The Vampire (1957)

 

THE VAMPIRE (1957)

 By Ralph Santini - **

                Paul Landres’ “The Vampire” has as its pun that Paul Beecher, a doctor who constantly doesn’t seem to feel good, is a sort of combination of Jekyll and Hyde with Vampires. Its screenplay by Pat Fielder is short on originality and it seems to copy every film adaptation (including the 1941 film by Victor Fleming) of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde with no spirit of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It’s not particularly exiting either. The biggest asset of this spook yarn is not its familiar premise but only a satisfying performance by John Beal as the story’s main protagonist.

                In the beginning, Dr. Beecher is alarmed that a scientist was dying in his laboratory and warns him not to take some capsule pills the scientist was using on his animals.  The only problem is that when Dr. Beecher isn’t feeling well he asks his daughter for those same pills the scientist warned not to take. After that, it would be revealed that two people were killed with vampire bites on their neck. That’s right, they are under attack by the title role of this film. That’s not all, it turns out that these pill do indeed make Dr. Beecher become a Jekyll and Hyde-like Vampire. And with that all he does is kill his colleagues (including an old psychologist friend) and attacks a beautiful nurse whom a cop has the hots for, aside from working on the murder cases that were Beecher’s victims.

                The more this film is thought about, the more it can be interested on why it’s lacking on spectacle. The biggest problem is that since there is too much sympathy for the character of Dr. Beecher there is no reason to be afraid of him. But underneath that, alas, is the screenplay’s trite representation of the hero turned villain. As said before, with the exception of the fine portrayal by Beal in this film, there is nothing much more to satisfy with its triviality. The special effects are relentlessly crude, there are not much thrills here and the screenplay is shockingly third-rate. It’s only a try-hard by becoming a lame-brained cross of Jekyll and Hyde and vampire stories.