If you think that the new age Twilight vampires, with their high school love sparkles, was the only weird era for the classic blood-sucking monster, then you'd be sadly mistaken. According to the early '70s, vampires lived in the desert, had a need to go to the city to see modern art exhibits, and also craved sexy threesomes with swinging hippie couples. Also, they would dig up their dead husbands and lay on their coffins...in the sun. See, vampires were always kind of weird.
The Velvet Vampire is about a sexy desert-dwelling lady vampire with the super gothic name of Diane. She heads into the city and seduces a hippie couple at an art showing and lures them to her desert hideaway. Here, she slowly, and I mean slowly, gets around to drinking some swinger blood. She uses her vampire dream powers to lure the man of the couple away from his wife with sexy dreams. In these dreams, she appears in front of his bed, which is now located in the desert. Then she seductively offers him sex without any fanfare or erotic teasing. At the same time, she shows the same dream to his wife, but in her dream, instead of offering sex to the wife, the vampire offers to have sex with her husband. As you may have guessed, he eventually has sex with the vampire. Now, the couple must wrangle their brains from the clutches of Diane before they become her next meals.
The pace of the Velvet Vampire acts as a double-edged fang. At first, its slow pace does a great job of letting us learn with the characters. The story reveals itself slowly without jumping right into the vampire stuff. Although they aren't the deepest of characters, this pace allows us to get to know them better. But as the movie hits the last quarter, the pace quickens, and Diane changes her slow seduction into a terrible plan that just has her running around in broad daylight murdering for blood. It's understandable as a vampire that Diane craves the blood of the living, and those cravings are getting worse. Except that she has been living a secluded lifestyle for years, and only now, she murders and drinks the blood of basically everyone she meets. She leaves in broad daylight and kills anyone she can get her fangs into, drawing more suspicion to her. Then she even starts to murder her friends and servants. It felt a bit out of character for a woman who had been able to live for centuries in a secluded desert home, never attracting attention.
Celeste Yarnall, who plays the vampire Diane, does a great job in the role. Even when she gets to be a crazed bloodsucker, she is fun to watch. The rest of the cast can get on the nerves, especially the couple she is seducing. They weren't all that likable, to begin with, so under Diane's spell, they are even worse.
Near the end, the movie has a neat chase scene through a crowded bus station where it seemed like the people around the actors had no idea what was going on. It turns out that the crew didn't have permission to film there and did anyway. So the spectators with general looks of concern for the half-naked woman being chased by a well-dressed vampire were sporting real looks of concern.
The Velvet Vampire is a solid, if not a bit of a mediocre sexy vampire film. The sex dreams and nudity seemed to have had a lot more thought put into them than the rest of the plot. If you are the type that enjoys an alright semi-erotic vampire movie, then this one will mostly satisfy. If you are looking for a bit more substance, you can give this one a pass.