Gypsy Vampire’s Revenge – review

Director: Conrad Brooks

Release date: 2007

Contains spoilers

When I looked at Gypsy Vampire I suggested that, at its very core there was a faint aroma of earnestness. It is sad to say that, as I watched this, there was no such aroma. Indeed, it actually managed to make the cinematography of the first film look good.

This, of course, made the film much more difficult to watch as there was really no redeeming feature just a parade of wooden performances and rank amateur filmmaking.

Lucy (and a note on actors, there is no cast to character listing on the film and no imdb page – Lucy is not played by the same actress) sends her minions to retrieve the bones of Count Lugo (Bruce ‘Porkchop’ Lindsay). Later we discover that they have laid out in the graveyard for three years and we discover where the clothes went also. The Beast picks the bones up – please note the metal ring attached to the skull for hanging the skeleton up in say a classroom. They take him back to the castle, put him in a coffin, call to Lucifer and he is reborn – and his clothes and eye patch mysteriously appear on him!

In the café the filmmakers from the first film appear. I say those from the first film as one of them was Marvin Kennedy but Joe Tilton had been replaced by another actor. They meet a real estate agent as they are buying the castle – they plan to turn it into a vampire museum and put on a play about Lugo, they even have Lugo’s clothes. All this is done before a terribly obvious microphone. Their actor, Terrance Logan Bridwell, and his wife Sandy arrive and are shown to their trailer.

There is a poker game going on and Brooks cameos as the character Cap in a completely pointless performance. Dr Cabasa (John Durham) arrives and has a talk to the drunken Cap as a poker game involving Queenie is going on. At the end of the game Queenie is walked back to her trailer by Johnny, one of the players. Their resultant sex is a black screen and a few seconds of noise. He leaves but the beast arrives, looking for a victim. He kidnaps her.

Of course Lugo chomps down on her – and she seems to like it – but the sheriff is now looking for the missing woman. Having pulled blanks interviewing the folks in the cafe, he offers Cabasa a lift to the castle – as he has never seen it before. Now, there are scenes here on a terrace and other scenes in the castle. The terrace scenes actually look like they were filmed in a petting zoo (or something similar) and we even get a member of the public looking in an enclosure in the background.

Lugo realises what is happening and wants to have his revenge on Dr Cabasa. Bridwell is, allegedly, a master of movie makeup so Lugo kills him and replaces him in the rehearsals – everyone thinks that the actor’s Lugo makeup is marvellous. He be-spells Sandy, proposes to make her his new bride and captures Cabasa ready for a ritual killing…

The only additional lore we get in this is that vampire’s dislike baby’s blood – strange as most films and books have such as a delicacy for the vampires but Lugo is disgusted by the thought… so much for being Lucifer’s main man on Earth. We also discover that vampires can be killed by being stabbed with a knife - though, to be fair, the reasoning or this will be explained in the third film.

All on all this was really poor and there is still the above mentioned third film in the series to go. 0.5 out of 10 is given for the brief scene with zombies as one of them is wearing a Tor Johnson T-shirt (and maybe a Tor mask), which I thought was a nice touch.

At the time of review there is no imdb page.