trio of horror and mystery fans—author Winslow Seabrook (Caldwell), Sherlock Holmes aficionado Philip Scott (Cochran) and costuming specialist Cindy (Youngfellow)—prepare to stage the first San Francisco Horror Convention. Their guest of honor is Prince Malakai (Walter), a flamboyant actor who specializes in Christopher Lee-like vampire roles. So eccentric is Malakai, he insists the organizers make arrangements to allow him to stay in character as a vampire throughout his participation in the convention; Malakai will even sleep on the convention site in a specially crafted coffin that must kept away from sunlight.
Malaki's public relations team is an unsavory duo named B.B. (Goman) and Harris (Pyke). B.B. and Harris do not carry press releases or photos in their cases, but cleavers and scalpels. Nor do they deal with the media at all, but primarily see to it that Malakai has access to an impromptu lab outfitted with equipment that would do a mad scientist in a 1940s Monogram poverty-row epic proud.
People affiliated with the convention die mysteriously. The victims are dissected and drained of blood. Organs are removed. In homage to Cat People, Scott's girlfriend is killed while swimming in an indoor pool. Scott is not too upset by the murder of his true love, but shifts into Arthur Conan Doyle gear and determines, through ludicrously placed clues and conveniently overheard conversations, that B.B. and Harris are none other than the infamous 19th-century body snatchers Burke and Hare. Scott and comic-book fanatic Gary (Eshelman) conclude that Burke and Hare are in the employ of Malakai, who truly is a vampire, to collect body parts and blood for the bloodsucker's unclean appetites. The convention organizers band together to eradicate the thing of horror that has walked into reality from the fantasy of the genre they love.
A fascinating curiosity that is curiously dull
Director and co-writer John Stanley is well known to horror fans as the author of The Creature Features Movie Guides, and is fondly remembered in the San Francisco Bay area as the host of a local Saturday-night horror movie show. How could a guy who knows so much about horror craft such a deadly slow and badly plotted movie?
This is not to say that Nightmare in Blood is without its charms. There are nice moments of unease. It's interesting to view the movie as a snapshot of '70s fandom, when genre conventions were growing in popularity. And Drew Eshelman as Gary, the comic-book freak, spouts outer-spacey monologues about the cosmic power of comic books that are a hoot, and that presage the comic-book monologues of Samuel Jackson's character in Unbreakable: "Men will turn to ash. Only comics will prevail!" Throughout the film, the love Stanley and co-writer Kenn Davis have for horror is gloriously evident.
Yet the movie grinds to agonizing halts when our horror experts expound on horror for no good reason, in ways that do not serve the narrative. To call these scenes "stagy" is an understatement, as they actually take place on stages. It's one thing to introduce a smarmy horror show host who hates horror so the horror fans in the audience can delight in watching him get his comeuppance. It's another to have the horror host gum up the movie by staging a debate about horror movies, just so the filmmakers can grandstand for five or ten minutes for a scene that has no valid dramatic payoff. Another scene, in which Malakai discusses the place of the vampire in modern society, is root-canal painful. These scenes and others so derail the movie that even at 90 minutes it feels an hour too long.
