Clearly aiming to emulate comedy/horror hit The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967), offbeat German-produced sexy horror/comedy The Vampire Happening sees a beautiful US actress, Betty Williams (Pia Degermark), travelling to her ancestral castle in Transylvania where she discovers that one of her supposedly long-dead relatives, Countess Clarimonde (also played by Degermark), is a vampire and has been feeding off the locals. Unfortunately, the film's attempts at replicating Polanski's spoofery are embarrassingly bad, making this 102 minutes of cringe-worthy nonsense which narrowly escapes being completely unwatchable thanks an excess of female nudity from some quality Euro-totty.
The film opens in typically bizarre fashion with Betty happily watching the in-flight entertainment on her flight to Transylvania; what makes this scene so strange is that the film being projected is not only R-rated and stars Betty herself partaking in a heated bout of nookie, but all of the passengers, children included, are watching. The erotic in-flight movie for all the family is just one of the many weird and confusing things about The Vampire Happening, other head-scratchers including an antique oil-painting of Clarimonde that looks suspiciously like a photograph, a hallucinatory sequence in which a randy monk is reminded of sex wherever he looks, a torture dream-sequence in which a buck naked, big-breasted babe is stretched on a rack, and, after much craziness involving mistaken identity, a vampire soirée where Dracula himself is the guest of honour, the count arriving in a helicopter emblazoned with a massive bat logo.
Despite all of that inexplicable madness, perhaps the most perplexing thing of all about The Vampire Happening is that Oscar winning cinematographer Freddie Francis directed this utter pile of drivel. While Freddie was far from the greatest director working in the horror at the time, he was more than capable of making an entertaining movie (such as the Amicus anthology Tales From the Crypt and Hammer's Dracula Has Risen from the Grave); even his clunkers Trog and Tales That Witness Madness look like masterpieces in comparison to this garbage.
The film opens in typically bizarre fashion with Betty happily watching the in-flight entertainment on her flight to Transylvania; what makes this scene so strange is that the film being projected is not only R-rated and stars Betty herself partaking in a heated bout of nookie, but all of the passengers, children included, are watching. The erotic in-flight movie for all the family is just one of the many weird and confusing things about The Vampire Happening, other head-scratchers including an antique oil-painting of Clarimonde that looks suspiciously like a photograph, a hallucinatory sequence in which a randy monk is reminded of sex wherever he looks, a torture dream-sequence in which a buck naked, big-breasted babe is stretched on a rack, and, after much craziness involving mistaken identity, a vampire soirée where Dracula himself is the guest of honour, the count arriving in a helicopter emblazoned with a massive bat logo.
Despite all of that inexplicable madness, perhaps the most perplexing thing of all about The Vampire Happening is that Oscar winning cinematographer Freddie Francis directed this utter pile of drivel. While Freddie was far from the greatest director working in the horror at the time, he was more than capable of making an entertaining movie (such as the Amicus anthology Tales From the Crypt and Hammer's Dracula Has Risen from the Grave); even his clunkers Trog and Tales That Witness Madness look like masterpieces in comparison to this garbage.