Movies That Suck/Vampire Flicks: The Slaughter of the Vampires (La strage dei vampiri, Curse of the Blood Ghouls) (1962)

Here's a perfect example of how spontaneous and off the cuff my process of doing these October Fest series of reviews is. Every year, before I start, I always make a list of what I plan to cover, as well as a small handful of backups just in case some of the main ones don't work out, like if I find they don't actually fit the theme, or I can't find a good source for screenshots, and so on. But, even then, nothing is ever completely set in stone. For a while there, it seemed like this year, I was just going to do all of the reviews I originally had planned, but instead, I ended up doing two movies that I didn't put on either the main list or the backups. The first of them, which you're looking at right now, was actually done near the end of the writing process, even though it's popping up early on in the month. The reason for that is because, as it was already October and I still had four more slots to fill, I needed at least one flick that I could blow through very easily in just a few days. I happened to stumble across this on Tubi and, after seeing that it was an Italian film that was only 79 minutes long, I figured it may fit the bill. And boy, was I right. I don't plan on spending too much time on this, as there is virtually nothing of substance here. It's little more than an uninspired, bare bones adaptation of the basic story of Dracula (it's so bare bones that the main vampire is never even named), with a lot of bad acting, pitiful characters, idiotic writing, unimpressive and often horrendous direction and editing, and so much padding that it's tedious despite how short it is.

In 19th Century Austria, a vampire and his bride are chased by an angry mob, intending to avenge several young women they're murdered in the village. The bride is caught and killed, but the other vampire manages to escape, and takes a coach back to his castle, desperate to get there before sunrise. He makes it and has the coachman help him carry his coffin into the castle's wine cellar. However, the castle is anything but deserted, as it has recently been purchased by a newlywed couple: Wolfgang and Louise. They throw a party to commemorate the occasion, which the vampire spontaneously appears at. His presence causes Louise to feel strange and dizzy, and he enters the ballroom and convinces her to dance with him, before leaving as suddenly as he appeared. Now feeling especially fatigued, Louise decides to head up to her bedroom, where the vampire appears to her again. Though she's initially frightened, he manages to seduce and feed on her blood, but is interrupted when Wolfgang and the governess, Corinne, come up to check on her. Now under the vampire's thrall, Louise continues coming off as fatigued and indifferent during the following days, and doesn't have much of an appetite. A friend of her husband's, Dr. Hant, examines her and finds that her pulse is weak; he figures she may be anemic. That night, the vampire draws Louise outside onto the castle grounds, where he offers her an everlasting life, one of passion and inconceivable sensations, before biting her again. Waking up to find her gone, Wolfgang goes searching for his wife and finds her. She's so weak that he has to carry her back inside, and her health continues to deteriorate afterward. Hant, unable to diagnose her issue, tells Wolfgang to travel to Vienna and consult Prof. Nietzsche. Wolfgang tells Louise that he must go there to get her "new medicine," though Louise seems to know she doesn't have much time left. In Vienna, Wolfgang arrives at Nietzsche's estate, and after waiting for some time, meets him. Desperate to return as soon as possible, he convinces the professor to accompany him back to the castle. Along the way, he tells Nietzsche of his wife's condition, and the professor determines that she's under attack by a vampire. Unfortunately, by the time they return, Louise has died. Now, Nietzsche must find and destroy the vampire, and save everybody else under threat from him.

The film was written and directed by Roberto Mauri, who started out as an actor in the 1940's and would continue to act during the first part of his filmmaking career, in the late 1950's. Said career mostly consisted of Spaghetti Westerns and some sword and sandal, or peplum, flicks, with The Slaughter of the Vampires marking a very rare foray into the horror genre for him. Near the end of his career, though, Mauri would return to it with the 1974 film, Madeleine: Anatomy of a Nightmare, starring Camille Keaton from I Spit on Your Grave. He also directed the notoriously misleading King of Kong Island, which was actually filmed in Italy as Eva, the Savage Venus. His overall filmography is not an enviable one, that's for sure, and his career ended in 1980, after he wrote, directed, edited, and even acted in a movie called The Porno Killers. Mauri died in 2018, at the age of 94.

Like I said, while credit is never given to it, this movie takes the basic elements of the Dracula story and boils them down to their most simplistic, i.e. bland, form. That includes our unnamed Count Dracula stand-in (Dieter Eppler), who has nothing to him whatsoever. Except that he, for all intents and purposes, once owned the castle where Wolfgang and Louise now live, we never learn a single thing about him, and his role in the story is to be the most simplistic antagonist imaginable. After the opening, where he and his vampire bride are chased by some villagers, who manage to catch and kill the latter, he gets a coachman to drive him back to his castle as quickly as possible, offering to pay him a lot of money for his trouble. He does arrive in time, and gets the coachman, who never questions anything, to help bring his coffin down into the wine cellar. From there, vampire later shows up at Wolfgang and Louise's party of of nowhere, has Louise dance with him, as all the partygoers wonder who he is, and when Louise says she's beginning to feel faint, he leaves just as suddenly. Later, when she's up in her bedroom, he pays her another visit, and manages to seduce and bite her on the neck. He's interrupted and is forced to flee, but another night, he draws her outside, onto the ground, where he appears to her again. He tells her, "The night is my element. It cannot frighten me. You, too, belong to the dark, for in you, the light of the stars is transformed into a being of flesh and blood. And what the night sky has lost, I now see standing before me, more beautiful than a thousand stars. All this, I see in you... I come from the past. I exist in the present and the future. I'm here to offer you a life of passion, for centuries everlasting. A realm which is waiting for you, a beautiful world of strange colors. Colors which, a yet, you cannot even imagine, but which I shall teach you to see. They are hidden in the darkness of our realm." After that mouthful (there was more than I didn't transcribe), he bites her again, and, despite Wolfgang rushing to Vienna for Prof. Nietzsche, the vampire manages to kill Louise before they can return. He also manages to begin feeding on and influencing Corinne, Louise's governess, while Louise herself rises as a vampire and begins preying on Wolfgang.

Not only is he utterly one-dimensional, but this vampire is never creepy, scary, or intimidating in the least. He is kind of good-looking, which makes it understandable why he manages to cast a spell over Louise, and why the other women at the party are intrigued by him, but that's about the extent of any pros I can give him. He doesn't have much dialogue, and as you saw, when he does speak, often to those he has power over, he gives these very overwrought, cheesy speeches and diatribes. And when he's not

doing that or resting in his coffin down in the wine cellar, he mainly just sneaks around the castle grounds, enters Louise and Corinne's rooms, and feeds on their blood. He seems to be jealous that Louise, even as a vampire, is still attracted to Wolfgang, as he interrupts her biting her former husband and orders her to come away with him. Despite that, he doesn't seem all that upset when both Louise and Corinne are staked, suggesting he viewed them only as slaves and a means to satisfy his bloodlust. He's not much of a physical threat,

either, despite attacking Wolfgang with a mace during the climax, and he's defeated after a very brief struggle, as Wolfgang kicks him back against the wall, he screams when his arm is burned by a torch, and Wolfgang then impales him with the spikes on some iron grating.

The vampire's look is very typical and cliche, little more than a modification of the visage that Bela Lugosi made iconic, namely in terms of the black evening suit and cape, and the pale skin tones. He also has some notable dark circles around the eyes and actual fangs that come out whenever he feeds, which Lugosi never had. As for the familiar vampire tropes, we have a lot of hypnosis and mental influence, both over Louise and Corinne, and seemingly over Wolfgang, who is bitten but never 

completely turned; a lack of reflection in mirrors, which is employed in the scene where the vampire enters Louise's bedroom; being vulnerable to sunlight and having to rest in a coffin during the day; being repelled by religious symbols; and a stake of some sort needing to be driven through the hearts. In another element taken from Dracula, blood transfusions are used to help someone in danger of turning, namely Wolfgang (that scene reminds me of the one from the first Hammer Dracula where Van

Helsing performs a blood transfusion on Mina, with Arthur Holmwood as the donor, right down to Nietzsche telling the donor how best to compensate for the missing blood). However, this movie was so low budget that they didn't even try to have the vampires turn into bats, even crappy fake ones on strings..

Naturally, Wolfgang (Walter Brandi) and Louise (Graziella Granata) are the Jonathan Harker and Mina Seward stand-ins, and are about as bland. That's especially true of Wolfgang, himself a Count, and while Louise has a bit more substance to her, due to the conflicting feelings she has when she falls under the vampire's spell, I still couldn't care less about her. The two of them are newlyweds and have recently purchased the castle, but no sooner do they move in, than Louise is preyed upon by the vampire. Initially 

frightened of the effect his presence has on her, when he manages to seduce her in her bedroom and bite her neck, she finds herself enraptured and asks him not to leave her. As time passes, she starts to look pale and sickly, and has very little appetite, before falling further under the vampire's thrall when he draws her outside one night in order to feed on her blood again. There, Louise admits to hating how he's contaminating her love for her husband, but also can't help but feel drawn to him. All the while, Wolfgang has little to do other than be confused by what's happening to his wife, then grow concerned when he finds her outside by herself and has to literally carry her back inside. Told that she appears to be dying somehow, Wolfgang is advised to go to Vienna to enlist the services of Prof. Nietzsche. When he tells Louise this, trying to assuage her fears by saying she will soon be better and that he has to go to Vienna to fetch some medicine, she can see right through him and knows she doesn't have much time left. Also knowing that she soon won't be able to see or feel the sun anymore, she asks Wolfgang to put her in a chair by the window before he leaves, which he does. He promises to return before nightfall, which he's wrong about, and by the time he does return with Nietzsche, Louise has already died. 

Louise reanimates as a vampire herself later that night, and takes advantage of Wolfgang's anguish over her death in order to get close enough to bite him on the neck. However, the vampire orders her to come away with him before she can completely turn Wolfgang, and Nietzsche performs a blood transfusion to save him. The following night, when Louise rises from her coffin, behind a secret door down in the wine cellar, and approaches Wolfgang's bedroom, Nietzsche manages to repel her with a

crucifix. He then chases her back down to the cellar, finds her coffin, and stakes her. Wolfgang, meanwhile, after being attacked by the vampiric Corinne, spends much of the rest of the movie seemingly under the vampires' sway. But in the end, he does manage to defeat and destroy the main one.

Prof. Nietzsche (Luigi Batzella) is our not so subtle Van Helsing substitute, whom Wolfgang is referred to by Dr. Hant when he's unable to diagnose Louise's malady. He's the only character I could halfway get into, as Batzella manages to bring that feeling of authority and class you'd want in this kind of character. He also comes off as very dapper and sophisticated, with his nice clothes, mustache (kind of looks like Vincent Price, doesn't he?), and his habit of constantly smoking small cigars. His manner is great, too. Though Wolfgang, upon arriving at Nietzsche's residence in Vienna, has to wait around for much of the day for the professor to return from another call, when Nietzsche does show up, he proves to be very accommodating and willing to listen. I like how, when Wolfgang talks about how Hant referred him to Nietzsche because he himself was at a loss to explain what was happening to Louise, and says that Nietzsche is his last hope of saving her, the professor sincerely tells him, "I cannot do miracles. I can only do my best." And when Wolfgang insists that they talk about Louise's condition on the way back, Nietzsche is more than willing to go with him. Along the way, Nietzsche determines from what Wolfgang tells him that Louise is being attacked by a vampire, which he's been trying to wipe out of existence for many years. He also tells him that he must follow every one of his instructions, no matter how unorthodox they may seem, something that Wolfgang later finds difficult to do as he tries to grasp what his wife has become. Throughout the third act, Nietzsche tries to find the vampires' hiding place, and also goes as far as to use Wolfgang as bait in order to trap them. But, while he does manage to kill both Louise and Corinne (he stakes the former by using his hand to pound a spike into her chest; not something I would think would be easy to do), he's not present during the climactic confrontation between Wolfgang and the main vampire. 

There are some egregious downsides to Nietzsche's character, however. When he and Wolfgang are searching the grounds after Louise's body disappears, Nietzsche flat-out suggests that the two of them split up, which, genre-savvyness aside, he should know is not a good idea. And, sure enough, it results in Wolfgang being bitten by the now vampiric Louise. In another scene, he fails to mention all of the ways to kill a vampire. In fact, he says, "Only fire and the cross can destroy them. Except for these remedies, no 

power can prevail," even though he knows that both sunlight and a stake through the heart are also effective, whereas the cross simply repels and forces them into submission. Also, at the end of that scene, where he and a servant are searching the cellar for the vampires' coffins, the main one's coffin is show to be behind some barrels that they were literally standing right next to! And at the very end of the movie, he almost stakes Wolfgang, thinking he's still under the vampires' influence! (Granted, Wolfgang earlier asked Nietzsche to not let him become a vampire himself, but still.)

There's also something of a Dr. Seward character in Dr. Hant (uncredited actor), who appears in a couple of scenes early on. An old school friend of Wolfgang's, he stops by after Louise has first been fed upon by the vampire and notes that she looks pale, finds that her pulse is rather weak, and figures she may be suffering from anemia. Unable to give a concrete diagnosis, he advises Wolfgang to simply make sure she gets plenty of rest and good food. But the next time he stops by, her condition has badly deteriorated, and Hant admits he's at a loss. That's when he suggests that Wolfgang consult Prof. Nietzsche and then leaves the movie, never to be seen again.

Corinne (Gena Gimmy), Louise's governess and longtime friend, initially seems like a minor, insignificant character. But after Louise has died and her body disappears, it turns out that Corinne has also become the vampire's victim. In fact, since she opens her bedroom window and waits for him, we can guess that he'd bitten her neck and fed on her blood at least once before offscreen. Now, she's reached the point where, like Louise, she's enthralled with him rather than scared, and tells him that she now looks forward to becoming a vampire herself, a wish he soon grants. The next night, during Prof. Nietzsche's vigil as he waits for the vampires to strike again, Corinne asks Wolfgang if she can stay the night with him in his room, feigning fear over what's been happening. But when Nietzsche stops Louise from entering through the window and chases her back to the cellar, Corinne, now a full-on vampire herself, bites and feeds on Wolfgang. She then heads down to the cellar, where Nietzsche, after staking Louise, hides and observes her strange behavior. Realizing that she's likely a vampire as well, he forces her into submission with a cross, then kills her by exposing her to sunlight.

There's also a small family who lives on the castle's property: Peter, the gardener (Alfredo Rizzo), his wife, Teresa (Carla Foscari), and their young daughter, Resy (Maretta Procaccini). Resy proves to be the most significant one, despite not having much screentime. She's shown to be quite close to both Wolfgang and Louise, and near the end, manages to play a piece on the piano that the latter played during the party. This gets the attention of a seemingly entranced Wolfgang, who walks downstairs to where

she's playing, then gets her to join him on a walk outside. But, when the vampire appears, Wolfgang takes Resy and runs down into the castle's cellar, only for the vampire to find and confront them. However, Wolfgang is able to protect Resy and destroy the vampire. As for Resy's parents, while her mother does little more than act as a servant, Peter comes off as a clueless idiot who does various dumb things. At the very beginning of the movie, after the coachman has brought the vampire to the castle and helped him bring his coffin inside, Peter, who walks outside just as the coachman is leaving, doesn't stop the guy and ask him what he's doing there. Even more egregiously, when he's watching the castle from his home's window, the vampire appears outside, right in his line of sight, but Peter never sees him. And near the end of the movie, he actually lets Resy play outside, despite what's happened. It's during the daytime, yeah, but you'd think he wouldn't want his daughter to be out of his sight for very long.

In trying to find any sort of compliments to give the movie, I will say that, when you watch a good print of it, the black and white cinematography is fine (although, I think most of the best-looking versions have been reformatted to fit a 16:9 screen, leading to many instances where characters on the sides of the frame are almost completely obscured), and there isn't as much day-for-night cinematography as you might expect. The most obvious ones are the nighttime carriage scenes, but all of the exterior scenes on the castle grounds seem to have actually been shot at

night. Speaking of which, they were able to shoot at the Castello di Monte San Giovanni Campano in order to give it some sense of production values. Both the castle's exteriors, like the immediate entrance, the destroyed spots, the courtyard, the little park on the grounds, and the broken down tunnels in the cellar area, do look nice and help give the movie an appealing Gothic feel. The same also goes for the castle's main interiors (whether those were the actual castle interiors or sets in a studio that the filmmakers

had access to, I'm not sure; I'm inclined to believe they were the latter, though), like the huge foyer, stairway, and enormous window on the landing, the ballroom where Wolfgang and Louise host their party, and the bedrooms for both Louise and Corinne (although the latter are also very sparse in their decoration, leading to their feeling a bit threadbare), as well as the little home on the property where Peter lives with his family. The costumes also all look 

really nice and elegant, as do the horse-drawn carriages used in several sequences. And finally, there is a little bit of kudos I can give to Roberto Mauri's direction, such as some effective enough shots from the vampire bride's POV as she's attacked by the villagers, a gliding POV from the main vampire when he approaches Louise at the party, an effective shot following his feet and the end of his cape as he walks up the cellar stairs, and some fair images of the vampires lingering in the dark on the castle grounds. However, that's where my compliments cease.

The Slaughter of the Vampires is a dismally bad movie, for a number of different reasons. First, like I've said, the screenplay is the definition of by-the-numbers, with a scenario and characters that are, more or less, taken straight from the original story of Dracula, with a big helping of the Bela Lugosi movie thrown in, but with nothing new done with them whatsoever. In fact, the writing treats these elements as basically and unimaginatively as possible, save for new character names and the setting. Again, we know virtually nothing about the vampire himself,

including his name and motivations, other than he's just a vampire who's doing what they do. The opening, with him and his bride being pursued by some angry villagers, who manage to catch and kill the latter (very easily, I might add), leads to nothing, as we never learn who that woman was originally, and those villagers are never seen or even mentioned again. You'd expect some of them to show up to warn Wolfgang and Louise about the castle they've just moved into and who it used to belong to, but nope. In fact, the vampire's desperate flight to reach the castle

before sunrise suggests that village was quite far away, which makes me wonder why he went there in the first place. But what really baffles me is how Wolfgang and Louise bought the castle unaware of who originally lived there or of any sinister local reputation it had, as well as how they managed to move in without the vampire even knowing until he shows up at that party. It seems as though they had just done so when he returns from that village, suggesting he was there for a while, but even then, 

he's not angry or even shocked when he rises from his coffin one night and finds their party in full swing; instead, he just shows up and immediately goes for Louise. You could say he just goes with the flow, but this is what I mean when I talk about how bare bones and mindless this writing feels.

Speaking of the writing, the dialogue is terrible, and that's not just me dumping on the English dubbing, which is, as expected, pretty bad. I have looked at the original Italian version and, if the subtitles I saw there are accurate, then the dialogue in the dubbed version is more or less the same. It's so bad, with many passages that are melodramatic and quasi-Shakespearean, and it's also sometimes contradictory. For instance, when Dr. Hant first comes over to visit Wolfgang, Corinne suggests they ask his expertise on Louise's illness, only for him to already know she's 

not been feeling well when he arrives. Early on, when Louise and the vampire are dancing at the party, a woman and her husband have this respective exchange: "I think he's fascinating." "Personally, I'd say he's sinister." "Very much so." Shortly afterward, when the vampire appears in Louise's bedroom and moves in on her, she goes, "Go away, please. What are you doing here? No. What do you want of me? Leave this instant. Go away. Go away." When he scoops her up in his arms and carries her over to the bed, she says, "Let me go. You're so cold, you make 

me shudder. Who are you? Why have you come here?" And when he bites her: "Don't ever go away." The next night, when he draws her outside and speaks to her, she says, "I knew you were calling me. Where are you? I can't see you. Who can you be to have this mysterious power over me? Who can you be that you poisoned all the love I bore my husband and made me become your slave? Show yourself to me! Where are you hiding?! This black night makes me fear you." I already gave you an example of the vampire's own 

dialogue during this scene, but again, there's more there that I didn't mention. The same goes for the scene where he comes to Corinne in her bedroom: "I felt that I was in your presence, even though I never heard you arrive." "I know. I, too, am always close to you, even when you are far away. I can feel your breathing when you are sleeping and when you're waking, I can feel the blood throbbing in your veins." "What has made me want you? I don't fear your power." "You've no need to fear." "I know that now. 

You only fear the dark when you're not used to it. But why have you returned to me? It's the day that begins now to make me afraid. My thoughts tried in vain to stay interested in the thing which made me love life, the joy of living a new day. All this seems to have vanished. It has no meaning." "Before long, all that will be only a memory." Only the character of Prof. Nietzsche is able to make this dialogue work, when he's describing how monstrous vampires are, but as I mentioned before, even he has his faults.

What also doesn't help the dialogue is how bland and stilted a lot of the dubbing is. The vampire and Nietzsche's voices are fair enough, but I can't say the same for a lot of the other characters. The guy who dubbed Wolfgang is really stiff, which doesn't help lines like, "Louise, what have you done to me?!", "It's terrible. I no longer know if what I believe in is good or bad. I've no doubts about your honesty, doctor, but what you are asking me to do concerns my poor wife," and, "You must understand that, to me, this doesn't make sense. This is ridiculous, as well as

painful for me. Oh, I know. This makes no difference to you, because all that counts with you is to realize your ambition to impress your friends and prove your brilliance. But you ought to realize that I, for one, have had enough of this comedy." He can't even convincingly cry in the scene where Wolfgang returns home and is told his wife has died. The dub actor for Peter is even worse, flatly delivering lines like, "What a tragedy. Poor dear lady." Finally, there are many instances where the actors step over each other lines,

typically when several characters are in a group, talking. And no, this doesn't make it feel more like real life, as some movies do, but, rather, like a case of bad timing and acting.

Putting the writing aside, the movie is just poorly-made in general. For one, there are numerous continuity errors that shouldn't have escaped anybody's attention: vampire fang marks that aren't there the day after someone has been bitten; a scene where Prof. Nietzsche insists they must find the vampires' hiding place before daybreak, as he stands in front of a large window through which you can see it's daytime outside; the character of Herman, a castle servant, who completely disappears following the scene where he and Nietzsche search the wine cellar

(and, again, completely miss the coffin hidden behind the stack of barrels, an obvious hiding place), even though the two of them are said to be rushing back to protect those under threat from the vampires; and that moment where Peter doesn't see the vampire, even though he appears outside the window, within his line of sight (he even quickly flings his cape and hides around a corner, before peeking out again, something Peter should see). For another, the movie's structure and editing make it hard to determine where and when a scene is taking place. At the beginning, when

the vampire makes it back to his castle and has the coachman help him carry his coffin inside, I figured the party was happening somewhere else entirely, given how it dissolves from the vampire getting into his coffin to the foyer and the ballroom, where the party in full swing. That transition would also make you think it's taking place the same night, but when you remember how the vampire notes when he gets back to his castle that dawn isn't far off, and then reemerges from his coffin and exits the cellar to

appear at the party, you realize it has to now be another night. (That was why I was so confused about how Wolfgang and Louise purchased the castle without them and the vampire being aware of each other.) Even worse, after the scene where Nietzsche acts as though it's still night even though it's clearly daytime, and he and Herman then search the cellar, with Nietzsche again saying that dawn is coming soon (only to turn around and say that the vampires will soon rise again under darkness; I think I get the

intention, but it's still initially contradictory and confusing), we immediately see the vampire rise from his coffin, go into the secret chamber housing Louise's coffin, awaken her, and the two of them head out into the night. But right after that, we see Wolfgang and Nietzsche talking during the daytime, only for it to be night again in the next scene. WHAT TIME IS IT?!

Probably the movie's worst aspect is how utterly dull and poorly-paced it is. It seems as though Roberto Mauri, knowing that he didn't have much to work with anyway, attempted to compensate by padding numerous scenes out to an egregious degree. These include the party scene, including when Louise plays at the piano, before being affected by the vampire's presence, and her dancing with him, as everyone else watches; the scene where the vampire draws Louise outside, and Wolfgang then finds her out there by

herself; Wolfgang arrives at Prof. Nietzsche's estate and waits around for the better part of a day for him to return (you see Wolfgang mill around and look at some doves in a cage, then sit down in a chair and look through a book, before the camera pans back to the doves and there's a dissolve to indicate that a lot of time has passed, then goes back to Wolfgang, who's still sitting and reading); and so many instances during the third act of people, both the main characters and the vampires, wandering around the

castle grounds at night. In fact, much of the third act is a hodgepodge of Wolfgang lying in bed, while the vampires sneak around the grounds, and the monotony is only broken up occasionally when either the vampires attack someone or Nietzsche manages to kill one of them. And those moments in and of themselves aren't much to write home about, as they aren't exciting and there are no grisly deaths or makeup effects to pique your interest. 

Yeah, despite the movie opening with a vampire bride being killed by those villagers (honestly, probably the most effective scene in the whole thing,), as well as the various biting and feeding scenes, and Nietzsche killing both Louise and Corinne in rapid succession, there's barely any blood here. Moreover, the moment where he stakes Louise is clumsily edited, as you see him place a spike on her chest (in-between her breasts, rather than over her heart, I might add), and it cuts to a close-up of his face just as he starts to slam it down into her using his hand. Then, after a reaction 

shot from the main vampire, it shows her screaming as Nietzsche is merely holding the spike in place, looking as though it's barely penetrated her flesh. As for Corinne, she's merely repelled by a cross, then exposed to sunlight, which doesn't disintegrate or burn her in any way, but just merely causes her to die. And when the main vampire is killed at the end, with Wolfgang impaling him with the spikes on a piece of iron grating, there are a few dissolves where he, initially, seems to lose much of his hair, and then, is reduced to a skeleton. That's the only bit of effects work you get here.

The climax is absolutely for the birds. Wolfgang wakes up in the middle of the night, seemingly entranced, as he sits up and gets out of bed in a robotic manner, then walks downstairs to where Resy is playing the same piece of music on the piano that Louise played at the party. He tells her that he initially thought Louise had come back, and after learning that Nietzsche and Peter are out searching for the vampire, he suggests the two of them take a walk out in the park. While they're out there, Wolfgang continues to act strange, and Nietzsche and Peter turn out to be

watching from nearby. Suddenly, Wolfgang spots the vampire, tells Resy they're not safe out there, then picks her up, runs to the half-destroyed part of the castle, and barricades himself down in one of the cellars with her. While Nietzsche and Peter, thinking Resy is in danger, try to break the door down, the vampire manages get in there through another entrance and confronts Wolfgang, wielding a mace. As I said before, this "fight" is pathetic, as the vampire jumps at Wolfgang, the two of them 

struggle, the vampire swings the mace at Wolfgang, they struggle some more, the vampire manages to get Wolfgang down on the ground and tries to hit him with the mace, only for Wolfgang to push him back with his feet. He's thrown back, gets burned by a torch on the wall, and as he yells in pain, Wolfgang stabs him with the iron grating. After he's disintegrated, Nietzsche and Peter break down the door, and both Peter and Resy have to stop the professor from killing Wolfgang, thinking he's completely succumbed to vampirism.

And after that nonsensical and anticlimactic bit of business, the actual ending is needlessly drawn out. Nietzsche talks with Resy to assure her that there's nothing to fear now, then tells Wolfgang, Peter, and Teresa that they must make sure what she went through doesn't negatively affect her mental development. He adds, "But small children quickly forget. With time, all this will be erased. Because, as always in nature, there's both good and bad. After every storm, the sun shines. In its life, we see a proof of God's love. Life has many strange secrets, but... I

think I'm talking too much." (No joke, he ends with that, as if Roberto Mauri was trying to come up with something truly profound, decided, "Oh, to hell with it," and left it in the script.) The carriage then arrives to take Nietzsche back to Vienna, they see him out, and the film lingers a bit on him during the ride home, as he looks back at the castle, then puts his top hat on, and continues smoking one of his little cigars. The film actually ends with Wolfgang speaking to Peter and Teresa, though there's no audio, and he walks off into the courtyard and onto the castle grounds.

If nothing else, the music score by Aldo Piga (who scored several other Italian vampire movies during this period), while certainly not amazing, is fair. It has some nice, exciting sections, like during the vampire's carriage ride back to his castle and the climax; some eerie, theremin-like sounds for when Louise first begins to fall under the vampire's thrall; and some effective emotional pieces for the romance between Wolfgang and Louise, and the tragedy over the latter's death.

The Slaughter of the Vampires, aka Curse of the Blood Ghouls (its original American title), is a prime example of the absolute worst of European horror during this period. The screenplay is uninspired, the characters little more than cardboard, the dialogue is terrible, the direction and editing range laughably bad to frustratingly confusing, and, worst of all, the movie is often just boring and padded like nobody's business, with a climax that's anything but climactic. While it does benefit from a serviceable Van Helsing substitute in Prof. Nietzsche, an effective location of an actual ruined castle, lovely interior sets and costumes, and some occasional inspiring bits of filmmaking, this is a colossal waste of 78 minutes. Trust me, you can find something much better to do with your time.