A small troupe of dancers, and their manager, Lucas (Alfredo Rizzo), are riding on a bus on their way to their next appearance. A storm comes up and the road is blocked by a landslide. The bus, being driven by Frank/Ferrenc (Leonard Botta), takes a side road. The troupe ends up at the Castle Kernassy. The caretaker (Antoine Nicos) tells them to leave but Lucas knocks on the door. The housekeeper, Miss Balasz (Tilde Damiani) lets them in but tells them that they cannot stay. Count Gabor Kernassy (Walter Brandi) appears and is about to tell them to leave when he sees Vera (Lyla Rocco), one of the dancers. He relents and allows them to stay but tells them they are not allowed to leave their rooms at night no matter what they may hear.
Later that night Katia (Maria Giovannini) goes walking around the castle. Then next day she is found dead. Frank, the piano player for the troupe, believes she fell from one of the castle tower windows. The troupe buries her. The troupe is unable to leave since, besides the landslide, the river has been rising and took away the bridge to the highway.
While Vera is walking around the castle she sees the portrait of a woman that looks remarkably like her. She asks Gabor about it. He tells her that it is a relative of his that died long ago. That night Vera finds that Katia’s grave is empty, her body gone.
The next day Vera goes looking for Gabor to ask about the empty grave. She ends up wandering into a laboratory and finds Vera’s body on a table and covered with a sheet. Vera freaks out. Gabor appears and tries to calm her by slapping her. He tells her that he was the one who disinterred her. He tells her he believes she was murdered. He then tells her that there is an evil that he has been working on curing. He asks her to trust him and believe in him. But when Katia proves to be one of the undead, Vera has more to worry about than just one vampire.
“The Playgirls and the Vampire” AKA “L'ultima preda del vampire” or “The Vampire's Last Victim” was released in 1960 and was directed by Piero Regnoli. It is an Italian horror film. The movie is often referred to as part of a quasi-trilogy with “The Vampire and the Ballerina” 1960 and “The Vampire of the Opera” 1964. Some even call it part of a quadrilogy along with “Slaughter of the Vampires” 1962. All of them are Italian horror films produced during their vampire craze.
If there is a sub genre called sleaze horror this would be one of them. There is more skin than horror in the film. The overall feel of the movie is vampire soap opera. Vera and Gabor spend more time professing their love for each other than anything else, even though they just met. Vera looks perpetually pensive and Walter Brandi, as Gabor, is mostly wooden. That being said there were parts of the movie that actually kept my interest. That’s because of the atmosphere. There are a lot of gothic touches and some suspenseful scenes that kept me from losing interest.
Besides having sexy girls wearing teddies and doing a modified strip tease there are a couple scenes where Maria Giovannini's character Katia is naked. She’s in shadow but you get a quick flash of her breasts. It is believed to be the first depiction of a nude vampire on screen.
The exterior shots are of Castello Orsini-Odescalchi in Lazio, Italy. Some of the interior shots are from Palazzo Borghese, Artena, Italy.