Grave of the Vampire

Soon after her college boyfriend proposes to her in a graveyard, Leslie (Kitty Vallacher) finds her fiance dead and herself being raped by Caleb Croft (Michael Pataki), a vampire who had been supposedly killed by electrocution. When it is found she is pregnant, Leslie decides to keep the baby, against her doctor's wishes. She gives birth to a child who refuses to drink milk, preferring to exist only on blood. Thirty years later, the now grown James Eastman (William Smith), distraught over his mother's death - caused by her feeding him her own blood all these years - decides to track down his vampire father in order to kill him. He finds his father teaching night classes under the name, Adrian Lockwood, and James prepares for the final showdown between father and son, where only one will survive.

Grave of the Vampire has a great plot, but very poor execution. In fact, the look of the movie gives you the feeling that it was made for TV and not the big screen. There is no suspense, very little special effects, and even though Croft horribly murders his victims before draining their blood, the camera usually has the murders taking place just out of frame. And the vampire teeth look a lot like the cheap plastic teeth you could get from a gumball machine. There are some disturbing images as we see blood dripped onto a baby's mouth, and then see Leslie taking blood from her own arm and filling a baby bottle with it, but that is as graphic as it really gets.

I wanted to like this film, based on its premise, but there was far too much exposition to explain Croft's past, and not enough visual. While this back story on the vampire does help us to understand how long Croft has been around, to listen to several characters explain calmly about the vampire they have read about in a book is just preposterous. This movie could have been much better than it turned out, had the moviemakers not been afraid to show us what was actually happening.