Widescreen technicolor schlocker The Vampires' Night Orgy aka Grave Desires (La Orgia nocturna de los vampiros, 1973) has mediocre dubbing for the Spanish faces.

A bus driver drops dead & the passengers save the bus from crashing too badly. They get the bus running & drive it to the nearest town, Tonia, which isn't on the official map, but a road sign promised it was near.

The village appears to be uninhabited though the hotel is tidy & ready for guests. That night the town's inhabitants come out from hiding, sucking the blood out of their first victim like a murderous pack.

In the nice hotel the night-visitors seem mostly normal & friendly & fix the bus passengers a nice dinner, inspiring no suspicions. They do not realize that the roast they are enjoying is leg of man.

[SPOILER ALERT] There are several allusions to the Countess before she finally appears. The expected orgy does not accompany her arrival. Only two bus passengers will escape alive, & they'll come back the next day, the gods alone know why, in order to discover the town is no longer there. [END SPOILER ALERT]

Expect only a little of this film & it won't disappoint.


The b/w cinematography & simple score that start off The Ironbound Vampire (1997) for about one minute fools the viewer into thinking this might be an unusual independent horror feature, set in suitably grimy Newark, New Jersey.

But as soon as the first line of dialogue is spoken & the wussy rock song begins, it's all too evident we're in the lowest of amateur territory.

It's hard to believe it was made in 1997 as it looks & feels twenty years older than that. The creative team are clearly horror fans & the film includes brief pointless appearances of two actors (Conrad Brooks & Dolores Fuller) from Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959), a fact that will likely always stand as Ironbound Vampire's one claim to fame.

It's hard to tell if this Ed Wood reference was intended as a confession of talentlessness, or if these well-meaning failures believe the past existence of Ed Wood justifies their own inability to do anything well.

No one can act & the script would be impressive only if a nine year old wrote it in one draft. The narrator's detective father has been researching the Newark vampire for a book.

The girl's voice-over explains what's going on because nobody involved in this turd understood how to tell a story pictorially & with dialogue.

Tom was fatally wounded in the Great War but was able to return to Newark even so, "& that's when the terrors began." The first of the vampire's victims, Pat, is just total foolishness. With each vampire-romance declaration & neck bite, the film gets dumber & dumber. A light dose of sexploitation doesn't help at all.

The highlight of the film, & the one thing closest to cool, is a guest appearance interview with an actual piece of white trash in a wheelchair with only one gobber tooth, telling her sad story of being tossed off a bridge & becoming a bitter woman. If there'd been one or two more scenes that came out that wickedly funny this could've been a lot of fun as unutterable crap goes, but such precious moments are damned few.

Continue to the next vampire movie:
Crypt of the Living Dead (1992)

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