Max Schreck did it first... Bela Lugosi did it best... And Christopher Lee did it the most. Now comes JOHN HOLMES! Yup, he of the mutant member plays Count Dracula -- Oops! Make that Count Spatula -- in this rude, raunchy, and ridiculous horror sex comedy from the early Seventies.
Rising from his coffin in traditional vampire regalia, the Count sees a mouse and screams like a little girl: “Goddamn no good exterminators!” Checking the refrigerator, he’s appalled to learn that he’s out of bottled blood. Fortunately, SANDY DEMPSEY and six other swingers conveniently show up, anxious to have sex in a haunted house: “Who’s afraid of a house with horny ghosts in it?” Rod (JOHN DULLAHAN), the leader of the group, is the nephew of the Count -- “The house belongs to this weird uncle of mine. He’s a vampire. He really sucks, man!” -- but that significant bit of plot development is immediately disposed of in favor of the real plot: screwing. Which is what the seven do almost immediately upon entering. One couple takes to the couch, another couple retires to Bedroom A, and the remaining three head for Bedroom B, and all get down and dirty in the blink of an eye.
As the couples hump the night away -- before ending up in one big orgy -- the Count peeps at them and gets turned on. We know he’s turned on because he makes funny faces. He also electrocutes himself (through the cinematic miracle of scratching the film), bites his nephew’s throat with bulging fake fangs (accompanied by slurping sounds and cutaways to the meter of a gas pump), then climbs in the sack with four of the gals before a vampire-appropriate punchline....
Though a complete filmography is probably an impossibility, it’s estimated that John (C. for Curtis) Holmes made over 2000 films -- most of them loops, starting in the late Sixties with a couple of gay ones -- proving, in his case at least, that size did matter. (And, at 12-plus inches, that’s a lot of mattering.) Sex and the Single Vampire is, apparently, one of his earliest feature-film roles, released a year before his signature “Johnny Wadd” epics. Wearing lipstick and so much eye makeup that one half expects a gay joke to be lurking around the corner, Holmes minces and mugs and, well, pretty much makes a damn fool of himself. That he abandoned comedy for a future in hardcore was an extremely wise career move. Oddly, Holmes remains outside and away from all the sex scenes here, at least until the last scene where his dongness is finally displayed. Holmes would again don plastic vampire fangs later in the decade for Dracula Sucks (starring Jamie Gillis as Drac) in which Holmes’ fleshy protuberance, rather than his neck, gets bitten.
A dumb, goofy, soft-X sleazefest, Sex and the Single Vampire belongs on every deviate’s shelf, right next to Terror at Orgy Castle (which -- surprise! -- stars a John Holmes look-alike). From a 16mm big-pronged print. -- Frank Henenlotter
SKU: 3449
Format: DVD-R
Year: 1970
Color: Color
Starring: John Holmes
Co-starring: Sandy Dempsey
Other cast: Stephanie Sarver, Kathy Hilton, John Dullahan
Directed by: Modunk Phreezer