One Professor Catalano floats his boat into a Venetian bay. What an entrance.
He’s a vampirologist hunting Nosferatu in the last place he’s been spotted, the beautiful Italian lagoon city – hence the Vampire in Venice title. However, since the last sighting was Carnival, 1786, maybe he’s literally late to the party – by centuries.
No matter. When it’s Christopher Plummer giving all he’s got, it’s immediately interesting.
The prof has been summoned by a princess who believes there’s an undead interred in her family crypt metres below the canal.
When Catalano meets the princess, he can’t help but notice she bears a striking resemblance to one of the Vamp’s loves as depicted in a garish oil painting. Uh oh, the foreshadowing alert is going off!
The prof is invited to a séance, and through some weird mechanism (it is communicating with the spirit world after all) Nosferatu rises from his multi-century slumber, and in the form of the scary-in-real-life Klaus Kinski.
Vampire in Venice is an unofficial sequel to Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu. And as befitting subject matter about the SECOND most evil person in the known universe (runner-up to the Devil, so sayeth the voiceover), this is a film that went through PRODUCTION HELL.
It had a half dozen directors linked to it, who quit or were paid off and quit, before Augusto Caminito took the directorial, but also musical, chair. He quit the project unfinished, leaving it to Kinski, who was more concerned with how he looked in the Venetian sunrise, at least according to unit director, Argento colleague and Paganini Horror director, Luigi Cozzi. What?? Kinski, a notorious egomaniac? Say it ain’t so.
Nevertheless, the sumptuous visuals and the defenestrations are entertaining as hell.
And there’s a bonus of Halloween icon, Donald Pleasence as a priest warning not to meddle where you don’t belong.
***1/4 (out of 5)
[Check out the Vampire in Venice podcast discussion]
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