1979's TV movie Vampire is as an odd a creature as its titular undead bloodsucker. A strange hybrid of horror movie and police procedural (in fact, co-written and executive produced by the late Steve Bochko of later Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law and NYPD Blue fame - in the period before these shows and when he had definite SF/fantasy cred for penning the screenplay for Douglas Trumbull's 1972 Silent Running and creating the 1975 David McCallum-starring The Invisible Man and its Ben Murphy sequel-cum-remake Gemini Man), it dwells in a twilit world betwixt genres.
As the film opens, we see the inauguration of construction on a new San Francisco church, marked by the unveiling of a gaudy gigantic metallic cross on the site - one suspects that the eventual church will be one of those hideous modern monstrosities of glass and concrete; call me old-fashioned, but I believe (in that I don't, not actually being a believer, but you know what I mean) that these sorts of buildings should be terrifying Gothic edifices. If you're not going to do something properly, why bother? Anyway, this parish's particular Reverend Lovejoy (played by Scott Paulin, who fans of genre flicks will probably recognise as Kirk Lolley from 1985's Teen Wolf and the original Red Skull in the 1990 Albert Pyun Captain America [oh, yeah, here) is making his speech watched by husband and wife architectural design power couple John and Leslie Rawlins (The Exorcist's more junior exorcist Jason Miller, and Nightwing's Kathryn Harrold) as well as mysteriously lurking ex-cop Harry Kilcoyne (E.G. Marshall of Superman II, Creepshow and many others), who remains loitering around the premises after the ceremony is over, noticing that the ground where the shadow of the cross was cast has slightly scorched.
That night when the moon has risen, the badly reacting earth finally spits out its unwelcome contents as the vampiric Anton Voyteck (Richard Lynch, who in common with fellow 1979 TV screen vampire villain Reggie Nalder gained his distinctive appearance through scarring from burn injuries - in Lynch's case self-inflicted from setting himself ablaze whilst off his face [history fails to record whether or not he was shouting about being "real gone" at the time like a freebasing Richard Pryor]) crawls out of the soil of his resting place of many years. You don't get all that many blond-maned male vampires, do you? Apart from Geordie Johnson in Dracula: the Series, Julian Sands in Tale of a Vampire and Christopher Atkins in Dracula Rising of course. But they do seem a comparatively rare breed.
Skipping ahead some weeks, we move to a house party given by the Rawlins where some guests are gossiping about the recent spate of homeless people being found dead with their throats torn out (in a vampire film? Unconnected, I feel sure) and lawyer Nicole DeCamp (Jessica Walter, probably best known these days from Arrested Development and lending her distinctive tones to Archer) introduces first Leslie and then John to her new beau Anton who has a business proposal that they might be interested in. Now dapperly dressed in a sharp '70s suit and taking to wearing his overcoat draped over his shoulders to create a classic cloaked Dracula-style silhouette, Voyteck presents as a mysterious, charming and urbane wealthy aristo who has family interests in the Heidecker estate where the new church is going to be built. He claims that the grounds of the property contain a great many priceless works of art that were removed from Europe during World War II for safekeeping that might be lost forever when construction begins in earnest, and he wants to commission a survey to retrieve them. John expresses scepticism over the endeavour, but agrees and to his surprise soon locates a underground vault containing not only countless lost masterpieces but also skeletal human remains. Calling in his friend on the force Chris Bell (Michael Tucker, who would go on to star in Bochko's L.A. Law alongside his wife Jill Eikenberry) it's established that not only were the artworks looted from their rightful owners during WWII but that the remains are those of an ex-cop who also disappeared in the 1940s; Voyteck is arrested by Bell and his men and before being taken away threatens Rawlins for grassing him up to the filth, saying that he will soon "repay him in kind".
Bailed out by Nicole just as he is attempting to escape by wrenching the cell bars asunder at sunrise, Voyteck dashes home to the secret coffin stashed in his swanky apartment without a minute to spare before rising at nightfall to pay a visit to the Rawlins household. Persuading the home alone Leslie to invite him in, he swiftly takes his vowed vengeance by sinking his teeth into her lovely neck and leaving her exsanguinated corpse for her husband to find and we are faced with the prospect of John going rogue after his wife's brutal death: we all know what architects can do when they take the law into their hands after the murder of a loved one - have the SFPD not heard about the Paul Kersey case?
The distraught designer is contacted by Kilcoyne, who has been mooching around the sidelines investigating - back in the '30s and '40s he was the partner (in a cop rather than romantic sense) of Maurice Bernier, the previous one non-careful owner of the skull and other remnants that were found in Voyteck's vault of stashed artworks. Bernier had become convinced of the existence of evil and creatures such as vampires and left the force join a seminary (a place for trainee priests rather than semen, but there may be a lot of that too) whilst Harry was off fighting in the war; upon Kilcoyne's return home Bernier had vanished mysteriously whilst playing amateur occult detective and sniffing around. Which is a shame, because a noirish 1940's-set series about a detective-priest investigating the paranormal would have been pretty cool, but we'll just have to make do with this tale of a bereaved architect and an aged hard-boiled cop teaming up to take out their mutual vengeance upon a centuries-old vampire. Which is good enough, honestly. Rawlins and Kilcoyne (Vampire Slayers) become like Van Helsing's "God's madmen" from Stoker's tome, diligently tracking down Voyteck across all of the property interests where his multifarious coffins lie. It's an entertaining and breezy hour and a half of safely TV movie horror fun with an ending screaming 'pilot that was never picked up for a continuing weekly series' and it's available to watch free on Youtube as of the time of writing.
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