185. The Vampires' Night Orgy

185. The Vampires’ Night Orgy aka La orgía nocturna de los vampiros (1973)
Director: León Klimovsky
Writers: Gabriel Moreno Burgos and Antonio Fos
From: Pure Terror

A busload of workers on the way to their new jobs get diverted into a seemingly deserted town. The next morning, the townspeople show up, but strange things are afoot.

An unintentional vampire double feature. When this title came across my itinerary, I joked with my friends that I’d be surprised if the movie actually featured a night scene. There’s a tendency with these movies where the more salacious the title, the less interesting the film. This does at least have vampires and nights, but I’d say “orgy” is pushing it a bit. Also calling this “a film.” Or expecting any display of interest during the film.

Very little of consequence happens here. A bus of people who have all been hired on as servants at one castle are on their way there when the driver has a heart attack and dies. Frankly, I kind of want to see a modern group of people suddenly working in a gothic castle, wondering why they were all hired at the same time, but, hey, that’d make for an interesting movie so what do I know. They take a detour into a nearby town to sleep and see what they can do about the body. Curiously, the town isn’t listed on their map.

S P O O K Y

Wait, no, I meant “hackneyed.”

The town is abandoned when they arrive but the inn has a fire in the fireplace and all the rooms are made up. A tourist who’s already been there for an hour says he’s walked around but couldn’t find anyone. There isn’t even a church.

S P O O—actually, I like that as a set-up to a horror RPG session. That’s a nice seed, isn’t it? Characters arrive in a town that’s completely empty, but everything’s prepared for visitors. So many ways you could take that story. One you’d never choose is the one this movie does.

Anyway, everybody goes to sleep, the tourist finds a peephole in his room and peeps on his neighbor (our hero), and one of the group members investigates a sound at midnight and is attacked by a mob of vampires. The next morning, the townspeople are there serving the group, but there’s no meat. So the leader of the town sends a man with an ax, under orders from “the Countess,” to cut off the leg of one of the villagers which is then served to the group.

There are no consequences for the group eating human/vampire flesh, by the way. It’s just part of the movie.

One by one, the members of the group are killed by the vampires including a little girl who follows the man with the ax and sees him cut off someone’s arm. She’s not particularly impacted by it, though. Nothing in this movie is particularly impactful, even within the movie itself. The tourist figures out something is up, fixes his car, and helps the woman he’s been peeping on escape. They have some difficulty getting out of the town, but manage it only to have the Countess pop up in the back seat and attack them. She gets staked and immediately rots and decays once they hit sunlight.

They reach the next town, but the police don’t believe their story saying there’s no such town. They all drive out to the location and nothing’s there except the rusted remains of the bus that was driving the workers there originally. THE END.

It’s stupid. Skip it.

I want to say more, but nothing here matters. The people are tricked into being cannibals which comes to nothing. The little girl sees a grizzly attack which comes to nothing. She’s playing with a little ghost boy who tries to protect her from the vampires, but ends up smothering her instead, and even that comes to nothing. The movie’s only 80 minutes long but drags because none of the characters stand out—they have no desires and no one’s curious about anything. No one’s even trying to figure out what’s happening. Even the townspeople, where there’s some variety with the man the ax, the town’s leader, and the Countess, offer no story or mystery of their own.

It just feels like at every level of production and even every level of the story, everyone involved went, “Yeah, whatever.” That’s even the dominant emotion of the characters. Hell, if you’re not going to get excited about your own movie, I’m certainly not going to put the effort in.