The Germans get some measure of revenge on us for their thrashing in a couple of world wars by unleashing this most typical non-epic about vampires, on an unsuspecting public. This is one of those movies that will remind you of early Mario Bava films or any cheap Italian horror movie of the period. These films as you surely by now are aware, are characterized by their stark black and white photography, spooky castles, and good looking babes that turn vampire on you. You will also recognize this type of movie immediately by its omnipresent boredom.

Adrian Hoven portrays Inspector Frank Dorin. You might know Hoven better under his birth name, Wilhelm Arpad Peter Hofkirchner. You would if you were a real fan anyway. Dorin is a cool cat who is hanging out at a bar using all his charms on the ladies. This involves rubbing the leg of one and rubbing the hand of another as she holds a phone for him when HQ calls.

We all know that when HQ tracks down Inspector Dorin at his favorite pool hall that something real big is up. There’s an important case that needs his expertise immediately. I never did figure out why Dorin was the only guy that could handle the job or why he needed to be called in real special like, but he rolls into the Chief’s office and he lays the bad news on Dorin. There’s six girls that have turned up murdered at some village across the sea and they need to send a man in there real quiet like before the press gets wind of it and starts panicking the public with such tabloid-ish headlines as “Six Girls Murdered” and “Case of Murdered Girls Unsolved.” Those bastards in the media will stop at nothing to sell their precious little rags!

The chief gives Dorin the use of a rental car, gives him some gizmo that allows him to see in the dark with infrared stuff (I guess this is the 1964 version of nightvision goggles – they look like a flashlight with a box attached), and some papers in case the local police give him trouble. (“Hey, what are you doing here, trying to solve our unsolved murders?”)

Dorin already has that angle doped out because he announces with a fair amount of pride that he’s going undercover as a tourist! Just before Dorin leaves, the chief tells them that there is one more thing, but he’s not sure if it has anything to do with the murders. Every time one of the girls has been killed, all the power in the village goes out for awhile. The local power plant has no explanation for this. He can probably get to the bottom of things by arranging a tour of the spooky castle that a mad scientist just moved into right near the village. Since Dorin will be masquerading as a tourist, no one will suspect a thing.

Inspector Dorin gets in his rental car and drives up to the village. Some really inappropriately bouncy and generally upbeat music is blaring (apparently from his radio) as he does this. Before he can get all the way to the village though, his car conks out on him. As he’s checking under the hood, a hand reaches out and touches him on the shoulder. A shudder passes through the audience as we realize that we have just been introduced to the completely pointless and unbelievable love interest!

She is a blonde chick named Karin. She’s the assistant for the mad scientist who moved into the castle six months ago. She’s been doing some type of research for this guy and she is due to leave in the morning. Dorin is naturally real sorry to hear that and also notes that in addition to his car conking out, even his flashlight doesn’t work. I’d like to think that whomever was responsible for knocking out the electrical power did so in an effort to stop Dorin from playing his infernal rock and roll.

Dorin makes it to the local inn and the innkeeper explains to him that of course rooms are available since nobody in their right mind would stay in town what with all the unexplained murders taking place. Dorin succumbs to this hard sell approach and ends up with a room right next to the maid’s room. Once everyone is asleep, somebody dressed in black shows up in the maid’s room through the window, and leaves two puncture wounds on her neck.

The next morning the local cops are banging on Dorin’s door and demand to be let in. He does and they try to stick a gun in his face because they think he’s the killer. He disarms them with this really cheesy karate chop and yells at them for being such Rosco P. Coltrains. If I was the killer, would I have a room right next to the victim, kill her, go back to my room and sleep until you guys show up yelling and screaming? Rosco and Enos agree that maybe they have the wrong man, especially when Dorin shows him the magic papers from the chief that say something like “you have the wrong man.”

The official finding is that the maid croaked from heart failure, the same assessment for the other six victims. Dorin shows his mental mettle when he comes to the conclusion that seven otherwise healthy young women from the same village with puncture wounds on their necks probably didn’t die from heart failure and that maybe autopsies should have been done.

Karin comes by again and invites him to stay at the castle. It seems that the mad scientist has extended an invitation though one wonders why. If it was so that he (Professor van Adelsberg) could kill Dorin, I’d be all for that, but once he gets there van Adelsberg doesn’t do much more than tell Dorin not go into his locked up, super duper, secret lab.

Dorin gets some advice from the town witch like where the vampire is, how to kill him, and here’s a hammer and some wooden stakes. Dorin gets this advice because he’s had to haul Karin’s dumb ass over there to make sure that he applied the powder correctly to a bite she suffered from one of the other vampires. Dorin follows the old witch’s directions, comes upon the mad scientist in his coffin and stakes him and that’s that.

The tedium one experiences as all these non-events play out is something to behold. When this witch was telling Dorin all this stuff, I was wondering why she hadn’t told anyone else before. Or better yet, if you know where and when the vampire is down for his nap, why not you haul your saggy butt over there and do the deed yourself?

Characters stand around talking, walk around grottos (that means caves to people out there that don’t speak Germanic), and hook up with mad scientists’ sexy assistants. I was watching this one and at one point I thought that if anything less eventful took place in the movie that I would be watching a home video of my life. I was reminded of films like Bava’s I Vampiri when watching this. I Vampiri was an affair that dulled your senses pretty good, but at least you had lots of Bava’s beautiful camera shots to keep you watching. Here you’ve just got no gore, no violence, and this dude that plays Dorin has the personality of overripe bratwurst.

© 2008 MonsterHunter