Count Yorga, Vampire (1970)

Where is the self respecting, high class, Bulgarian vampire to go for his blood and harem of undead wives circa 1970? Well Southern California of course. When we first meet Count Yorga, well when we first meet him we don't actually meet him, we see a stereotypically coffin shaped crate being hauled around L.A. and it implied he's in it. When we do meet him, in the second scene, he's conducting a seance with a group of yuppies. You see one of these yuppies (Donna Anders) is hopping to communicate with the spirit of her recently departed mother, she won't succeed then, but she'll be seeing mother later in the program. You see mom has become one of Yorga's vampire wives, and Yorga would like to add daughter as another, so its creepy on multiple levels. Yorga will pray on this girl and other guests, some for love, some for blood, including Michael Murphy, the only actor in this film who I recognize.

My favorite character in this film however would have to be Dr. Hayes (Roger Perry). Hayes is a friend of the yuppies who examines one of them (Judy Lang) and discovers the suspicious looking, evenly spaced puncture marks on her neck. Brighter then the rest of the group he quickly deduces that they are dealing with a vampire, and is at first ridiculed for this deduction. But I mean the woman clearly has bite marks on her neck and has recently been in the company of a charming eastern Europen count, and subsequently killed a cat to obtain blood, so not a huge leap. Hayes also has a  thing for bimboish women which gives his character a self aware edge and results in a humors scene or two. This is a cheaply made B film that must have proved fairly popular because it got a sequel titled The Return of Count Yorga, which sounds like it should be difficult in that Count Yorga ends up turned to dust at the end of this film, sorry spoilers. Anyway I found it quite amusing. **1/2