It was kind of interesting to compare and contrast The World of the Vampires with the other Mexican Vampire movie I watched the other day, The Invasion of the Vampires. Both manage to shake up the traditional vampire lore by making up their own weird rules, which is kind of ballsy and fun. While the overall quality of Invasion was all over the place, it still managed to crank out a handful of striking and impressive visuals. World, on the other hand, is more consistent in its approach and embraces the B-level production design (the familiar cobweb-strewn Churubusco Azteca Studios sets are trotted out yet again), which makes everything go down much smoother.
The evil Count Subotai (Guillermo Murray) rises from the grave and sacrifices a woman on his altar. He then vows revenge on the Colman clan who originally killed him a hundred years ago. He sets his sights on turning the latest Colman descendent, Leonor (Erna Martha Bauman, who was also in The Invasion of the Vampires) into a bloodsucker. It’s then up to a scientist of music and the occult named Rudolph (Mauricio Garces) to stop the Count from putting the bite on her.
Murray isn’t particularly great as the Count. (He’s no German Robles, I’ll tell you that.) He often looks perplexed and the giant cartoonish fangs they give him to wear don’t exactly help. However, he looks at home playing weird skull-encrusted pianos and ordering around a bunch of zombies with Paper Mache faces, so he has that going for him.
The most fun aspect of The World of the Vampires is how it incorporates music into the vampire legend. The character of Rudolph is a great twist on the typical Van Helsing character. Music is his forte, and he’s perfected a theory of how the particular arrangement of musical notes can affect his surroundings. There’s a great scene where he attends a dinner party and plays a song that could “wake the dead” that ends with the Count mysteriously appearing in the living room. Conversely, when he plays a song that vampires hate, it drives the big-eared, wild-eyed vampire minions mad. Who needs holy water when you can just tickle the ivories?
Another departure from the usual vampire lore is the fact that when you are bitten by a vampire, you turn into… a werewolf?!? One way that the vampires keep with tradition is the fact that they can be killed with a stake through the heart. You would think that knowing this, the Count wouldn’t have installed a giant pit filled with sharp stakes at the bottom, right in the middle of his lair. I mean it was only a matter of time before someone slipped and was impaled by them. I don’t know what they’re smoking down there south of the Rio Grande, but it is of the high-grade available-only-with-photo-I.D. variety.
Whereas there were moments in Invasion that felt like a Mario Bava movie, World is content to evoke the look of an old Universal horror programmer. (The scenes with the vampire’s brides are clearly cribbing from the 1931 version of Dracula.) Even with the crummy masks, shitty half-assed werewolves, and silly bats, it proves to be more engaging and fun, despite not reaching the atmospheric heights of The Invasion of the Vampires. One thing is for sure, The World of the Vampires isn’t your typical tired old retread.
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