Argentina's first vampire film is a potboiler enlivened with plenty of sex and violence. At its best moments, it recalls Jean Rollin's stylish vampire movies with almost surreal scenes of sexy female vampires wandering through the night in their negligees and seducing innocent men. At its worst, this is a tepid, often boring and predictable yarn that runs through all the old clichés without adding much in the way that's new in the genre, and it suffers from a serious lack of pacing in the second half. The plot is the old tried-and-trusted story of "a group of blokes and birds spend the night in a spooky location and are attacked by vampires" which seemingly fuelled an endless array of European horror films during the '60s and '70s. Director Emilio Vieyra (also responsible for the truly demented CURIOUS DR. HUMPP) has confessed that he's a big fan of detective stories and the second half of this film plays like a mystery, with a man investigating the strange illness of his girlfriend which is caused by... well, I'm sure you can guess.
Where BLOOD OF THE VIRGINS excels is in its exploitational aspects. There's a great prologue (which reminds one of the mini-movie at the beginning of VAMPIRE CIRCUS) in which a vampire is thwarted when his prospective bride marries her cousin. The cinematography is colourful at all times, although some of those '60s fashions are definitely a bit garish. Be sure to check out the incredible nightclub sequence near the start of the film in which travelogue footage is interspersed with naked strippers dancing on a table while a guy in huge joke-shop glasses ogles them in disbelief. Definitely dated, and played for laughs anyway. Another bizarre aspect of the film is the repeated red-tinted shots of seagulls we see in place of the more traditional bats. Now, I like a change as much as the next man, and the use of seagulls is something a bit different, but why? An explanation would have been helpful!
Unfortunately, the characters are a bit dull and lifeless, the cast wooden and unmotivated. The hero in particular is one of those "tweed suit" guys with long sideburns whom you just can't help disliking. The vampiric Count is a direct Dracula rip-off and doesn't get much dialogue, being more of a silent menace like Christopher Lee in Dracula, PRINCE OF DARKNESS. The film does pick up for an action-packed finale, shown in unflinching detail with gore splashing everywhere, but this scene comes as too little to late. BLOOD OF THE VAMPIRE is a nice try, but a poor excuse for a horror film only for those really obsessive completionist horror fans.