“Gory! Ghastly! Ghoulish!”

As kitsch entertainment, Lust For A Vampire gets a pretty high score. As a horror film, not so much…

First, let's dispel a few myths. Remarkably, there is hardly any nudity. The only sex scene is between an only-seen-naked-from-the-shoulders-up Yutte Stensgaard (good score in Scrabble) and a fully clothed man, and the song that accompanies this "lovemaking" is so bad, and so ill conceived, that it not only improves the film but renders the scene utterly unsexy.

A traveller arrives at a middle European village and immediately starts berating the locals for their belief in vampires. When he fails to heed their not-very-veiled warnings and goes up to Karnstein Castle, he's menaced by a bunch of sultry vixens who turn out to be - no, not vampires, but students fro the nearby young ladies finishing school.

Returning to the village, our "hero" tells this hilarious story to the locals (about five times) who appear to have quickly developed a sense of humour about the castle, and laugh along with him until one of their maidens is found, throat torn out in the usual manner. That kills the mood.

Ignoring this, the hero manages to get a teaching position at the school and immediately falls in love with one of the students, a surly blonde called Mircalla (Stensgaard). Of course, Mircalla is an anagram of Carmilla, who, as we all know (if we've seen The Vampire Lovers and Twins Of Evil), was a vampire.

Of course, then it all kicks off. Fellow teacher and "follower of Satan" Ralph Bates discovers Mircalla's true identity, and gets killed.

Fellow teacher Miss Playfair lives up to her name and calls in the cops, and the villagers forget their former fear and descend on the castle, flaming torches aloft.