Basically just a big movie of Dracula being petty and vindictive. “You put up a ‘No Vampires Allowed’ sign on my house while I was sleeping, so now I’m going to kill you and turn your niece into a monster.” That sort of thing.

There’s lots of inexplicable stuff (Why is there no road to Dracula’s castle? How does he burn a body to nothing in the fireplace without everyone in the inn smelling it? Why is there a weird dungeon with Dracula in it just off the bakery?) and none of the vampire scenes are anything particularly special, but there are a surprising number of genuinely good and funny character moments.

I like how the rules that govern vampires keep changing in Hammer movies. In this one in order to kill Dracula you apparently have to impale him with something and then pray. If you don’t pray he’ll just writhe around like a character from War of the Monsters who got stuck through with a radio tower and then eventually pull it out and be cranky(er).

Over the weekend I managed to watch one of the aforementioned hard-to-find seasonally appropriate movies from Netflix watch instantly, and I figured I’d make my first official Countdown to Halloween post talking a bit about Vampire Circus.

Vampire Circus is a movie that I’ve been wanting desperately to clap eyes on ever since I first got into Hammer horror movies. Because, well, Vampire Circus, right? And look at that poster! Unfortunately, while it wasn’t quite the visual tour de force that I was hoping for based on that poster, it was still a pretty intriguing spectacle, though not always in the ways I expected.

The sets were actually pretty bland, as Hammer sets go, though there’s a really nice church near the end. There was, however, lots of other “scenery” on display. Vampire Circus is remarkably graphic and shockingly erotic, even for a late-era Hammer film (at least, for the late-era Hammer films that I’ve so far seen). There’s implied incest, and very heavily implied pedophilia, and moreover, virtually everything in the movie is so heavily sensual and eroticized that it’s hard to even explain. There’s quite a lot of nudity, including a completely naked lady dancer who is painted to look like a tiger, I think, though at first I thought she was supposed to be a snake person since she looked sort of green. There’s also a lot of animal transformations and some very, very credulous villagers who seem to not question just how these people seem to transform from animal to person and back again willy-nilly. I guess they are in the circus.

Lest you think that Vampire Circus is all sex, though… no, actually, go ahead and think that. It pretty much is. Even the stuff that isn’t sex somehow manages to feel like sex, in spite of plagues and gory panther murders and creepy midgets. One of Hammer’s weirder outputs, and definitely not exactly what I was expecting, but certainly interesting and unusual.