The crossroads where Hammer horror and blaxploitation met, and it was so groovy, baby, with The Hues Corporation firmly installed as a club act in case you didn't hep to the groove, cat.

Actually that's being unkind. Being a Roger Corman/American International Pictures jam the acting is hammy and the effects are cheap but it was far less a pastiche piece than I expected.

It opens in the castle of Count Dracula in Transylvania in the 1700s, where the Count is entertaining an emancipation activist, Mamuwalde (William Marshall), who's trying to recruit him to the cause of ending the anti-slavery movement.

It ends badly when the vampire lord makes eyes at Mamuwalde's wife Luva (Vonetta McGee). Mamuwalde objects, it gets physical and Dracula condemns them both to death – he bites Mamuwalde to turn him, has him locked in a coffin the basement of the castle where he'll thirst for blood forever and throws his wife in the locked room with his coffin to starve or suffocate.

Centuries later in the very groovy 1970s, two extremely effeminate gay interior decorators (to the point it'd be offensive today) arrive at the castle to assess the items being sold off in an estate sale, and they bring it all (including the coffin with the undead Mamuwalde inside) back to the US.

They open the coffin, Blacula claims his first two victims and he's soon on the loose and hungry for blood in contemporary LA.

Somehow, he later knows to go to the funeral home where one of the gay decorators is laid to rest where he hides behind a curtain to check out the mourners; Michelle (Denis Nicholas), her sister Tina (McGee, again) and her husband Gordon (Thalmus Rasulala), a pathologist with the LAPD looking into the murders.

Tina is so much like his beloved Luva Mamuwalde believes she's the reincarnation of his late wife, and he becomes determined to possess her again.

As he tries to woo Tina like a gentleman (and succeeds in short order), Gordon and his colleagues are on the case of a rash of murders across the city in Mamuwalde's wake, bodies that suspiciously disappear or – when he convinces Michelle to accompany him to an exhumation – leap out to attack them.

They close in on Mamuwalde being the killer, Gordon convinced they're dealing with a real life vampire, and it all ends with them tracking him to a subterranean power plant where he intends to make Tina his forever.

It's not nearly as awful as I expected, and some real writing (let's just not pretend it's Oscar worthy) has gone into a plot that makes sense with characters that inhabit the drama adequately.

There's a single scene of extreme gore right near the end that situates Blacula in the grindhouse movement, otherwise it's surprisingly tame. I never would have considered it except for the night my wife saw the icon on a streaming service and we watched it for a lark, but it's good fun and interesting enough to hold your attention.

It's claimed to be one of the highest grossing films of 1972, but I can't find anything online that confirms that.