Rating: PG
Run Time: 98 minutes
Director: Jesus Franco
Starring: Christopher Lee, Herbert Lom, Klaus Kinski
Somehow, some way, Jess Franco
and Harry Alan Towers managed to convince Christopher Lee that the Dracula they
wanted to film would be definitive in the sense that it would most faithfully
follow Bram Stoker’s source novel, at least more closely than any other movie
had hitherto done. To a
degree, that is true. The
movie, to a point, follows the novel in broad outline, particularly in its
opening scenes. There are
sections of dialogue and/or monologue that are taken directly from the
book. This subject was
apparently something dear to Lee’s heart, and anyone who knows anything about
the history of Hammer Films knows that he was constantly bitching about how
shitty their Dracula films were increasingly becoming (he was right, I guess,
although I still passionately adore them). He’d show up in the next one,
anyway, of course (Lee has never seemed terribly discriminating in his
choices).
Still, Lee was
legitimately alarmed by how Hammer seemed to so disparagingly treat
the literary character in the monster's iteration in each new film (he was
right, there, too, because they were making him a buffoon). Dammit, he was the King of the Vampires, after
all.
So he must have been easy
pickings in that regard, because he surely otherwise already knew what Towers
and Franco were up to: cheap exploitation fare. I think he’d by that point already been in
more than one of their Fu Manchu flicks.
Oddly, however, that is not at all what we get. Instead, we have subdued performances
from everyone in the picture...including, and you will not
believe me, Klaus Fucking Kinski as...and you will not believe me here,
either, Renfield of all people, the most wacked out character in all of
Stoker's epistolary novel. No
histrionics, no ham.
Lee, who was always a physical match
for the part, here plays him as depicted in the novel. When we first see Dracula, he is a
tall gentleman with white hair and long mustache, dressed entirely in black,
just as Stoker described him. He
introduces himself to our Jonathan Harker, who arrives at the castle through
travels and stops as also described in the book. There in the castle, Harker is accosted by
the three vampire brides, who are warned off by Dracula himself before their
being satiated by an infant. Harker
awakens in his bed as if this had been a dream. He does some exploring and discovers
Dracula’s tomb. Now, he
does this by climbing out of the window to his bedroom because Dracula has
locked him in. The funny
thing about this window is that it is clearly a small room he is climbing into,
not the outside at all; this will not be the last sign of cheapness in the
film, oh no. Anyway, before
too long, he is plummeting through a window in a free fall to escape an
otherwise toothy demise.
The next time we see Harker, he
is in the hospital bed of a sanitarium run by Doctor Van Helsing... not
Professor Van Helsing, Doctor Van Helsing. He is played by the inimitable
Herbert Lom. Harker is
being comforted for the moment by Dr. Seward, who works for Van Helsing. Also at the asylum are Jonathan’s
fiancé, Mina, and her friend, Lucy Westenra. Ms. Westenra’s fiancé is Quincy
Morris, an attorney. That’s
right, everything’s kinda ass-backwards and nobody's who he's
supposed to be; relationships are altered, etc. Still, it is an
admirable attempt to get in a nod to all the characters from the book (who are,
besides Van Helsing, largely interchangeable anyway); Arthur Holmwood only
is missing. Even so, this is probably the point where Chris Lee
began to suspect he had once more been suckered into appearing in yet
another Dracula adaptation that was precipitously heading down the
shitter again.
As always, or pretty much always,
Dracula first selects Lucy as a victim, making short shrift of her. Now the puzzling thing about her
victim status is that Van Helsing will later tell his intrepid group of vampire
hunters that, as a student of the occult and black arts, he pretty much knew
what was going on from the get-go and further that he also knew the author of their
woe was Dracula himself. But
does he tell anybody? Does
he do anything constructive to save Lucy from a fate that's even worse from the
one that's supposed to be a fate worse than death (If
Stoker’s novel was at least in part an unconscious study of sexual repression
in Victorian England, and if women always bore the worst brunt of that
repression, then vampirization was tantamount to sexual assault)? No, he doesn’t do a damned thing,
that’s what. But now that
he knows what he’s dealing with, well, by God, let’s get down to
business. And then he goes
and has a fucking stroke.
So, with Seward being around only
to introduce us to Renfield, and with Van Helsing now wheelchair bound, guess
who’s left of the intrepid vampire hunters? Harker and Morris. At any event, they are up to the
task. But first let me back
up a little and discuss Renfield. As I noted above, he is portrayed by
Werner Herzog’s great actor, Klaus Kinski. And what is more, I’ve seen him in
other things, so when I say he plays Renfield in a subdued manner, I am saying
all kinds of things about the movie. Stoker’s
Renfield was certifiable, a true lunatic. He is here, too, I suppose, but
Kinski’s performance is gentle and relaxed. And he does not have a single word of
dialogue; no, that’s not true, but more on that later. The funny thing is, he really
performs no function in the film in terms of moving the narrative
forward. Unlike the novel,
where he is something like Dracula’s “man on the inside,” here he has only a
rather tenuous psychic link to the vampire. In one scene, Mina inexplicably goes
to visit him in his cell because she thinks he may be able to illuminate this
mystery. I cannot tell you why,
really, because he hasn't done a damn thing before then to suggest he knows
fuck-all about what Dracula's up to. But
Dracula tells him to kill her, so he tries, unsuccessfully, to strangle
her. Then he just goes back
to being gentle, relaxed, and quiet. What is this shit? If Lee was
privy to this asinine business, he must have been about apoplectic at this
point.
So, the intrepid vampire hunters
(plus Seward), spurred on by the invalid, Van Helsing, traipse to Dracula’s
haunts (I can’t remember if it’s his place in Carfax Abbey or his London
digs). There they are
subjected to an attack by – wait, are you ready for this? - a menagerie of the
world’s most vicious stuffed animals. Yes,
that is correct; no, I am not exaggerating. This scene is, of course, justly
famous among connoisseurs of shitty movies, and if you were harboring the
illusion that this were anything other than a shitty movie, let me disabuse you
of that notion
right here. What could they have possibly been thinking? What is more, the filmmakers are not
content to allow the taxidermied critters to maintain the dignity of merely
remaining motionless as they snarl and threaten. No, off-screen hands shake and move
the little fuckers to simulate animation. Because a shitty stuffed animal that
is moving is infinitely more frightening than a shitty stuffed animal that is
stationary. I wonder what Lee thought about that scene?
While I’m on the subject of
shittiness, let me say something about the writing. It sucks. And you know what, if I had been
Herbert Lom, I would have walked off set, because he alone is singled out to
deliver the most nonsensical, contradictory, cryptic garbledegook I have ever
heard uttered in a movie in my life. Remember,
Lom is speaking English, so there is nothing lost in the dub, so to
speak. And, speaking of
dialogue and moving us along to the end of this review, remember when I said
Kinski did not say anything? Well,
he says one thing, “Varna.”
Varna, you remember, is the
Eastern European port on the Black Sea that Dracula chooses to sail to when he
cuts short his losses and attempts to return to his homeland. Harker and Morris arrive before him,
kill the vampire sisters, and sanctify Dracula’s crypt. Dracula himself is just getting onto
the grounds of his castle, led by an escort of gypsies (taken from the book),
when the fearless vampire killers roll two large paper mache boulders over the
castle ledge, momentarily pissing off a startled horse, yet apparently killing two gypsy extras. The two intrepid monster-killers then
mount the trailer where Dracula’s body is found within its wooden box and set
the vampire on fire. Then
they toss the box and body off yet another ledge. The end. I will say, not a bad
ending as endings in bad movies go.
Was this movie bad, you ask?…yes. Was it any worse than a lot of other
stuff I’ve seen?...no. Harry Allan Towers was a legendary producer of
exploitation crap & Jess Franco was the absolute non plus ultra of
exploitation directors, so this could have been far, far worse. Still,
I've seen Franco movies I thought were not too bad; I really don’t see why
he is vilified quite as much as he is. And,
as I said, it was a serious, somber production. Christopher Lee, Herbert Lom, and
Klaus Kinski are all of them capable of the worst overacting. But they don’t do it here. And,
barring the monstrosity that was Coppola’s Dracula twenty years later, this is actually one of the closest of
adaptations I’ve yet seen. Which is a sad commentary in its own
right.
Relatively soon after this
movie was completed, Soledad Miranda, who plays Lucy, was killed in a car
accident in Lisbon. She starred in a number of Franco movies in the short
period between 1969-70 and seems to have quickly become his muse during this
time. Anecdotal stories indicate he went into a years-long funk,
heart-stricken over the loss of the woman he intended to make a star even
outside of their native Spain.
The
Horror Inkwell Rating: 5/10
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