“Welcome to the finishing school where they really do finish you” throatily growled the trailer to Lust For a Vampire, the troubled second film in Hammer’s Karnstein trilogy, following on from The Vampire Lovers and preceding Twins of Evil. Peter Cushing dropped out when his wife fell ill while original director Terence Fisher broke his leg, resulting in Ralph Bates, channelling Dwight Frye, and Jimmy Sangster taking over.
It’s the weakest of the three films, but it has a few things going for it, chief among them Yutte Stensgaard’s bisexual vampire and Pippa Steel as one of her lesbian conquests/victims (the film could just as easily have been called Lesbian Vampire in a Girl’s Dormitory and might have fared better at the box-office if it had). Michael Johnson, one of those identikit early 70s British actors you’d swear you’ve seen a dozen times before until you look at his filmography and realise you’ve never seen him in anything else, is the randy dandy author of lurid Gothic tales who schemes his way into a English teaching job at a finishing school so he can have his wicked way with one of the students, Yutte Stensgaard’s Mircalla, not realising that she’s an even more accomplished predator who’s working her way through the schoolgirls there herself. Not that he’s overly concerned when he finds out, but that’s no surprise considering Yutte’s main competition is Suzanna Leigh, who looks about as much fun as mucking out a stable on a hot day and spends most of the film with a scornful disappointed scowl on her face that combines with unflattering photography to make her appear much like you’d imagine Joanna Lumley’s brother might after a night on the tiles.
The story isn’t particularly compelling and the screenplay isn’t one of Hammer’s best: it’s the kind of film where a line of dialogue like “What you need is a –” is immediately accompanied by the fortuitous arrival of a Bishop with a line in killing the undead before the line can be finished. But it does feature much 70s nudity and even an oral sex scene to the accompaniment of perhaps the most memorable song in Hammer’s oeuvre, the aptly-named Strange Love, while disc jockey Mike Raven is quite hilariously dubbed by Valentine Dyall – his delivery of the line “Heart attack!” is guaranteed to bring the house down
