The Curator of Schlock #327 by Jeff Shuster

Hannah, Queen of the Vampires

Also known as La tumba de la isla maldita.

I woke up at about three in the morning last night to see Jervis and Celestial digging holes in the back yard in the pouring rain. Near them were what looked like two bodies completely covered in duct tape. Celestial spotted me, dashed toward the house, and climbed up my bedroom window on the third floor. She bared her fangs at me and shrieked. I passed out and woke up the morning in a pool of my own vomit. I confronted Jervis about what I saw, but he insisted that I must have had a nightmare. Just like he said I had a nightmare about Celestial draining the life force out of that biker she brought up to her bedroom last week.

Tonight’s movie is Hannah, Queen of the Vampires from director Julio Salvador. The Wikipedia entry for the movie consists of one whole sentence. That’s not going to be too helpful.

Now I have to rely on my own memory to see this review through. Of course, this could be a golden opportune for yours truly to write a plot summary for the Wikipedia entry. I wonder how much they pay.
This movie goes by a bunch of titles such as Crypt of the Living Dead, but I prefer Hannah, Queen of the Vampires as it suggests the promise of a beautiful vampire woman ready to conquer the world and what more can you really ask for in a movie. We begin with a would be vampire hunter going deep into a crypt underneath a church on an island somewhere near Africa or India. One of those continents. The would-be vampire hunter is named Professor Bolton (Mariano Garcia), but don’t too attached to him as his head will get detached from his body. The murderers are Peter (Mark Damon), a graduate student turned devil worshipping priest, and the local mad hermit (Ihsan Gedik) whose name escapes me.

Peter and the mad hermit drag the corpse of Professor Bolton under the marble coffin of Hannah, Queen of the Vampires. They smash the feet of the coffin with hammers so it crushes the body. This is all a scheme to get his son, Chris Bolton (Andrew Prine), to fly out to the island so he’ll use his ingenuity to move the tomb of Hannah, the Queen of the Vampires thus simultaneously freeing his father’s corpse so it can be properly buried while at the same time unleashing a vampire plague upon the world.

Chris doesn’t believe in all of this mumbo jumbo voodoo horse shit about vampires. His father was into that occult stuff. Chris is all about science and the rational. He tries to employ some locals to help him out, but they are afraid. One elder says if they open the tomb, Hannah will get free and find the other vampires buried on the island. Then the vampires will eat babies and hold black masses and dance naked in the cemetery and whatnot. Chris ignores the warning and gets some of the younger villagers to lift the lid off the coffin and wouldn’t you know it, Hannah is perfectly preserved. No decomposition.

Anyway, it turns out the oncoming Vampire Armageddon will happen because Peter is a failed writer. He wanted to be the next Hemingway, but he took too many uppers and downers. So instead of finishing his thesis, he decides to resurrect a centuries old vampire queen in the hopes that she’ll bite him and turn him into an immortal vampire. Great plan. Sigh. Say no to drugs, kids.

Jeff Shuster (episode 47, episode 102, episode 124, episode 131, and episode 284) is an MFA graduate from the University of Central Florida.