The Vampire Happening (1971)

Director Freddie Francis pretty much dismissed The Vampire Happening (1971) as being a 'vanity project' that he mistakenly became involved in.  Watching it, you can see why he formed this opinion, as the film stars the producer's wife, in a dual role, and the script seems largely as an excuse for her to get her knockers out.  Not that I'm complaining about the latter point, as Pia Degermark, a Swedish actress who had appeared in a number of European films, most notably Elvira Madigan (1967), had very nice knockers, but I do like my gratuitous nudity to be part of an actual plot which it can at least pretend to be integral to.  (I've often pondered that there's a whole doctoral thesis to be written on the psychology of film producers married to attractive actresses who like to star them in films where they get naked for global audiences to ogle.  Is it some kind of twisted alpha male behaviour of showcasing their wives to the rest of the male population with the gleeful underlying message of 'Yeah, you can look, but I'm the one who gets to have sex with her'?  Certainly, it is the ultimate expression of the idea of women being 'property' and objects to be displayed and paraded as displays of their husbands' masculinity).   According to Francis, he thought that he'd been hired to direct a horror parody, but quickly found that he had little artistic control over the project with the producer treating it as a 'home movie'.

The resulting film, an international co-production shot in West Germany, fails to work as either parody, comedy or horror, with a script that can never settle on an appropriate tone and performances from the cast that are far too broad to be effective in any context.  While the film's obvious inspiration was Polanski's Gothic horror parody Dance of the Vampires (1967), the script for The Vampire Happening eschews genuine parody of the genre and its conventions in favour of humour more on the level of a Carry On film or a sex comedy.  Indeed, it is very reminiscent of one of those German sex comedies inspired by classic fairy tales - and just as lame.  Interestingly, the plot's central conceit - the confusion of identity between the American actress who has inherited the castle and her undead vampire ancestress - is also vaguely reminiscent of Hammer's Twins of Evil (1971), which must have been shooting at around the same time.  Francis does, at least, manage to give it a professional sheen, with some good photography of the German locations and some occasionally mildly creepy chasing around dark and dank corridors and dungeons.  While undoubtedly conceived as a vanity project to allow Degermark to showcase her, well, assets, the fact is that her performances in the dual roles of actress and vampire aren't that bad.  She had, after all, won the best actress award at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival for Elvira Madigan.   Here, unfortunately, the script doesn't give her much to do, other than flash her breasts and bare her fangs periodically.  Sadly, these aren't enough to save the film which, at an hour and forty minutes, long outstays its welcome.