There are gaping credibility holes – at the beginning of the film George Chakiris’s vampire receives a phonecall to go to the storefront where the latest victim is, he managing to arrive before the police and tv newspeople do – who the phonecall was from and how they were aware of what was going on before anybody else did is never explained nor questioned by Chakiris. The story never convinces – the twist ending about Pamela Ludwig being a vampire too defeats credibility, indeed is the sort of thing that seems more appropriate for a vampire comedy. The problem about modern vampire films is that the vampires need to seem credible against the environment they are alien to – Pale Blood does not see this problem and the scenes of the vampires inexplicably floating and vanishing, not to mention the addition of clairvoyant dreams, seem implausible in a realistic context. Some attempts at modernity do occasionally amuse, particularly amusing is Chakiris’s collapsible valise coffin.

And Chakiris seems an appropriately dark romantic vampire, the film achieving this largely by having him hardly saying anything throughout – although the closeups do reveal his youthful looks to be less than they appears. Wings Hauser, usually a staple actor in low budget action films, gives a bizarre performance, ranting about all manner of things throughout and managing to eerily dominate half the women in the film before going right off his rocker in a rather ludicrous ending with him locked in an asylum and seeing vampires everywhere.