A quintet of curvaceous nightclub performers and two male companions takes refuge in a dark, mysterious castle after being caught in a violent storm. Though penniless, the group is perfectly willing to accommodate their host, Count Gabor Kernassy (vampire movie staple Walter Brandi/Brandt), with plenty of sleazy stripteases to pass the night away. Kernassy notices a striking resemblance between one of the ingenues, Vera (Rocco), and Margherita, the great love of Kernassy's 200-year-old ancestor... who, unfortunately, has gone vampire and still stalks the premises. After much wandering through corridors and surprisingly sleazy fang activity, Kernassy faces down his ancestor, resulting in a peculiar dual confrontation which, as virtually every viewer has noticed, owes more than a nod to 1958's Horror of Dracula.

Originally released in Italy as L'ultima preda del vampiro (The Last Prey of the Vampire or The Vampire's Last Victim, depending on your source), The Playgirls and the Vampire isn't a stellar genre milestone but definitely delivers the drive-in goods. The fact that this opened the same year as Mario Bava's Black Sunday and Mill of the Stone Women just goes to show that the dichotomy in Italian horror cinema between art and sleaze was already well in place right. The previous year had already seen Renato Polselli's eccentric The Vampire and the Ballerina, and while Polselli later blew his private little fetishes into full-blown exhibitionism during the '70s, Playgirls' Regnoli only churned out five minor period films as a director before settling into a career as a screenwriter on zombie films like Nightmare City and Burial Ground. He does a competent job here and probably could have been a notable player in the spooky-sexy European sweepstakes of the '60s and '70s, had he chosen to pursue it.

In 1999, Image Entertainment inaugurated its EuroShock line of DVDs with this title as part of an early licensing deal with producer and English-territory distributor Richard Gordon. Running 82m18s, it was taken from the archive print held by Gordon and looked better than the numerous bootleg and quasi-PD copies floating around for years. The Dolby Digital English mono soundtrack does a perfectly good job of rendering the throwaway music and thunderous rumblings in the background. Running times for The Playgirls and the Vampire range from 66 minutes (the U.S. reissue print intended for TV circulation which removes most of the stripteases and the relatively mild nude scenes) to the uncut one seen here. As always, Tim Lucas does an incisive and informative job with the lengthy liner notes, though he implies that Regnoli actually directed Burial Ground which was helmed by Andrea Bianchi. The DVD also includes the amusing first-run U.S. trailer.

After that the film went out of circulation for a long time, with a U.K. DVD from Nucleus Films turning up in 2016 with a 1.33:1 transfer and Italian audio with English subtitles, plus a video appraisal by Kim Newman, the trailer, and an alternate scene from the French version. In 2024, Vinegar Syndrome gave the film its global Blu-ray premiere featuring a 4K scan from its 35mm fine grain master, here framed at 1.66:1 with a lot of extra horizontal information and a tad less at the bottom. The source features Italian credits and runs longer than the earlier U.S. DVD (which added a U.S. logo and extra black at the end), reverting to Italian with English subtitles for the added bits in the English dub plus the entire Italian track with translated English subtitles. English SDH subs are also included, and both options sound very nice (with the Italian being far more carefully prepared). Quality-wise it's obviously an improvement with deeper blacks, more detail, and finer film grain. Extras include a video-sourced U.S. trailer, the U.S. title sequence as The Playgirls and the Vampire, an alternate Curse of the Vampire title sequence for the edited version, a French title sequence as Des filles pour un vampire, a 2m2s gallery of international lobby cards and press material, and "Striptease Gothic" (25m56s), with Mark Thompson Ashworth reading a piece about the film's "shortie nightie" appeal and some contemporary Euro vampire films.

Vinegar Syndrome (Blu-ray)

Image (DVD)

Reviewed on March 21, 2024