(Though some may find lineage with the Dracula played in several '40s films by John Carradine.) Count Karol de Lavud, alias Mr. The Vampire predates the release of Hammer's seminal Dracula / Horror of Dracula by almost eight months, yet in many ways it anticipates the Christopher Lee-style vampire that broke from of the Bela Lugosi mold. Also, unlike the merely adequate transfers of the Santo movies from Rise Above Entertainment, CasaNegra / Panik House Entertainment's transfers, though not 16:9 enhanced, are otherwise splendiferous and pristine and come with excellent supplementary features. Both show a lot of imagination and are especially intriguing in that they bridge the gap between the classic Universal horror films of the 1930s and '40s with the Hammer Gothics that immediately followed. Both have a stateliness utterly lacking in the anything goes world of Mexican horror-fantasy of the 1960s and '70s. If your exposure to Mexican fantasy cinema has been limited to Aztec Mummies and the wild and wooly wrestling movies of masked icon Santo, you're sure to find CasaNegra and Panik House's double-feature special edition of The Vampire ( El Vampiro) and The Vampire's Coffin ( El Ataud del Vampiro, both 1957) a big, pleasant surprise.
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