The Mad Love Life of a Hot Vampire & The Horny Vampire

For some reason I decided to watch two of Steckler's porn films. Well, if most of Steckler's films feel like accomplished home movies, this feels pretty much like an accomplished private sex tape. Given the general quality of home sex tapes, 'accomplished' here just means there is editing.

Yes, I've been kind to Steckler lately, but there's not much good to say about these films. None of his characteristic cinematography is on display. He seemed to have only a single light. The colours have a very brown, wash-out look, just like in Manos: The Hands of Fate. The acting is quite beyond atrocious.

The Mad Love Life of a Hot Vampire is about an overweight Dracula who decides he wants to make love and not war, as he tells us against a black background that of course symbolizes Thanatos as opposed to Eros. He therefore commands his three servant girls who are, oh, how should we say, very natural women--natural to the point that their vulvas, on this terrible film stock, look like wounds--to have lots of sex, right there, in front of him. This of course symbolizes society's overemphasis on sex in today's culture. So they lick at each other a bit in the most unerotic lesbian sex that has ever occurred on film. And another one blows Dracula's hunchback servant Igor, who stays in character throughout the whole blowjob! This scene is randomly interrupted by cut-aways to Dracula making lascivious utterance and Carolyn Brandt saying stuff like, "Dracula is groovy." What does that have to do with anything? And then she divorced Steckler.

Dracula sends his servant girls out as prostitutes to gather blood from their customers. More unerotic sex ensues, because to get this blood, they apparently have to let the customers bang them until it's time for the oral cumshot, at which point they bite and suck blood. How erotic. Then they bring the cummy blood back to Dracula to drink.

Meanwhile, Van Helsing has been talking to a porn star and her boyfriend in her living room and they decide Dracula must pay. So they show up on the nearby set of Dracula's lair and an awkward fight occurs.

It's all very hairy, flabby, washed-out, unerotic, and effortless.


The Horny Vampire is about Dracula's nephew, who is very camp and wants to experience sex. He struts around in broad daylight wearing a Wal Mart Dracula costume, with a little sex manual, trying to pick up women. In each case, he's intercepted by the well-meaning Dracula, who bangs the girl instead, while giving bizarre pointers to his nephew in voiceover, like, "And now I pleasure her love garden." And my favourite, "Let her taste the green hot juice of love." Yep. It ends with this vampire, overcome with melancholia, telling his penis he'll try again. He's not one to give-up. This little vampire man is the brooding personification of sexual angst in the new era of female liberation.

It actually contains a few Steckleresque things: lengthy walking shots on Las Vegas streets and goofy attempts at comedy. But it's a sad, sad viewing experience.

Let's hear what Count Floyd has to say: "Ohhh, isn't that scary, boys and girls? Hairy balls the size of your TV screen flopping away and those huge, hairy vaginas. Ohhhhh, I was scared, boys and girls. Aaaaoooooooo!"

So they're both very bad films. You might think the sex has sort of taken the place of the random documentary footage Steckler shoots in his other films, but no. He doesn't even try to make a real film around the sex here. Even the shooting is bad.