cult film freak: LYNNE FREDERICK & ADRIENNE CORRI IN HAMMER'S 'VAMPIRE CIRCUS'

Lynne Frederick in VAMPIRE CIRCUS Year: 1972 Rating: ***1/2

Hammer's VAMPIRE CIRCUS is like two movies in one, both showcasing different horror sub-genres, each element built into the title... as the first and final acts involve an ominous vampire's castle...

Beginning with a creepy intro involving a very young girl facing Dracula surrogate Robert Tayman as Count Mitterhaus, and it's no surprise that Hammer does Victorian horror effectively, looking as elegantly terrorizing as their salad days of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee...

Anthony Higgins in VAMPIRE CIRCUS

Then the eerie circus element occurs in-between... the traveling troupe, led by the slain Count's cousin Anthony Higgins as a panther hybrid alongside confidently vivacious gypsy woman Adrinne Corri: both seeking revenge against what the town's fathers did to that rudimentary bloodsucker who killed their children...

Which is a no-brainer for the inevitable-victim-protagonists, making the villainous circus-troupe hardly the kind of big screen monsters that the audience should love-to-hate, or get a guilty pleasure from...

Lynne Frederick in VAMPIRE CIRCUS

Meanwhile lead ingenue Lynne Frederick doesn't show up until the 45-minute mark, literally running into the village that's been blocked off by musket-blasting guards... who didn't stop her, or that circus...

That has its own spooky tagline 'Circus of Nights' (which might have made a better title)... as director Robert Young stages creatively-shot kill-scenes that are quite often surreal, even psychedelic: the wickedly eclectic circus seems a possible metaphor for the darker side of the hippie counter-culture...

From VAMPIRE CIRCUS

Which includes viciously instigating midget Skip Martin, muscle-man David Prowse and eerie trapeze girl Lalla Ward... whose own fervently climatic blood-lust against chaste final-girl Lynne Frederick (protected by a horribly miscast young hero) feels obliquely connected to Hammer's then-concurrent Karstein Trilogy...

That also entailed R-rated nudity, bloody violence and lustful vamps -- when Hammer morphed their signature velvety sophistication into the more sparse and exploitive drive-in-theater zeitgeist.