In the annals of iconic Vampire beings, there’s only a few big names that truly stand out. There’s Count Orlork of course; there’s obviously the numerous incarnations of Count Dracula that range from Bella Lugosi to Adam Sandler and there’s the ever-preening, perma-brooding cluster of metrosexuals who sprang from the brain pans of the likes of Anne Rice and Stephenie Meyer. However, among this bunch of Counts and scowling petty boys lurks a vamp who never truly got the plaudits that his fanged brethren received, which is odd considering that he starred in a couple of movies at the start of the 70s.
The neck biter in question was Count Yorga, and while lush castles and subtle seduction was the name of the game for his peers, his realm was the down and dirty world of the low budget drive-in horror flick as he flounced around in velour dinner jackets while matching wits with confused randos. His entries in the world of horror weren’t exactly masterpieces, but Count Yorga, Vampire, and its fiendish sequel, could creep you out with the best of them.
Despite being reduced to a gurning pile of ash at the end of his last movie, the nefarious Count Yorga has been resurrected by some unfathomable means (wikipedia mentions some shit about bring revived by the “supernatural Santa Ana winds”, but whatever works I suppose) and immediately gets back to doing what he does best – being the most spiteful prick he can be. As if to double down on this aspect of his personality, he sets his beady eyes on a local orphanage and commands his gang of vampire brides to rise from the dead to terrorise a young boy named Tommy before the Count makes the bowl-haired little tyke into his slave. From here Yorga swans melodramatically into the orphanage the night of a fundraising party in full vampire gettup and then positively bristles when some dude dressed as Count Dracula wins the fancy dress competition.
However, it’s all rendered immediately worth it when he meets Cynthia and becomes immediately infatuated with her, but instead of wooing her with poetry, he sets his vampire wives on her family that night, promptly murdering them all – Jesus Yorga, something wrong with just sending flowers?
Awaking in his mansion with the memories of the massacre hypnotized completely away, Cynthia finds that the Count wants to care for her and ultimately wants to make her his wife, but even though his servants has swept away all evidence of the murders, Cynthia’s fiancé, David, becomes suspicious and tries to convince some grouchy police detectives to look into the mysterious Count.
Soon, everything culminates at Yorga’s mansion where a desperate free-for-all occurs to save Cynthia’s soul, but who will emerge from this blood bath victorious, and who will be left drained like a discarded packet of Capri Sun?
Certainly sitting on the low-rent, gutter shlock end of the 70s horror scale, Count Yorga’s scrappy return may not be anywhere near as majestically camp as, say, The Abominable Dr. Phibes, but that rough charm that came with Bob Kelljan’s incredibly odd original. Once again it feels like he’s lifted the basic ingredients of a period-set Hammer film and hurled it as hard as he could at a 70s setting in the hope that some if it might stick and luckily for him, chiefly the weirdest stuff did. It’s a similar story for the sequel which, while featuring all the flaws of the first film, decides to up the spite ante to prestigious degrees which ends up being its most endearing feature. Literally, right from the off, The Return Of Count Yorga strives to be as casually cold-blooded as it possibly can as we open with an orphan being stalked by vampire/zombies fresh from the grave and the fact that this scene illogically happens in broad daylight makes it all the more unsettling. From there, the characteristically horny Yorga uses his little agent of chaos to help him ruthlessly set up his victims, exterminating his boo’s entire family in a drawn out murder and then getting little Tommy to gaslight the shit out of the dead family’s deaf maid for no other reason than to be extra cunty.
One of the more lasting traits of the first movie is that there was never any real feeling that the admittedly bland white hats had any chance of getting out of this movie alive and the sequel thankfully keeps this feeling alive by maintain that bleak feeling throughout.
Yes, the good guys are as boring as cold, unbuttered toast, but it manages to create that counter-intuitive atmosphere that absolutely no one is safe and when I first saw this movie randomly at around 10 years old around one in the morning, if left me appropriately mortified. Curiously, not only does the cast include Roger Perry who fucking died in the last movie, but plays a different character here; but it also proves to be the first acting role for none other than Craig T. Nelson as a gibbering detective.
However, it’s still Robert Quarry’s Yorga who still holds court here who suddenly seems to have a bizarrely large inner circle with his inexplicably alive manservant, Brudda, loping about the place and an expanded harem of zombie-like wives who usually does Yorga’s dirty work like a lumbering, crack-team of vampire black-ops operatives. On top of all that, he also now seems to have his own, live-in vampire/witch whose presence makes no sense at all considering he doesn’t listen to a fucking world she says.
But still, it’s obvious that Quarry is having a ball parading around in his hilariously obvious vampire threads and uttering such lines like: “You’re much too attractive to be so bitter” which I can only assume is vampire talk for “you’ll look more attractive if you smile more”. However, as ludicrous as he looks as he stalks around looking like a blood sucking Noel Coward, the scenes where he suddenly shifts into kill-mode are actually quite startling. Yes, it may be the sight of a doughy, middle-aged man running down a corridor screaming with his arms outstretched, but it’s so primal is actually works. Take the moment where he lunges along the length of a jetty to throttle the life of a victim that’s distorted in the rippling reflection of the ocean while whale song inexplicably plays over the soundtrack. Its certainly ridiculous, and yet when it happens it still proves to be genuinely creepy and way more unnerving than it has any right to be. The fact that a third movie was planned that would have seen a weakened Yorga retreat to the sewers to create an army of undead homeless could have been magnificent and is a real shame it never materialised.
While it hardly earns a place in the pantheon of great, all-time horrors of the 70s, the fact that it’s essentially a Hammer Dracula movie that’s shot like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre means that it has a weirdly endearing aura about it that makes it well worth digging up.
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