Hammer seems to have had a creative crisis of sorts regarding its vampire output in the eight-years absence, between the 1958 "Dracula" and the 1966 "Dracula: Prince of Darkness," of Christopher Lee in the Dracula role. "The Brides of Dracula" (1960) had Peter Cushing return as Van Helsing, but it's a dull retread, and kid-vamp Baron Meinster was a poor heir to Lee. Absent Lee, Cushing and any Dracula connection this outing, "The Kiss of the Vampire," at least, has a grown man in the role of its head vampire. And although it's slow going for a while after the opening credits, if you stick with it, you're in for a few treats.
This probably would've benefited by being cut down to closer to an hour's length. The early automobile-out-of-gas episode, for instance, where the wife is left alone and, gasp, nothing happens, could've been left out. Or the innkeeper's sad wife, who disappears in the second half of the film, may as well have not been in the first half either. There probably could've been fewer protentive looks early on, as well. You can't really create mystery with such eyeballing when the movie's title tells us there's going to be vampires.
Now, for the treats, we get one to start off when the Professor thrusts a shovel through the coffin and the heart of his turned daughter—resulting in the kind of blood splatter Hammer is beloved for. Vampires as decadent cultists is another good idea. Roman Polanski must've seen this for his ballroom sequence in "The Dance of the Vampires," a.k.a. "The Fearless Vampire Killers" (1967). The husband gives us Hammer's best makeshift cross yet by drawing it on his chest in his own blood. And for the grand finale, they realize the black-magic climax that, reportedly, Cushing thought (probably rightly) unwholesome for his Van Helsing in "The Brides of Dracula." Fortunately, the Van Helsing stand-in here, the Professor Zimmer, has no such qualms. The fake-bats biting the vampire cultists to death is just deliciously trashy.
This probably would've benefited by being cut down to closer to an hour's length. The early automobile-out-of-gas episode, for instance, where the wife is left alone and, gasp, nothing happens, could've been left out. Or the innkeeper's sad wife, who disappears in the second half of the film, may as well have not been in the first half either. There probably could've been fewer protentive looks early on, as well. You can't really create mystery with such eyeballing when the movie's title tells us there's going to be vampires.
Now, for the treats, we get one to start off when the Professor thrusts a shovel through the coffin and the heart of his turned daughter—resulting in the kind of blood splatter Hammer is beloved for. Vampires as decadent cultists is another good idea. Roman Polanski must've seen this for his ballroom sequence in "The Dance of the Vampires," a.k.a. "The Fearless Vampire Killers" (1967). The husband gives us Hammer's best makeshift cross yet by drawing it on his chest in his own blood. And for the grand finale, they realize the black-magic climax that, reportedly, Cushing thought (probably rightly) unwholesome for his Van Helsing in "The Brides of Dracula." Fortunately, the Van Helsing stand-in here, the Professor Zimmer, has no such qualms. The fake-bats biting the vampire cultists to death is just deliciously trashy.