Your Daily Dracula – as Waldemar Wolfahrt as Baron von Frauler, El Vampiro de l’Autopista (The Horrible Sexy Vampire)

Your Daily Dracula – as Waldemar Wolfahrt as Baron von Frauler, El Vampiro de l’Autopista (The Horrible Sexy Vampire)

If El Vampiro de l’Autopista – The Vampire of the Motorway – is a fairly underwhelming (if accurate) title, then the English alternate – The Horrible Sexy Vampire – is memorable (if slightly overselling) monicker.  By any name, it’s listless rather than compelling, though it has an odd, unusual feel and a peculiar backstory.  Between 1964 and 1967, three women were murdered along a German motorway and very slim evidence made German playboy Waldemar Wolfahrt a suspect in the case – which the newspapers made a big deal of, until he proved his alibi and sued for big money which he spent first on kickstarting a pop music career and eventually initiated this a clef film spun out of the true crime case, though the vampire of the autobahn (a serial killer) here becomes pretty much a riff on the vampire ancestor in the basement premise of L’ultima preda del vampiro (Playgirls and the Vampire).

Wolfahrt – who called himself Waldemar the Vampire as a pop singer (not to be confused with Paul Naschy’s Waldemar the Werewolf) – was later billed as Wal Davis or Davies on films, and he’s weirdly blank in a double role as monster and descendent, though he has a striking bleached blond ‘do and two separate goth fashion styles.  The vampire is in full Dracula cape-and-evening dress – with no fangs, though – while the descendent has a more mod look.  Directed and written by José Luis Madrid, who’d later work with Paul Naschy on some livelier films, it has a weird three-act structure as if it were a fix-up from a serial (like the Mexican Nostradamus movies).

In the first half hour, a couple of women in German motorway motels near Stuttgart take their clothes off (in the export version, at least) and are attacked by an invisible creature which drains their blood.  Since every version of the film has ‘vampire’ in the title, it’s not much of a mystery – but it is one of the very few ‘invisible vampire’ movies, though it’s not really discussed in the dialogue that the monster can be unseen and it never really has much to do with the plot.  It just feels cheap, as if the star actor wasn’t around when they were filming those scenes and they had to make do.  A puzzled police chief (Luis Induni) is nagged by a coroner (Anastasio Campoy) with a copy of Dracula and they team up to investigate the long-abandoned castle of Baron von Frauler, and connect the killings with murders that have been taking place in these chilly German parts since the 1880s.  Could the long-dead Baron be the vampire?  The fearless vampire hunters delve into the cellars of the castle and find that while the Baroness is a the skeleton the Baron’s coffin is empty.  Then the twosome, who seemed to be major players, are killed … and the next chunk of the film is about Adolf Vishinsky (Wolfahrt), the English-resident grandson of the Baron, who turns up to claim the estate under the terms of a complicated will which mean he can’t let strangers into the castle and should on no account ever look in the cellar.

At the castle, Adolf isn’t that surprised when the Baron (also Wolfahrt) manifests visibly and doesn’t kill him – because it would be impolite to murder his descendents.  In a few callbacks to that real case, Adolf is suspected of being the vampire – though he was in England at the time of the murders (just as Wolfahrt was in Spain at the time of at least one of the motorway killings) and since the killer was invisible no witnesses can really say the vampire looked like him (though, as it happens, he does).  At an hour in, Marianne (Patricia Loran – who gets above-the-title co-billing with Wolfahrt) – fiancée of Adolf – shows up and a low-wattage triangle between the two Waldemars and the girl eats up footage.  To save money on doubles and opticals, the vampire is invisible again in an amusing fistfight with Adolf after he’s stalked Marianne in her bath.  In the end, Adolf stabs the vampire with a stake.

It has snowy grim widescreen German exteriors, though I presume most of the interiors were shot in Spain.  Most of the online sources use the character names of the English dub, which features Baron Winninger (Vinegar?) and Adolf Oblensky and there are a few inserts with those names though the originals are visible on tombs (Frauler is misspelled Fraunler at least once).  It has a classy warbly-wailing score by Angel Arteaga.