Hell, the first ten minutes alone are worth the price of admission, as a sexy vampire (Domini Blythe) leads a little girl to her death at the hands of the local Count (Robert Tayman). How come Counts are always vampires? Or are vampires just always Counts?
Anyway, this is witnessed by a schoolmaster (Laurence Payne) who gets a mob together with the mayor (Thorley Walters) and attacks the Count's castle, burning it to the ground and murdering the Count, stake style. As the Count dies, he puts a curse on the village, claiming all of his murderers' children will die to bring him back from the dead. Again, this is within the first 10 minutes.
15 years later, the curse seems to have come true, as the town is crippled by a mysterious plague. There are roadblocks on the outskirts of town where armed men stand waiting to shoot anyone who dares to enter or leave. This creates a very claustrophobic and intense atmosphere as a backdrop for the rest of the story, especially as a doctor (Richard Owens) makes a mad dash out of the town in hopes of finding a cure. His son and apprentice (John Moulder-Brown) first acts as a decoy to draw fire away from his father, and then stays behind to tend to the sick and dying.
This is when the circus shows up, mysteriously making it past the blockade, and distracting the town from its troubles. There's a gypsy woman (Adrienne Corri), a strongman (Dave Prowse, a.k.a. Darth Vader), a littler person (Skip Martin) a couple jungle cats and, of course, a monkey. There's also Emil (Anthony Corlan) who turns out to be the vampire Count's cousin, and, wouldn't you know it, turns out vampirism runs in the family.
The rest of the flick unfolds at a fairly breakneck pace as the circus of vampires kills off the town's children, and the townspeople try to figure out what's going on. The stakes rise as the schoolmaster's pretty, virginal daughter (Lynne Frederick) shows up at first as a love interest for the doctor's son, and later as prey for the vampires.
I guess if I had any complaints it would be that the editing is so frenetic and there are so many superfluous characters to keep track of that what amounts to a fairly simple story sometimes left me scratching my head, wondering what exactly was going on. Turns out, I was over thinking it -- nothing much was really going on, except rather stylish mayhem and carnage, thick with atmosphere, pretty girls and scenery chewing British thespians. The kind of stuff Hammer does best.
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