I wish I was the photographer!

Hammer's KotV was Isobel's feature film debut, wherein she's the daughter of a local innkeeper seduced by the satanic bloodsucker Doctor Ravna (Noel Willman). She goes from innocent beer-stein-scrubber to vampirized temptress in a heartbeat. Few Hammer Glamazons have looked better roaming the local cemetery by moonlight in a see-through dirndl. Her skill at oozing a surfeit of sexual subtext in the Bavarian mist is just gravy.

Tania is a pleasure to watch thanks to Black's acting. She's a corrupted soul that shifts effortlessly between beguilingly beautiful and utterly malevolent — like all the great female vampires.

At climax-time, we see Isobel lovingly devoured — ironically — by a flock of vampire bats a la Hitchcock's "The Birds." The sucking swarm is rendered on screen as a dark swirling mass, ritually summoned from the depths of Hell by Ravna's arch-enemy, the Van Helsing-ish quasi-magician Zimmer. Take it from me ... you'll enjoy the ending better if you just ignore the piano wires in the closeups, and the fact that the rubber neck-biters resemble flying hunks of calf's liver.

Better are the closeups of Isobel pawing her breasts seductively as she succumbs to the "death of a thousand nibbles" that leaves her ultimately bloodless, draped rather theatrically over a hopelessly ornate, velvet-upholstered stool. What a tableau!

Considered one of the most beautiful vampire films ever made because of the strikingly colored sets and costumes, combined with the lush cinematography, KotV is said to have inspired Roman Polanski's spoof "The Fearless Vampire Killers" (1967). Considering it featured neither stalwarts Christopher Lee or Peter Cushing, that was no small feat.

Lovingly serialized on YouTube (in nine parts) ...

One of the original "Carry On" girls, six-foot Valerie is still carrying on at age 64 after 40-odd years in front of the camera.

She started her career as one of the Harem Girls in "Carry On Up the Khyber" (1968) and then graduated to a speaking part in "Carry On Camping" a year later — she was the eager sporting goods shop assistant who helps Charlie Hawtrey "erect his tent."

In "Carry On Again, Doctor" (1969), she was Jim Dale's secretary, thoroughly befuddling him with her overt sexual advances.

"Carry On Up The Jungle" (1970) gave us Valerie as Leda, the bikini-clad leader of an all-female tribe, the Aphrodisiacs, who were desperately seeking men to impregnate them so their line of warriors could continue (in the UK, the film was titled "Stop Beating About the Bush, or Show Me Your Waterhole and I'll Show You Mine").

Many other small roles followed her roles in the Carry On comedies, including bits in the sci-fi sex romp "Zeta One" and the Michael Caine action caper "The Italian Job."

In 1971, Valerie landed her first leading role, in the Hammer Horror production "Blood From the Mummy's Tomb," which has become one of the most popular in the studio's canon over the years, mostly because of the revealing costumes Valerie wears.

She followed up "Tomb" with the cheeky "No Sex Please, We're British" (1973), the soft core "Can You Keep It Up for a Week?" (1974), and the culty "Queen Kong" (1976), co-starring Rula Lenska.

She book-ended her iconic Hammer Girl reputation in 1977 with a turn as another of cinema's iconic character strains, the Bond Girl, in "The Spy Who Loved Me," starring Roger Moore. Although she's a third-tier "Bee-Gee" — her character is listed only as "Hotel Receptionist" — she's memorable nonetheless. Wearing a low-cut, frilly-necked frock and a small crucifix just above her ample cleavage, she makes Agent Amasova (Barbara Bach) jealous when she hands a message to Bond along with about a dozen come-hither looks.

In "The Revenge of the Pink Panther," she played Tanya the Lotus Eater, clad in a skin-tight black leather suit and wielding a whip — an image that is quite a popular seller on the movie stills circuit.

The 007 franchise beckoned once more in 1983, and she was cast in "Never Say Never Again," Sean Connery's return to the role of Bond in an independent production/remake of "Thunderball." Again, she was a third-stringer, the nameless "Sexpot/Lady in The Bahamas" that Bond uses as a interim sexual-relief module on his way to a dalliance with Fatima Blush (Barbara Carrera).

However, she is perhaps most vividly recalled in the memory banks of adolescent English boys for playing the long, cool nurse driven wild by a hospitalized nebbish wearing Hai Karate aftershave, in a commercial for the product that aired in Britain in the early Seventies (the clip is below). Sadly, we never got to see it stateside.

More information about what the very vixenish Valerie's up to today is available at her official web site.

This time, it's "Dracula A.D. 1972" (1972).

Lalla might be better known to the denizens of geekdom as Romana II, the companion of Tom Baker's "Doctor Who."

I've chronicled how MooTcrush Hayley Mills made an amazing transformation in the mid- to late-60s from pollyanna to vixen. If you didn't want to wait for such a change, there was always Linda Hayden, who was a dirty little girl from the get-go ...

Usually cast as nymphets or seductresses, blonde, baby-faced, and British Hayden launched her career at age 17 playing an over-sexed 15-year-old named Luci (replacing the 'y' in girl names with an 'i' always guarantees a high slut factor) in the lurid melodrama "Baby Love" (1968). She went on to specialize in cheeky sexploitation stuff as well as some Hammer horror.

( See more of Linda under the cut ... )

Sandra Dee dirtied up just a bit. Or Full Frontal Hayley.

Linda also starred in "Expose" (1976) (aka "The House on Straw Hill"), which is famous for being the only British film to get itself stuck on the dreaded UK 'Video Nasties' list. Not much smoke there though 20 years later. It's just an overblown soap opera enlivened by a few sex scenes and a spot of good old bloody violence.

Hayden said recently that she hates "Expose" because it's not the film she thought it was going to be and was just plain sleazy.

Wot?

How could she not know what the film was? She openly masturbates many times, has a couple of lesbian encounters, and gets screwed in a cornfield after pleasuring herself with a shotgun! Given all that, it does make you wonder what kind of film she thought she was making!

The nicely staged lesbian breast nuzzling sequence between Linda and Fiona Richmond rates a 10 on the Howard Stern–o–meter.

I would imagine it's the endless sheer nightgowns and relentless nip slip Hammer Horror producers demanded ...

Linda was young, British, and beaufiful and decorated the set in some of the 1970s most culty English 'sploitation flicks, including "Baby Love," "Blood on Satan's Claw," "Taste the Blood of Dracula," "Madhouse," "Vampira," and the penultimate video nasty "Expose."

Reclining on a blood-stained divan somewhere between Susannah York and Susan George on the Brit-blondometer, her combination of nubile freshness and dirty-little-girl corruptability make her exceptionally watchable in almost every movie she's in — no matter how wretched the script. Known as the British Lolita, Linda's role in "Claw" (1970) — as jade-eyed, vicar-vexing Angel Blake, a seducer of clergymen — is her best, one that spawned Britt Ekland's later characterization of Willow in "The Wicker Man" (1973). I also suspect her seductive antics as Angel prompted Hammer and their competitors to always include naked or nearly naked, lusty devil-possessed or vampire women in their output throughout the seventies.

The Malco movie theater in Memphis, Tennessee at the opening of the 1960 Hammer film "Brides Of Dracula" starring Peter Cushing, Martita Hunt, and Yvonne Monlaur. In those days, such openings featured gimmicks such as that mentioned on the marquee: "Dracula's wedding ceremony" and "monsters loose in the audience." Another big deal back then was that theaters were a place to cool off. Note the signs boasting that the place is "cooled by refrigeration." I saw many a movie in the Summer of '72 at the Storm King Theater in Cornwall-on-Hudson simply because they had AC. (Below is a photo of French vixen Yvonne Monlaur — had to throw her in as part my continuing, slavish chronicling of Hammer Glamour queens.)

Some rarely seen stills from the shoot, from my Hammer Glamour collection ...