Count Dracula's Great Love (1974)

**POSSIBLE SPOILERS**

I’ve never been big on Dracula or vampires, in general.  I’m all for women with heaving bosoms coming under the thrall of a vampire, and the scenes of “consummation” can be a lot of fun.  Back in the day, I loved watching the Hammer Dracula films on television on a Saturday afternoon, because they were so different from the staid portrayals of vampires up until then (but, hey, isn’t that why Hammer became so popular to begin with?).  I still love Horror of Dracula, largely because of that absolutely kickass ending, and some of the later Hammer films, when they incorporated Satanism into the mix, are a joy, as well.  The 1931 versions of Dracula (Spanish and English language versions) are great stuff (the former especially elides the cumbersome elements of Browning’s take, and it doesn’t hurt any that Lupita Tovar is absolutely ravishing).  That said, the romance angle that so many films hang their coats on does nothing at all for me.  Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula bores me to tears, this despite some fantastic effects work (all done practical and very, very old school).  I’ve never wanted to watch John Badham’s Dracula with Frank Langella even a little, and stuff like Twilight are as far away from the mark for me as you can get.  Give me Nosferatu (1922 or 1979; I’m not picky), or Near Dark, or Martin, or Shadow of the Vampire, anything with either something to dwell on intellectually or respond to viscerally (sure, sex can be considered visceral, but I like monsters, and blood and sex is more interesting to me than sex and sex).  Aren’t you glad I didn’t say, “give me something with some bite?”  Javier Aguirre’s Count Dracula’s Great Love (aka Cemetery Girls aka Dracula’s Virgin Lovers aka El Gran Amor Del Conde Dracula) gives me so much of what I want, but still flubs it.

A carriage carrying Imre (Victor Alcazar), his secret love Marlene (Ingrid Garbo), and three other chicks, Karen (Haydee Politoff), Senta (Rosanna Yanni), and Elke (Mirta Miller), throws a wheel in the middle of the Burgo Pass.  Seeking shelter for the night, and since the coachmen is dead from an ill-timed horse hoof to the head, the gang make it to the old sanitorium, where they are taken in by Dr. Marlow (Paul Naschy).  From there it isn’t long before the blood and boobs start flowing.

I have a weakness for many of Naschy’s films, because, like the man himself, I have a weakness for the classic Universal monster movies.  His Waldemar Daninsky character is a true member of the lycanthrope hall of fame, though my all-time favorite film of his (and Aguirre’s) is The Hunchback of the Morgue (reviewed previously on this site).  He loves his monster mashes, and he’s not afraid to tackle multiple characters in a film (witness: Dr. Jekyll and the Werewolf).  He even managed to inject some life (man, the puns are flowing tonight) into the Mummy (The Mummy’s Revenge).  Naschy was fantastic at playing the physicality of monsters, incorporating his background as a bodybuilder to give his performances a kinetic energy.  His films have a concrete atmosphere that plays with the gothic trappings of the classics of the Thirties through the Fifties.

It is entirely possible that Naschy’s Dracula could have been all the things I look for in a vampire film.  The problem is that the movie follows its dopey, half-baked love story to the point of schmaltzy sentimentalism.  The film does have some fine moments for any exploitation/horror fan.  The actresses are all willing to get naked.  There is enough blood to make things pop here and there, and it’s often intermingled with female flesh.  Naschy gets to tussle with other men often, showcasing his Shatner-ian slugfest skills.  The male vampire makeups include these great contact lenses that really give the monsters an otherworldly, creepy mien.  There is just enough sadism to please fans of whippings, and some sleazy moments are mixed in with them (the lady vampires suck the blood from the wounds incurred during a lashing).  There are even some “what the fuck?!” elements, such as the knife sticking through a character’s throat like Steve Martin’s old arrow-through-the-head bit.  

That said, the filmmakers are infinitely more interested in the love between Dracula and Karen, and even that they get wrong.  Much ado is made about how the only way for Dracula to regain all of his powers and resurrect his daughter Rodna (yes, Rodna) is for a virgin to fall in love with him of her own free will.  Now, you may recognize this plot device, as it’s the exact same one used in every one of Naschy’s Daninsky films, and it’s handled in the exact same way (as is the film’s structure).  The women in these films fall in love at the drop of a hat, all for the sake of the tragic endings these movies have to have, and it feels like it.  Karen is not only no different from any other Naschy heroine (and I really hesitate to use that term to describe them) in this respect, but the boundaries of just how much love can forgive is stretched past breaking.  After giving of herself physically and emotionally to the Count, he promptly cuts Karen open as part of Rodna’s resurrection ceremony.  Then he throws her into a cell for what must be a couple of months (he keeps having to inexplicably wait for another full moon to complete the next step of his little ritual), where she sleeps on a straw bed and shouts for help.  During all this time, he keeps begging her to love him (I’m confused; didn’t she already say that she did?).  

Before the “finale,” Dracula and his lady vamps bounce around the countryside, attacking peasants, thither and yon (these sequences are actually entertaining, and had there been more of this, the film probably wouldn’t stink as bad as it does), and Dracula continues to pontificate about this, that, and the other thing and plead with Karen, who remains as emotionless here as she does in the rest of the picture.  The filmmakers then give up on any semblance of reason or narrative in one of the most anticlimactic endings you’re likely to see.  There are so many “WHY?!” instances in the film, it really deflates the bits that work well (because they do work so well).  I can’t say I recommend Count Dracula’s Great Love, but goddamn it, I want to.

MVT:  The elements that deal with the more graphic aspects of the story, both red and pink.

Make or Break:  Dracula’s monologue in the third act, that seems to go on for over twenty minutes and not make a lick of sense.

Score:  4/10

The Hunger (1983)

Directed by: Tony Scott
Run Time: 97 minutes

This isn't a vampire movie. Yes I used a vampire tag for this blog post, yes the book that this movie is based on is about vampires, and yes there is blood drinking. What this movie lacks is fangs, bursting into when the vampire come in contact with sunlight,  no fear of crosses or religious objects, no nonsense with mirrors, and they don't turn into fucking human disco balls when the sun hits them. Instead the creatures in this movie have more in common with Baobhan sith or Leanan sídhe, blood drinking fairies.  Which fits more with the mood of this film instead of vampires.  Rather than a supernatural menace that is on the verge of destroying humanity,  it's an ancient creature that is deal with the solitude due to being immortal.

The film opens with Miriam and John Blaylock (Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie) in an early eighties goth club picking up a young couple.  This footage is interrupted with a monkey killing another monkey in it's cage. The monkeys are test subject's of Sarah Roberts (Susan Sarandon) Sleep, Blood, and Longevity experiments. Which is great for John as he likes drinking blood, he can't sleep, and he is starting to rapidly age.

Alice, a young violin student that Miriam was grooming,  also notices John's rapid aging. This revelation motivates both John and Miriam to independently seek Doctor Roberts' help. They both fail in this task as Miriam becomes enraptured with Sarah and John comes off as a crazy old man. Sarah assuming that John really is a crazy old man and leaves him waiting for an hour in the hopes he gets the message and leave.  Sarah sees him as he is leaving and John has visibly aged ten years and is rightly pissed that she wasted a good chunk of his life. So with his youth slipping away from him, John tires and fails to feed on some kid in a tunnel.

John gets home to find he is starting to look almost two hundred years old. Alice shows up later and does not realize that the old man with John's eyes was in fact John. In a vain hope of regaining his lost youth John feeds on Alice but nothing happens and he ages into a walking mummy. Miriam finds him and carries him to the attic where she keeps all of her other lovers who have become mummies. After a tearful farewell and asking her other lovers to be kind to John tonight. The rest of the movie is Miriam seducing Sarah and turning her into a near immortal blood drinking lover.

The movie is beautiful and annoying at the same time. A good chunk of the film is spent building the atmosphere at the price of the plot. Yes Tony Scott manages to show the body horror of rapid aging and David Bowie is fairly good at showing this horror. However I spent most of the film going 'Hello, I'm the audience would throw me a bone and tell me a little of what the hell is going on and why'. I am glad they did not try to be smarter than the film was and use science babel to explain things. Instead things just happen without context or explanation and the cool visual is all that is given. The example that comes to mind is the monkey from the beginning of  the movie who was not sleeping  starts to rapidly age. After a few minutes in movie time the monkey dies and starts to rapidly decay. No reason given just sleep deprived monkeys turn into rage filled killers and then die due to rapid aging.

Aside from everyone casually smoking in every scene this movie has aged rather well. The effects are creepy but not genre shattering and aside of my petty complaints about the plot it is an ok movie. If you want to feel nostalgic for your goth days or this movie shows up on cable or steaming services it is worth a watch because you're bored.

Make or Break: The whole style over substance stance this movie takes pisses me off. There is a good horror movie in there but it is lost in the art.

MVP: Catherine Deneuve. In this film she is everything you would want in a vampire. Classy, sexy, and mysterious. As a point of disclosure I have been a fanboy of hers since I saw Belle du Jour.




Score: 5.9 out of 10


                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

La Residencia (1969)

Young Theresa (Cristina Galbo) is carted off to Mademoiselle Fourneau’s (Lilli Palmer) private school for wayward girls (even though she seems like the most normal person in the place), where hard discipline is the order of the day.  There, Theresa has to contend with the likes of the cruel, manipulative Irene (Mary Maude) as well as learning the politics of the academy.  All this and a mysterious killer who intermittently takes out the occasional girl for diabolical reasons which will soon be made clear in a manner most ghastly.

Narciso Ibañez Serrador’s La Residencia (aka The House That Screamed, the version I watched for this review via Elvira’s Movie Macabre release, so I’m fairly confident that the film was heavily edited, but it still packs a hell of a punch) is a film which is simultaneously semi-classy melodrama and sleazy exploitation/psychothriller.  The cinematography is gorgeous, and the camera moves fluidly throughout scenes, following characters and accentuating the gothic, harsh confines of the school’s estate.  The editing is smooth as silk and on point (maybe just a little too on-the-nose with its metaphoric usage but not distractingly or offputtingly so, in fact quite the opposite).  It’s odd (but somehow fitting for how the film’s scenes form a cumulative effect rather than a singular narrative; it might have been interesting to see this film as directed by the late, great Robert Altman) in how characters who we expect to have some long term significance in the film don’t, and things happen offscreen (but again this could be from the version of the film I saw) only to be referenced later on as if we were given this information (a common enough occurrence in European genre fare).  

There is a heavy focus on the interactions between the characters rather than on the murders, and I believe this is because the killings are a symptom of the twisted environment of the school’s interior community.  On its exterior, the school is portrayed as a very proper, very orderly place for “troubled girls” to be molded (by force) to fit back into society.  Naturally, the dark underbelly lying beneath this façade of civilization is more akin to a prison than a school.  Fourneau posits that the activities in which the girls partake (like dance and needlework) “prevent them from indulging in morbid thought” (i.e. sex), but the inner world of the academy revolves around sex and perhaps even moreso around control.  The two go hand-in-hand.  Fourneau sends an obstinate girl to “the Seclusion Room” where she will later be stripped and whipped.  Fourneau’s teenaged son Luis (John Moulder-Brown) spies on the girls at every possible opportunity, but his mother tells him that “none of these girls are any good,” and he needs to be with a woman like her.  She is over-protective to the point of smothering, and her domination combined with the libidinous temptations of all the young female flesh flitting about is toxic.  Irene is a predatory lesbian who blackmails and inveigles girls into doing her bidding (“all you have to do is obey me”) and orchestrates the release of the girls’ pent up sexual energy with regularly scheduled trips to the shed with Henry (Clovis Dave), the strapping wood delivery (in more ways than one) guy.  She abuses the authority granted her by Fourneau in the same way that Fourneau abuses the authority granted her by the people who placed her in charge of their daughters.  As in a prison, these abuses are common knowledge to the “inmates” yet are not spoken of in public.

While La Residencia is a Women in Prison film in spirit, it is also about the curiosity of young people, both sexually and in regards to life in general.  The most obvious example of this is Luis’ antics around the school.  He wants to see the girls shower so badly, that he puts his life at risk to get an eyeful.  He plays boyfriend to some of the young ladies, but it’s with the seeming naiveté of a boy in the throes of puppy love.  This can be seen as a result of how his sexuality is repressed and twisted by his mother (he knows nothing about the physical act of sex, but he desires the bodies of the girls) as well as being an act of defiance (just covertly).  Another prominently defiant character is Catherine (Pauline Challoner) who openly flouts Fourneau’s authority, even though she knows the punishment that will be visited upon her.  Catherine’s actions are those of a self-discovery of her independence, no matter the cost.  And yet, this is not truly viewed as a positive in this cinematic world, more like the nail that sticks up getting hammered down.  Upon her arrival at the school, Theresa notices the signs of Luis following her (a knocked over plant, doors that are left ajar, and so on), and she approaches these with the natural inquisitiveness of a young person investigating the world with both wonder and trepidation (in the same way that she begins to investigate her sexuality).  Nevertheless, the discoveries that Theresa makes about sexuality in general are not ones that could be considered healthy.  Instead, she is shown only about how sex is used as a weapon, a tool, and about how the gaze of people falls on her and other young women without their consent or desire.  Inquisitiveness is not rewarded in this film; it is punished, with murder being arguably the worst of the sanctions.    

    

I think there are parallels to be drawn between this film and Serrador’s other feature length theatrical film, Who Can Kill a Child?, and the predominant of these lies in the mentality of children/young people that have been twisted and perverted by the actions of the adults around them.  These kids learn from the poor examples they have witnessed, but more than that, they take the lessons learned and go several steps further, turning things around on the adults in an augmented, disproportionately appropriate fashion.  In this sense, both of these movies are in the vein of “as you sow, so shall you reap” morality tales.  Even with our sympathies lying with the kids, however, their actions are still terrifying.  After all, these are monsters that we, that adults, created.  And they are worse than us.

MVT:  The creeping, skanky, gothic atmosphere of the film maintains interest, even during the more talkative sections, and it aids greatly in delivering some powerful moments throughout.

Make or Break:  The first onscreen murder is expertly handled in every way from the moment the killer’s black figure pops up into frame, the use of dissolves, and the lyrical piano score to the fantastic final sonic effect of a record (like a life) winding down.

Score:  7/10