SATAN'S BLACK WEDDING

Mark Gray is a Hollywood actor who travels to Monterey to attend his sister's funeral. Nina Gray slashed her own wrists and left a suicide note, but both Mark and the police believe there must be more to the story, since the corpse was thoroughly drained of blood and is missing the ring finger of its left hand. What they don't know is that an evil 200-year-old priest has turned Nina into a vampire and is commanding her to murder each member of her family. Ultimately, he plans to bring Nina and Mark together in an unholy union to conceive a son for Lucifer.

Satan's Black Wedding is an amateurish, low-budget feature, but it overcomes its many deficiencies where it counts, providing eerie ambience and maximum gore. The acting ranges from bad to serviceable, and a romantic subplot is unconvincing, but when the vampires attack, the viewer is given genuine creeps and buckets of red paint. The film's wretched lighting becomes an asset in these harrowing sequences, and the fiends are drooling, animalistic creatures with oversized fangs and dead expressions. There are no seductive vampires in flowing gowns and smartly tailored tuxedos here, just soulless monsters tearing into their horrified victims. As a result, Satan's Black Wedding won't appeal to most vampire fans and certainly not to anyone expecting any level of professionalism (the film refuses to acknowledge the difference between night and day, and the sound is awful, with dreadful hissing audible in most scenes), but schlock cinema devotees seeking uneasy sensations will find this brief obscurity worth an hour of their time. FRED BELDIN for All Media Guide

Posted by popcinema.