The Kiss of the Vampire (1963)

Five years is a long time in the movie business, and during that time Hammer had learned a lot.  Although it’s only six minutes longer than 1958’s ‘Dracula’ this has a higher budget, more moving parts, some actually fun side characters, and although it doesn’t have anyone with a presence as strong as Van Helsing or an actor as interesting as Peter Cushing it does a generally good job of telling a decent story and drawing out the suspense until it completely falls apart in the third act.

‘The Kiss of the Vampire’ also makes the deeply disappointing mistake of introducing some genuinely interesting ideas into a vampire story and then doing almost nothing with them.  Apparently the script was formed from repurposed ideas left out of 1960’s ‘The Brides of Dracula,’ the direct sequel to 1958’s ‘Dracula’ and to which this movie is a quasi-sequel.  Turn of the century scientific advancement and vampirism, a vampire cult, an explicit conflation of big city slash aristocratic decadence and a moral descent into literal demonism, these are all presented but in no way examined.  At a certain point everyone at a party full of upper crust, intellectual vampires just throws on white cult robes without a hint of explanation and we’re all just supposed to swing with it.

The movie opens with the strongest single vampire scene we’ve had so far.  A series of long, somber shots accompany a set of pall bearers as they carry a coffin to an open grave.  The priest begins the ceremony and a lone figure is spotted overlooking the burial against an overcast sky.  The crowd murmurs.  The man slowly approaches until he’s graveside.  He makes his solemn goodbyes and beckons to be handed the shovel.  After glancing at the priest for permission the gravedigger does so.  After bracing himself for a moment the man thrusts the shovel down into the coffin.  A woman screams and the man sags a bit, sad but not surprised.  He turns and walks away as the coffin starts to bubble up blood, causing the crowd to panic and run away.  The camera pushes down into the coffin to show the now dead face of a young female vampire, fangs poking through her lips, and we get the title card.

Y'know, I'm relatively sure there are no kisses in this movie.

This is our introduction to Professor Zimmer, and although he’s not nearly as interesting a character in this as Van Helsing was in ‘Dracula’ it’s mostly because the movie decides he’s a relatively minor side character instead of the lead he should so obviously have been and so limits his time and characterization.  If this movie had focused on him and the couple who runs the inn, Bruno and Anna, while keeping the actual main characters in the background, the entire thing would have been a lot better.

Instead, those shoulda-been side characters are who we follow for the rest of the movie: Gerald and Marianne Harcourt, a newly married English couple honeymooning in Dracula’s backyard.  They’re introduced in the next scene by having their car run out of petrol in the middle of the forest while a figure in the nearby castle watches through a telescope.  The man watching will end up being Dr. Ravna, the very-obvious vampire, although since this scene takes place during the day and Ravna just kind of wanders into and out of the light without taking much care it just underlines how long the tradition of vampires ignoring the whole ‘sunlight is deadly’ thing when it suits the needs of the scene has existed.

Gerald happily abandons Marianne to go looking for help.  After a few brief scene transitions let us know that it’s getting dark and stormy out she starts to make for the castle.  The first time through I sat up a little bit when the movie managed to surprise me.  Marianne is stopped in her quest to be vampire food by Zimmer, who grabs her and tells her very directly to go back to her car.  It made me think the movie was playing with our expectations a little bit, maybe teasing around the edges of the rules that had already been established about vampire movies, but no.  It doesn’t do anything like this again, so I guess I was expecting too much.  Marianne is soon reunited with her husband and they make their way to the local inn.  Here we’re introduced to Bruno, played by Peter Madden, very much a ‘hey, it’s that guy’ of the 1960’s, who’s great as the slightly bumbling, slightly nefarious landlord of the inn at which both the Harcourts and Zimmer are staying.  It’s eventually revealed that his daughter was turned into a vampire by Dr. Ravna, placing both he and his wife under his thumb.  He adds a great energy to the scenes he’s in.

This movie continues a trend where vampires get around the efforts of their foes by using such devious, underhanded tactics as sending messages asking for people to come visit.  The couple are soon invited up to the castle for dinner.  The Harcourts accept and meet the aforementioned Dr. Ravna, who seems to take a sudden and marked interest in Marianne, though that never goes anywhere so never mind.  As played by Noel Willman he’s pretty interesting but he's no Christopher Lee, although his Dr. Ravna gets much more screen time in this movie than Dracula did in his.  Dr. Ravna is awkward and a little stiff and keeps talking in a quasi-scientific way that is meant to convey to the audience that he’s a Doctor of Science who Has Ideas.  Again, there’s a great notion in there, what a turn of the century scientist would make of being turned into a vampire, kinda Cronenberg’s ‘The Fly’ meets Sherlock Holmes, but the movie doesn’t do anything with it.  He introduces the couple to his children: his daughter Sabena, who doesn’t do anything in the plot, and his son Carl, who is given a lot of emphasis by the camera and does matter a little to the plot, but who has maybe three lines and doesn’t have a personality.  Barry Warren, Carl’s actor, certainly plays him as if he’s important, all dramatic expressions and struck poses, and scenes keep focusing on him as if he’s going to be some kind of love rival for Marianne’s affection, but he’s basically a thug with some lines that the movie completely sidelines along with most everything else when it falls apart at the end.

The dinner the Harcourts were promised happens entirely off screen.  As they go to begin the camera follows a character sidling out of the front door who ends up being Bruno’s daughter, Talia, as she runs off into the night to start pawing at the grave from the very beginning, wondering why her friend is still in the ground.  She’s stopped by Zimmer, who grapples with her briefly before getting bitten on his wrist.  The next few scenes contrast the after-dinner entertainment at Castle Ravna, as Carl plays an original composition on the piano that seems to mesmerize Marianne (this doesn’t go anywhere) while Gerald studiously studies a painting in the background, with Zimmer stumbling to his quarters, pouring alcohol on his arm, setting it fully on fire, then collapsing to the floor.  It builds up the suspense pretty well, cutting between the furious piano playing, Marianne’s rapt attention, and Zimmer’s grim business.

Then Gerald and Marianne leave the party and go back to the inn, which makes the entire rest of the move basically make no sense.

It does if you work at it and make some assumptions, but then that’s me putting the work in, not the movie.  The eventual upshot of the entire plot is that Dr. Ravna is starting a vampire cult by infecting intellectual movers and shakers from his social circle with an eventual end goal that we’re really not told.  Why everyone wears robes and acts like his disciples when it’s just a bunch of vampire colleagues is never made clear.  What’s made even less clear is why Dr. Ravna let Gerald and Marianne go back to the inn when he’s just going to turn them into vampires in a few days, what’s the point of waiting?  Maybe he just wanted to wait for his smart friends in their cool robes to arrive?

What then happens to Gerald is another point where they could have done something interesting, but then they blow that too.  The day before their expected petrol is set to the arrive the Harcourts are invited back to the castle for a masquerade party.  Everyone else there ends up being in the vampire cult but at first they’re putting on a show for Gerald and Marianne.  No idea why considering their later actions.  They eventually drug Gerald into unconsciousness while Carl lures Marianne upstairs by wearing the same mask as her husband.  There Dr. Ravna puts an unspecified whammy on her.  The next morning Gerald stumbles downstairs looking for his wife, whereupon Carl coldly tells him he came to the party alone, he never mentioned a wife, and he needs to leave.  Gerald gets back to the inn where all of Marianne’s possessions have been taken.  Bruno swears he has no idea what wife he’s talking about.  The local police dismiss the entire idea because of Dr. Ravna’s sterling reputation.  In a foreign country, with no ability to contact anyone outside of the small town he’s in, with no transportation and a wife kidnapped, Gerald is in a believably nightmareish situation.   

Until he just talks to Professor Zimmer, who explains that his wife has been kidnapped by vampires but he’s been preparing to perform a magic ritual that’ll take care of everything so it’s all going to be fine.

Thus do we get to the third act, where everything collapses into sawdust and bent screws.  Learning that they’re up against vampires Gerald immediately wants to to run back to the castle and rescue his wife.  Instead Zimmer says she’s safe as long as it’s daytime and drugs him until nightfall to "bring back your strength."  After a scene transition it’s sunset.  Gerald wakes up alone, runs immediately to the castle, sneaks his way in, then finds Talia asleep and wakes her up to ask for her help.  She immediately leads him to Ravna who sics his goons on him, then proceeds to gloat.  What little scraps of backstory we get for what Ravna is doing are in here and we’re about fifteen minutes from the end.  He brings in Marianne to full on spit in Gerald’s face, which is fun, and then he just decides to turn Gerald into a vampire as well, so what was all the business about telling him his wife didn’t exist?  They put up this whole entire plan, sneakily stole stuff from his room, did a whole ‘what are you talking about’ bit, and then the second he turns back up they decide oh screw it, he’ll be a vampire too?

Gerald manages to escape through the very questionable method of getting a hand free and drawing a very crude kinda-cross on his chest in blood that causes the surrounding vampires to recoil.  He grabs Marianne and manages to flee outside of the castle, where Zimmer is suddenly just there, waiting for them.  They kill the head goon then get Marianne back to the inn.  The vampires decide it’s too much of a hassle to chase after them and Ravna says he’ll just mind-whammy Marianne back to them.  Zimmer states he’s going to perform the ritual which he starts back in his room.  Gerald goes to watch just long enough for Marianne to give in to Ravna and start wandering back to the castle.  Zimmer performs the black magic ritual which summons a bunch of bats that fly into the castle and bite the vampires to death, Gerald chases after Marianne and reaches her just as Ravna and his family die, she seems to be fine, the end.

So in the end the entire story is about a vampire and a vampire hunter both killing time until the night of a full moon and the fairly unlucky couple that gets ping-ponged between them until a bunch of bats kill everyone.  Like I said, the third act falls apart pretty hard.  Gerald and Marianne don’t actually do anything over the course of the movie except go to a dinner, go to a party, then one breaks into a castle to get the other and they both run away.  They don’t save anyone, they don’t prevent anyone from falling under Ravna’s spell, they don’t even know there are vampires around until the last twenty minutes of the movie.  This is why I insist that the movie should have followed Zimmer around as he impatiently waits for the night of the ritual, just incredibly annoyed at the stupid English couple who keep going up to the castle for dinner and dancing, doing his best to keep people away from the castle and maybe having some drinking nights with Bruno.  Bruno would be the heart of the movie, doing the vampire’s bidding in an effort to see his daughter again, caring for his distraught and quasi-delusional wife Anna, eventually being convinced by both Zimmer’s moral certainty and the fondness he starts to have for the English couple to eventually stand up and do what’s right.  Maybe Zimmer helps him put his daughter to rest in a dramatic scene at the end of the second act.  Meanwhile Zimmer will have to wrestle with his incipient alcoholism, Ravna shows up every once in a while to taunt him and ask him whatever happened to his lovely daughter, have an actual relationship between them that isn’t in the actual movie.  Have the couple be actual characters who are clued into what’s going on much longer than the last quarter of the movie.  Have Marianne be drawn in by the Carl’s intensity, have Gerald be intrigued by the Dr.’s moral theories, let them be the complicating factor that interrupts the ongoing duel of wills between vampire and vampire killer instead of the bland leads we are pushed from scene to scene.  I’d have much rather seen any of that.  It’s not that the movie is bad, it’s just not trying very hard.  It has enough filigrees of interest around the edges that the blunt utility of the bulk of it is something of a shame.