The Kiss of the Vampire
1963
Action / Horror

The Kiss of the Vampire
1963
Action / Horror
Plot summary
Honeymooning in Bavaria, a young couple becomes stranded and is forced to stay the night in the area. Doctor Ravna, owner of the impressive chateau that sits imposingly above the village, invites them to dinner that evening. Their association with Ravna and his charming, beautiful family is to prove disastrous.
Director
Top cast
Tech specs
720p.BLU 1080p.BLUMovie Reviews
Non-Dracula Vampire Film From Hammer.
The Kiss Of The Vampire (1963) ***
As I lay watching this film, I was reminded all over again why Horror is my favorite cinematic genre: despite the absence in the cast of any major stars from the Hammer stable, this well-directed shocker is arguably one of their best efforts. The film is bracketed by two bravura sequences: the opening scene at the graveyard where an obviously drunk and distraught Professor Zimmer (the Van Helsing figure here vividly essayed by Clifford Evans as a boorish and cynical man) unceremoniously plunges a spade into the wooden coffin of his dead daughter thus releasing her soul from the curse of the undead; and the startling climactic destruction of the vampiric cult at the hands of (irony of ironies) some admittedly fake-looking vampire bats! As usual with this type of film, the young leads (Edward De Souza and Jennifer Daniel) are merely adequate but the film benefits immensely from a deliciously villainous turn by Noel Willman as Dr. Ravna, a worthy Dracula stand-in, whose soothing, calm composure and tonality starkly contrast with the more energetic antics of a Christopher Lee, but exude just as much evil. Although judging from the IMDb synopsis, the added-for-TV scenes (for an alternate version of the film entitled KISS OF EVIL) are nothing to write home about, I would still like to have seen them included as a supplement to the DVD - although apparently that would have been too much to expect from Universal...