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Vampire Circus [1972]


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plenty of lashings of red paint everywhere.
Review date: 2003-11-17 Rating: 8 out of 10

Out of the entire Hammer canon "Vampire Circus" has got to be one of the strangest things they ever did! It is an offbeat, highly surreal number with oodles of blood and gore thrown in. A Transylvanian village is sealed off from the outside world due to an outbreak of the plague. Anyone who tries to get in or out is shot dead by the police. Nevertheless a travelling circus somehow breaks through the lines, and boy, are all its bloodless-looking performers a wee bit strange! There is a gypsy male who seems to be able to turn himself into a panther, and a pair of very creepy acrobatic twins (one of which is played by Lalla Ward, who went on to play an equally strange assistant to Dr Who), who seem impervious to pain and can transform themselves into birds. All of it is presided over by Adrienne Corri, who makes a suitably vampy Ring-Mistress. Added to all this the village itself is living under a curse imposed on them by an aristocrat they killed several years before for being a vampire, all of which is related in the violent and blood-splattered opening sequence to the film. This is a very downbeat film, it doesn't have the exuberance and verve that the presence of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee usually gave to the proceedings, and the first few minutes are fairly typical of the tasteless, tacky offerings that the early 1970s were starting to produce, most particularly with the little girl being abducted from the forest into the vampire's castle. Nevertheless it's a curious offering, albeit with no reassuring good-versus-evil theme.

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Product Details/Specifications


Actor(s):
Thorley Walters
Laurence Payne
Anthony Higgins
John Moulder-Brown
Adrienne Corri

Creators:
Adrienne Corri (Primary Contributor)
Thorley Walters (Primary Contributor)
Moray Grant (Cinematographer)
Peter Musgrave (Editor)
Michael Carreras (Producer)
Wilbur Stark (Producer)
Wilbur Stark (Writer)
George Baxt (Writer)
Judson Kinberg (Writer)

Director(s):

Recording label: Filmax
Manufacturer: Filmax
EAN: 8420018444160
Binding: DVD
Number of items: 1
Format: PAL,
Release date: 2005-06-28
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Region code: 2
Running time: 84 minutes
Language: English (Original Language)
Language: Spanish (Original Language)

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