockwood (his current moniker) spry and undead for many years; but let's euphemistically rewind a bit for some background. When the movie opens it's the 1940s (the time period is never directly mentioned, but the clothes and cars appear to be from that era) and we see a young couple headed to a nearby cemetery to fool around. Unfortunately for them, the Croft crypt isn't exactly sealed and vampire Caleb wakes up hungry and, apparently, horny. First he kills the boy and then rapes the girl in an open grave. He doesn't kill her though. As you might well guess, after this exchange it is revealed she is pregnant. (Anyone wanna guess who the father is?) Once the child's born it refuses mother's milk, but once a couple drops of mama's blood inadvertently cross the baby's lips it's all over but the shouting and in no time flat mom's tapping her veins and filling baby's bottle up with blood. Time passes and we jump to a point where the baby is an adult, but not a vampire. He's mourning the passing of his mother, as well as being hell-bent on finding his father and killing him for what he did to her and, in turn, to him. So, who's occult lecture do you think he ends up at? Coincidence? Fate? Maybe, but there's so much more to Grave Of The Vampire - including some free love, random acts of vampirism, and a healthily ambiguous ending that leaves the door open for a sequel - that I'm gonna actually recommend this to fans of TV horror a la Kolchak or Night Gallery.
House Of Evil is another of the handful of films Boris Karloff shot in Mexico a couple years before he died, all of which feature uncredited direction by Jack Hill and all of which are reviled far more than they deserve to be. (OK, well, maybe Snake People does deserve it's rep.) This one is the only gothic-style horror flick in that batch, and probably the best of the lot. Karloff plays a demented old man who, knowing the end is imminent, calls a disparate group of distant relatives to his secluded mansion. He's got some sort of inherited family ailment that causes the brain to shrink, making those who contract it (and only some do) homicidal. The old man dies almost as soon as everyone arrives and as they wait for the will to be read, one by one, those assembled begin to get killed off. (It's kinda funny to me how much this film's story resembles a stock Andy Milligan plotline.) All you really need to know about House Of Evil is this: killer toys and homicidal dolls. Truthfully, it's a mindless little horror movie but, despite the fact most of the cast can't act their way out of a paper bag, it's still kind of fun.
—the Kommandant
The Kommandant's previously published review of Guru, The Mad Monk (the third film in the "triple avalanche of horror") can be read here.
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