Original title: El vampiro de la autopista

José Luis Madrid’s wearisome vampire film – hopelessly misnamed in its English dub – is one of the worst Spanish horror films of the 1970s, a horrible (they got that bit right…), ponderous mess that tries to ring the changes on the vampire myth but just ends up looking extremely foolish. Spanish horror has a sometimes well-deserved reputation for being on the sluggish side and that’s often part of their wayward charm. But The Horrible Sexy Vampire is just unbearable.

In begins in familiar enough territory, with a young couple abroad in some anonymous stretch of countryside (the bulk of the film is set in a wintry Stuttgart). They check into a hotel where she becomes the first of film’s many women to strip off. He takes a more chaste shower when he suddenly starts to choke and die. The same fate then befalls the woman. A coroner (Anastasio Campoy) notices bite marks on their necks and concludes that, despite what we’ve seen, the culprit is a vampire. He and a detective (Luis Induni) talk at great length about what might be going on before they decide to explore a castle in Stuttgart rumoured to be haunted. After 22 minutes, they’re killed off after a tedious traipse around the castle accompanied by a guide that becomes so bored by it all that he can be seen, briefly, glancing wearily at the camera but only after establishing that the coffin of one Baron Winnegar (amusingly pronounced “von Vinegar” throughout) is empty… A new inspector (Barta Barri) turns up in town, as does Count Adolf Oblensky (Waldemar Wohlfahrt, credited as Wal Davis), descendant of Baron von Vinegar, newly arrived from London in an awful snake skin jacket, who is hoping to claim the castle as his birth right. It doesn’t take the highest of IQs to work out that Winnegar (also played by Wohlfahrt) is behind it all, a vampire with the ability to render himself invisible in order to stalk his potential victims.

Once could be charitable and suggest that the terrible dialogue was somehow mangled in translation, but that seems less likely than Madrid’s own screenplay stinking in the first place. Certainly he’s to blame for the glacial pacing and the fact that even at 90 minutes, The Horrible Sexy Vampire is a film in which virtually nothing happens at all. Although the snowy Stuttgart locations are unusual, Madrid does absolutely nothing with them. Though in fairness, he spends so much time wandering around in the castle location that he at least got his money’s worth.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the whole sorry affair is the presence of committed non-actor Wohlfahrt whose own strange past goes some way to explaining the otherwise baffling and meaningless original Spanish title, which translates as The Vampire of the Highway. In 1964, American tourist Mary Ann Peterson was murdered while hitchhiking near the German town of Karlsruhe, the first victim in what would become known as the Autobahnmörders (Motorway Murders). By 1966, two more women had been found strangled in the area and the police began to suspect playboy and private detective Wohlfahrt who was eventually arrested while on holiday in Benidorm and charged with a total of four murders.

It turns out, of course, that he had nothing to do with the killings and, having cleared his name, sued German and Spanish newspapers for slander. He was imprisoned for procurement after the German police arrested him again in 1967 but on release, he decided to use the considerable sum of money he’d won in his court case by embarking on twin careers in music (he released the single Benidorm and performed under the name Waldemar the Vampire) and film, financing Madrid’s film. The original title therefore traded on the lingering infamy of the murder trial though the story of the film has nothing whatsoever to do with the tragic real life events. Wohlfahrt went on to appear in several Jesus Franco films (La nuit des étoiles filantes/A Virgin Among the Living Dead (1973), Al otro lado del espejo/The Obscene Mirror (1973), Maciste contre la reine des Amazones/The Lustful Amazons (1974), Les gloutonnes (1975) and Frauen im Liebeslager/Love Camp (1977)) but retired from the publ,ic gaxze when the crew of a documentary he was producing died in a plane crash in 1980.

All of which is far more interesting than anything you’ll have to sit through in his debut film. Sob many Spanish films of the 1970s have gone on to attain cult status but The Horrible Sexy Vampire has languished in a sort of semi-obscurity, unloved by even the majority of Spanish horror lovers. It’s a shoddy, tedious trudge that makes nothing of its invisible vampire angle and gives all the impression of having been slapped together on the fly. One for only the most ardent of Spanish horror and vampire film completists. And even they might turn their noses up at it…