On the heels of The Vampire Lovers quickly followed the very controversial sequel, Lust For A Vampire.  It was controversial in the sense that everyone seems to have an extremely different opinion about it.  But what's most surprising is the opinions of those who actually worked on it!

Forty years since their last appearance (which one can only assume was in The Vampire Lovers) the Karnstein family has risen once again!  If you were under the impression the entire family had been slaughtered in the prior film, you would be mistaken, there was still the mysterious man in black and the Countess, who were never destroyed they simply disappeared, presumably to sleep for forty years.  Calling upon the Devil they summon the dark powers to reincarnate Mircalla / Carmilla (formally played by Ingrid Pitt now portrayed by Yutte Stensgaard, who looks nothing like Ingrid) with the blood of an innocent virgin.

Now back in fashionable vampire form the Countess once again proceeds to pawn Mircalla off on some unsuspecting victims, a gold mine of young blood at the newly established all girls boarding school!  By some ill fated luck renowned Gothic story writer Richard Lestrange happens to be in the area researching the legend of the nearby Karnstein castle.  Not a believer in the stories he writes, he soon has a change of heart when people suddenly start dropping dead with nothing but two single fang marks on their necks.  Not only does he find himself in the thick of it, but in a visit to the boarding school Lestrange immediately becomes infatuated with the beast herself, the lovely Mircalla, and scams his way into the schools English literature position with the sole purpose of getting close to her.

But Mircalla is not interested in romance, she's there to feast and regain her strength after her rebirth, a feast which begins with a barmaid and her boarding house roommate.  Unfortunately Mircalla is discovered draining the life from her fellow classmate by the school's history teacher, a man by the name of Barton who has an eccentric enthusiasm for the dark arts.  He takes it upon himself to dispose of the body and then makes it known to Mircalla that he wishes to serve her... bad idea.  Now with a local girl dead, a student at the boarding school missing and Mr. Barton turning up a little less flushed the town begins to get in an uproar suspecting it to be the work of the Karnsteins. Surprisingly, the discovery of Mircalla's true identity doesn't seem to stop Lestrange's infatuation over her, in fact it only grows stronger, and for some strange reason this is highly attractive to Mircalla who eventually returns his advances.  But the lust between a human and a vampire is destined to end in tragedy for one or both parties, as the conclusion of Lust For A Vampire clearly portrays.

Lust For A Vampire by all accounts seemed to be fairly doomed from the beginning.  Peter Cushing was originally cast to play the perverse nut job Giles Barton but as was the case with Blood From The Mummy's Tomb was forced to drop out due the to grave condition of his wife.  Following that the original director Terence Fisher became incapacitated and Jimmy Sangster was brought in to replace him.  The role of Barton was eventually taken over by actor Ralph Bates who only signed up as a favor to the director and later made it well known he thought it was a tasteless film and regretted having anything to do with it.  Ironically I thought Bates played the rather quirky role of Barton very well and probably gave the best performance of the entire cast.

Ingrid Pitt's replacement for the role of Mircalla went to Danish actress and model Yutte Stensgaard who had been in a few British films in the past such as the Carry On series (who in Hammer hasn't?), and had bared all in the 1969 science fiction comedy The Love Factor (aka Zeta One).  She had told a BBC film crew visiting on the set that she had Oscar ambitions.  Unfortunately for her those ambitions ended with Lust For A Vampire the closest she'd ever reach to fame before her career evaporated.  To round it all off a pivotal scene of Mircalla seducing and feeding on the body of a schoolgirl was axed completely from the film, and an overly corny pop song entitled Strange Love was inserted into the scene where Lestrange and Mircalla literally make "strange love".  It's the same scene where Mircalla is seen crying during the love making, you can assume it's because she's never experienced the sensation before, or my personal opinion is it was because the song was so horrible!  It's the films' low point and even the director would later comment that he'd never been so embarrassed in his life when that song played.

While Lust For A Vampire fails to live up to the quality of The Vampire Lovers, I strangely found myself enjoying this film.  It's extremely corny compared to the original with bumbling characters such as Richard Lestrange and Giles Barton both falling for who they know to be a murderous vampire, followed by the audacious pop song which would likely rank among the worst things ever to be featured in a Hammer horror film.  Yutte Stensgaard is nothing close to Ingrid Pitt, in fact I found her to be more like Madeline Smith's character in The Vampire Lovers, very juvenile and ditsy.  She reminded me of a young, well endowed Shelley Long, and that's not really a compliment.  Still I couldn't help but enjoy it, I have no explanation as to why except to say the story has enough going for it and the characters are interesting (or bizarre) enough that it's a rather fun ride.

Lust For A Vampire is a cynical and depressing exercise that has all been disowned by its director, who accidentally wanders into shot towards the end of the film. One can only imagine what Fisher, Cushing and Bray's craftsmen might have made of Gates' reasonably literate draft.

7/10