Low Budget

More specifically, in vampire movie terms, I just finished watching Track of the Vampire.  I didn't know much about the movie when I watched it, just that it was cheap, early 60s, and the bad guy was a vampire.  The movie was kind of a mish-mash.  Fortunately, our minds will add sense to things that aren't all that coherent.  In particular, the Vampire does not look like, move like, dress like, or in any way echo the evil artist, Soldi, though we soon learn they are the same.  My mind, helping out the movie, understands that the spirit of the vampire is kind of like The Incredible Hulk.  When it takes over, the artist is transformed.  I could even ignore that the the artist is pretty freakin' evil when he isn't transformed.  He drops people in wax, and paints them when they're dead.  Still, he does love at least one woman.

I also noticed that sixties women look really hot in sixties-style bikinis.  Women from this century, when trying to play sixties women, never get it right.  Maybe we've lost the combination of fitness, weight, and softness that made those suits work so well.  Modern women can be hot, but they are usually too skinny or too buff, or too big to play that sixties idea woman.

I also noticed that the movie is a great play on art schools.  The "hero" is a classic self-absorbed artist with a small following, who thinks of himself as being on the forefront of the next great thing in art.  He resents the commercially successful Sordi (the vampire) who paints Nude Red Deads.  The group of followers this guy has remind me of real-life bohemian cliques who view all art not accepted by the group as crap.  And the standards of the group keep changing.  Interestingly, there is a lot of play between the "good" artist and his model, who wants to be seen as a beautiful woman.  He, naturally, wants to paint her in some kind of abstract way.  When he's finally done a fairly natural portrait of her, and she seems excited, he demonstrates "quantum art" by spraying something over the face.  Later, we see this group experimenting with using the model directly as brush.  This destructive relationship to the models is, of course, a parallel to Sordi's more extreme method, which include boiling them in wax.

It did occur to me, more than once, that the character was only marginally a vampire.  At times, it didn't seem that was the case.  He was plenty evil enough without that element.  But that didn't bother me too much, mostly because it's not that great a movie.

Then I did some reading.  Turns out this movie was produced by Roger Corman.  His first director left, he insisted on using footage from a Yugoslavian vampire movie, even though it was otherwise unrelated.  Then a second director fit the vampire element in, shot the rest, and Corman edited the whole thing together.

So he knew, the bastard, that even "smart" guys like me would help him out, inventing the linkages needed to bring the fairly unrelated footage together into a single story.  If we're being entertained, we'll make it make sense.  Sometimes.