Ingrid Pitt was off doing Countess Dracula and thus unable to reprise her role as Marcilla so that role is given to Yvette Starsgard, who is pretty and shapely but simply doesn’t have Pitt’s charisma; they really should have waited until Pitt was ready to play the part. She is revived from the dead by her Karnstein parents, who bundle her off to finishing school where she runs amok (as well as presumably receiving an education), seducing and chewing on the various students. (Although she’s on that predatory – on her first night there student Pippa Steele tries to seduce her.)
The early scenes at the finishing school are pure camp: the girls are doing some sort of weird Grecian dance with flowing ropes and revealing dresses; later they lounge about in various states of half-dress, doing up stockings while topless, letting their tops fall down as they receive a back massage, etc. This stuff cuts out after a while – I don’t know why they bothered, a bit more might have livened things up.
Marcilla is less of an exclusive lesbian in this one – although she still takes her fair share. She seems to fall in love with an annoying male novelist (Michael Johnson) who is in the area – they have sex to a gloriously daggy ballad; although later on he busts her chomping on another female student. Another girl – a non-lesbian, non-vampire teacher, is also meant to fall in love with Johnson, but she doesn’t look as though she believes the lines she’s saying.
Ralph Bates is good value as a teacher of the school who wants to be a vampire, plus a headmistress who wants to hush up all the deaths, and a mob of villagers at the end who go to burn down the castle. The man in black reappears although it’s clearer who he is – Count Karnstein, aka Dad. There’s also mum who drops her off, and I was hoping for some Karnstein domestic scenes with their charge (“how was school?”, “kill anyone interesting?”, “Your grades aren’t very good” and so on) but no matter. Jimmy Sangster wasn’t a very good director; there’s a bit three times where we see a woman from the POV of a vampire where the woman smiles at her attacker, offers herself up, then stops smiling and screams. Followed by Twins of Evil, although that's not a "pure" sequel.
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