Blood of the Vampire *** (1958, Donald Wolfit, Barbara Shelley, Vincent Ball, Victor Maddern, Andrew Faulds) – Classic Movie Review 6266

Director Henry Cass’s lusty 1958 British horror movie stars Donald Wolfit as the anaemic mad scientist Dr Callistratus, who uses criminal inmates of his 1880 Transylvania insane asylum for his blood-typing research and transfusion experiments to replenish his blood supply. This Fifties one-time blood-curdling horror movie is in the style of the concurrent Hammer Films and written by their regular script man Jimmy Sangster, but comes from the Robert S Baker and Monty Berman production team’s Tempean Films.

The prologue is set in Transylvania 1874 and the main part of the film six years later. Dr John Pierre (Vincent Ball), who had performed a fatal emergency blood transfusion and been convicted of ‘malpractice leading to manslaughter’ and sent to Callistratus’s Prison for the Criminal Insane, now becomes Callistratus’s assistant. When Pierre puts in a bid for freedom with his also terrorized fiancée Madeleine (Barbara Shelley), Callistratus seizes them.

Wolfit acts with succulent relish and there is also suitably extravagant acting work from horror queen Shelley and Victor Maddern as the one-eyed hunchback Carl, who has restored Callistratus back to life after he was executed for being a vampire.

Once considered gory back in its day, it is good horror fun, all done with relish, and with the rich and often ripe bunch of performers well up to the task in hand.

Also in the cast are Andrew Faulds, William Devlin, John le Mesurier, Bernard Bresslaw, George Murcell, Bryan Coleman, Colin Tapley, Denis Shaw, John Sullivan, Hal Osmond, Max Brummell, Henry Vidon, John Stuart, Cameron Hall, Muriel Ali, Otto Diamant, Sylvia Casimir, Yvonne Buckingham, Julian Strange, Bruce Wightman, Richard Golding, Milton Reid, Theodore Wilhelm, Gordon Honey and Carlos Williams.

It is written by Jimmy Sangster, shot by Geoffrey Seaholm and Monty Berman, produced by Robert S Baker and Monty Berman, and scored by Stanley Black.

It was released by Universal in a double bill with Monster on the Campus in October 1958.

Henry Cass is the prolific horror and comedy director of The Glass Mountain (1949) and Last Holiday (1950).

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 6266

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