Rating: /5
An artist named Antonio Sordi, sweating and breathless, pulls back the curtains on a painting of a woman named Melizza. He tells Melizza that he needs her again.
Antonio takes to the streets, cloaked in shadow. He finds a woman alone and knocks her unconscious. We see his face — he looks entirely different and has fangs.
Antonio is a respected artist in his community. His paintings, dubbed “dead red nudes,” depict women tortured and murdered.
An art student named Daisy admires Antonio’s work and ends up meeting Antonio. She asks for him to paint her.
He tells Daisy about a painter who painted for Satan. A painter who lived in the same bell tower that Antonio lives in now.
His muse, Melizza, appears on the easel. He is transported to the desert in a surreal moment before becoming a vampire. He chases Daisy with a meat cleaver, then drops her body into a vat of hot wax.
After that, tracking the plot is pretty much pointless.
There’s a subplot with hack artists where a guy puts an eyeball on a metronome, and another guy invents “quantum painting,” which seems to be just shooting a portrait with a blob of paint.
This movie is weird as hell, and it has almost everything to do with Roger Corman hating the first three versions of this movie. It combines footage from each attempt, including reshoots where they couldn’t get the actor who played Antonio back. The vampire form looks different because it’s a different actor.
I watched the fifth version of this movie called Track of the Vampire, which has additional footage filmed to make it long enough for TV movie showings. These additions include a six-minute dance sequence on the beach.
That this works at all is astounding — that it is a compelling surrealist nightmare is a miracle, and Stephanie Rothman is the miracle worker.
What a great ending!