Horror Express / Gothic Originals: Blood For Dracula (Paul Morrissey, 1974)

On first viewing, ‘Blood for Dracula’ was by far my favourite of the two Paul Morrissey / Udo Kier horror films. Long story short: upon returning to the film for the first time in many years, my opinion remains unchanged.

‘Blood..’ has a genuinely funny / sexy premise (helpfully summarised by the Italian release title, which translates as ‘Dracula Seeks a Virgin’s Blood… and He is Dying of Thirst!!!’), and an interesting and unconventional take on the Dracula/vampire mythos, but more importantly, it also feels far more tonally consistent and comfortable in its own skin than Flesh For Frankenstein had a year earlier.

I’m not quite sure how to quantify that impression exactly, but… this one feels more like the kind of European film which an actual European filmmaker might have made, if that makes any sense? It is a film which actually seems to have risen from the culture in which the story takes place, rather than reflecting the perspective of a cynical outsider looking to tear shit up and upset people. As a result, we’ve got less sniggering from the back row this time around, and more actual stuff-which-is-funny. Taken purely as a black comedy in fact, ‘Blood for Dracula’ is often pretty sublime.

Once again, Udo Kier must be singled out for praise here. Dialling it down slightly from his mincing fascist Baron in ‘Flesh..’, his malnourished, hypochondriac Count Dracula is a truly pitiful creation. It is often reported that Kier starved himself to the point of infirmity before taking on the role, and his frighteningly cadaverous, translucently pale visage certainly bears this out. Barely keeping it together during moments when he is required to present himself in public or interact with other human beings, Keir’s performance is, in its own strange way, just as much of a compelling vision of the vampire-as-other as Max Shreck’s Graf Orlok in Murnau’s ‘Nosferatu’.

For all this though, the energy Kier puts into the nauseous bathroom freak-outs we’re subjected to as Dracula expels torrents of tainted blood from his system is remarkable. Both horrifyingly intense and disconcertingly intimate, these scenes of physical collapse prefigure the similarly unforgettable transformations Kier put himself through in Walerian Borowczyk’s ‘Docteur Jekyll et les Femmes’ (1981), whilst the fact that he manages to carry off this disconcerting business without undercutting the film’s comedy is little short of extraordinary. (Indeed, he even manages to deliver one of the greatest lines in film history whilst in the midst of his unnatural convulsions.) (1)

Here though, unlike in ‘Flesh..’, Udo is assisted by the presence of a supporting cast who (for the most part) prove strong and/or interesting enough to go toe-to-toe with him. Arno Jürging is once again very good, playing it less broad and rather more cunning than in the previous film as Dracula’s dedicated valet/servant, and I was also very impressed by British-born actress Maxime McKendry, who is absolutely dead-on as the harried, snobbish matriarch of the poverty-stricken aristocratic family Dracula infiltrates in search of a bride.

Best-known for her work in the fashion industry, McKendry was seemingly cast here as a result of her friendship with Andy Warhol (perhaps his only tangible contribution to these films, beyond lending his name to their American release), but she is so good, it is almost impossible to believe that this was her only acting credit.

Her matter-of-fact response to walking in on the sight of her youngest daughter being raped by the gardener is one of the film’s blackly comedic highlights, although her doddering, crackpot husband, played by no less a personage than Vittorio De Sica, proves equally amusing, seemingly improvising the lion’s share of deeply eccentric performance.

Elsewhere, Elsa Lanchester-lookalike Milena Vukotic is also memorable as the family’s eldest daughter, and even ol’ Joe Dallesandro is served better here than he was in ‘Flesh..’, despite making no effort either to exhibit any emotion or to disguise his incongruous New York drawl.

Once again, Joe is called upon to embody the brutish, proletariat assassin of Kier’s aristocratic entitlement, but the script’s decision to go all out in making his scowling, sex pest gardener an early-doors communist proves inspired; the sheer misery he manages to pile upon the poor Count’s head, quoting simplified Marx-Leninism as he shags his way through through his employer’s assorted daughters, is comedy gold.

Meanwhile, ‘Blood..’ is, if anything, even more grandly appointed than ‘Flesh..’, with the familiar Villa Parisi, which serves as the film’s primary location, looking absolutely beautiful here, augmented by Enrico Box’s exquisite set dressing and Luigi Kuveiller’s hazy, diffused photography. Ancient and austere yet decrepit, chilly and depressing, the villa provides a perfect visual metaphor for the fading, dysfunctional dynasty who dwell within it, whilst its bright, airy spaces offer a stark contrast to the dusty, shadowed chambers occupied by both the film’s peasants, and its vampires.

Claudio Gizzi’s stately, orchestral score feels more appropriate here than it did amid the comic book slaughter of ‘Flesh..’, particularly during the film’s strikingly melancholy Transylvanian title sequence, during which we see Dracula swathed in near total darkness, painstakingly applying the make up which allows him to pass as human in preparation for his reluctant departure from his ancestral estate.

Largely devoid of camp/comedic intent, these opening scenes are in fact extremely sad. In spite of everything, we feel for the Count, as he is pulled away from his crepuscular world of taxidermy and dried flower arrangements by the ugly realities of seeking sustenance in a cruel world which no longer defers to his aristocratic pedigree.

Sequences such as that in which Kier and Jürging inter the remains of Dracula’s now-expired vampiric sister (Eleonora Zani), who after untold centuries has expired from her ‘thirst’, are simply fine, atmospheric filmmaking, and, in using vampirism as a prism by which to explore aging and mortality, Morrissey even finds himself pre-empting the funereal tone of Tony Scott’s The Hunger to some extent. (Which also makes this pretty much Goths on Film 101, children of the dark should take note.)

Assuming viewers are prepared to roll with the total absence of sympathetic characters (pretty much a given for a Paul Morrissey film), ‘Blood for Dracula’s greatest flaw is probably the performances by the actresses playing the family’s other three daughters. Despite including ‘Suspiria’s Stefania Casini and poliziotteschi stalwart Silvia Dionisio amongst their number, one suspects that these ladies were probably not cast for their thespian talents (their participation in the film’s soft focus sex scenes is both lengthy and relatively explicit), and insisting that they recite their dialogue in heavily-accented, phonetic English strikes me as having been a really bad decision.

Contrary to standard practice in the Italian film industry, my impression is that these Morrissey films must have been shot with live sound, but I wonder to what extent Casini, Dionisio and other Italian performers were aware of this? To my ears, much of their dialogue in the film sounds akin to a ‘guide track’, waiting to be replaced with something better in the dub, and as a result, much of what they have to say is both excruciatingly delivered and also somewhat incomprehensible.

(To be fair, De Sica also suffers from the same problem, but it’s less of an issue given that his character is supposed to be a rambling old duffer who rarely says anything of narrative importance. And yes, SDH subtitles would no doubt help, but I watched the film on this occasion via an old DVD copy which offers no such luxuries.)

Aside from this unfortunate throwback to Morrissey’s earlier bad-on-purpose methodology however, I was surprised at just how well ‘Blood for Dracula’ stands up. Both effective and actually quite affecting in parts, it’s an accomplished social satire and an intriguingly clever / self-aware take on a late period gothic horror film - but most importantly, it’s also still uproariously entertaining despite its decadent languors, easily capable of winning over a suitably cynical/open-minded crowd nearly half a century later. The next time I find myself idly mulling over a list of ‘best vampire movies’ or ‘best horror-comedies’, I definitely feel it’s earned itself a spot.

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(1)Amazingly, it has only just occurred to be that there might actually be a tangible connection between these two Morrissey films and Borowczyk’s ‘The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osbourne’, or ‘Bloodbath of Dr Jekyll’, or whatever you wish to call it. I mean, obviously Borowczyk brought a very different sensibility to the table, and his film was made nearly a decade later, in a different country, but think about it. Intense performance from Udo Kier in the lead; chaotic / anti-authoritarian feel, ‘shocking’ content and overwhelming emphasis on cruelty, excess and perversion. Plus, if you’ve already done Frankenstein and Dracula, Jekyll & Hyde is the natural next step, right? Not that I’m suggesting Borowczyk was directly influenced by these films, you understand, but could the idea of the Jekyll film forming the final part of a trilogy have been floating around somewhere in the background when his film was being conceived and financed..? Who knows.

Pointless List Making / October Horrors # 14: Hammer Vampire Movies, in order.

Happy Halloween / All Hallows / Samhain / whatever everybody! I’m sorry that I’ve fallen behind on my self-imposed one-post-every-two-days October schedule over the past week or so. I was confident I could stick to it so long as I didn’t get to busy in real life, and provided nothing too unexpected or time-consuming happened... but guess what?

Anyway, having re-watched a few of Hammer’s vampire films recently, I thought it would be fun as an act of pure self-indulgence this October to rank them all in the order in which I like them, and to knock out some quick text to show my workings. The results are below, and I would like to think there are a few CONTROVERSIAL choices, so hang on to your suitably gothic hats, Hammer fans!

1. Brides of Dracula (1960)

Having not watched this one for a few years, I’d started to suspect it might actually be a bit over-rated, but revisiting it recently soon set me straight. [NOTE FOR NERDS: I finally acquired a version of the film sourced from the old Region One U.S. DVD which, unlike subsequent Blu Ray editions, is framed correctly at 1.66 and to my eyes still looks very nice – recommended.]

‘Brides..’ remains a masterpiece of gothic horror, especially during its opening half hour. Not only for its magnificent photography and production design, or for the brooding atmosphere of decadence and dread conjured by Terrence Fisher’s flawlessly classical direction, but also with regard to more down-to-earth matters of narrative and character drama. To my surprise, the story here remains gripping for a modern audience, and genuinely horrific in its implications. The script is rich with beautifully turned, evocative dialogue, and the entire supporting cast do fantastic work in bringing it all to life, with every single character who appears on screen enriching the proceedings in one way or another; far too many to list here, but to pick just one example, even the bloke manning the stable at the girls’ school gets to use his one minute of screen-time to deliver an evocative soliloquy about his collection of horse brasses reminding him of the seasons of the year.

It’s a shame then that things go a bit silly in the last few minutes – inaugurating not only Hammer’s long-running tradition of killing off vampires in really stupid, anticlimactic ways, but also of ineffectual vampire brides who dither about the place doing absolutely nothing – but until that point at least, this is Hammer Horror at its absolute finest, arguably the text-book example of the heights the studio could scale in their Bray-era heyday.

2. Twins of Evil (1972)

From October 2017: “Tudor Gates’ ultra-pulpy script drives things way over the edge of self-parody (perhaps the reason I’ve underrated the film in the past?), but the chaps in charge of production design, cinematography etc don’t seem to have noticed the shift in tone, instead delivering one of the best-looking and most atmospheric (not to mention most violent and erotically charged) films Hammer produced during the ‘70s. The result is a film that is really funny (the almost ‘South Park’-like antics of Cushing’s puritan witch-burning club), slyly subversive of the Hammer formula (no moral black & whites to be found here), and an exceptional example of straight up, late period gothic horror all round.”

3. Vampire Circus (1971)

One of the darkest (in both sense of the word) films to ever carry the Hammer name, ‘Vampire Circus’ goes off-brand in pretty hair-raising fashion, adding a brooding, Eastern European flavour to its grimly relentless and exceptionally gory reinvention of familiar “sins of the father” gothic tropes. With vampires who look like depraved ‘70s rock stars, disturbing intimations of paedophilia and nods to Camus’s ‘The Plague’ (and/or Poe’s ‘Masque of the Red Death’ – take your pick), this is a heady brew by anyone’s standards, and Robert Young directs with an intensity that sometimes boils over into a nigh-on visionary fervour, lending a hellish, hallucinatory feel to the film’s intense and spell-binding horror set pieces.

Patriarchal authority – aided by John Moulder-Brown from ‘Deep End’ as one of Hammer’s best ever juvenile leads - may win out in the end as tradition demands, but it takes one hell of a battering along the way, making for a pyrrhic victory that leaves ‘Vampire Circus’ feeling like an unlikely cousin to the nihilistic, post-Romero horror films that genre historians like to tell us were making Hammer’s efforts look old hat by the early ‘70s.

4. Taste The Blood of Dracula (1970)

Not only my favourite of the brace of ribald Victorian London movies Hammer made in the early ‘70s, but by far the best of the Christopher Lee Dracula films, ‘Taste the Blood..’ finds relatively young n’ fiery director Peter Sasdy breathing new life into the franchise, not just through the imaginatively rendered new setting, but by delivering what is arguably the only instalment in the series since the 1958 original to have been made with serious dramatic intent (the Dracula-free ‘Brides..’ notwithstanding).

Far stronger meat the any of the earlier sequels, ‘Taste the Blood..’ pre-empts the aforementioned ‘Twins of Evil’ by pushing back hard against the patriarchal authority and Manichean certainties of earlier Hammer horrors, introducing a transgressive note of moral ambiguity as its nightgown-clad young ingénues (Linda Hayden amongst them) find themselves pushed into a perilous spiritual interzone, forced the choose between the seductive and exotic evil of Dracula and the equally predatory depredations of their own morally bankrupt fathers - a cabal of depraved big-wigs and aristos whose private pursuit of perversion not only allows the Prince of Darkness an entry-point into the ‘modern’ era, but makes his no nonsense Satanic evil seem positively sympathetic in comparison to their own sweaty, corrupt and very British hypocrisy. (Heaven knows, there are certainly a few contemporary power-brokers viewers might enjoy super-imposing onto these sorry specimens as they face their grisly comeuppance…)

5. The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974)

Ok, I know that production difficulties, cross-cultural confusion and general creative desperation may have prevented this one from being quite as earth-shattering as the full scale Hammer horror / Shaw Bros kung-fu crossover of our dreams, but it’s still at least 75% as good as the one in my dreams, so that’s something right? In fact, the very fact this film exists at all fills my soul with joy each time I think of it, just as the sight of Peter Cushing getting busy alongside David Chiang and Szu Shih in the middle of a chaotic, Chang Cheh directed vampire kung fu brawl does each time I watch it.

I also love the crazy, proto-‘Black Magic’ Hong Kong horror type shit going down here as the genuinely horrid, cadaverous, golden masked vampires chain down writhing naked virgins in the lair and drain their blood into a bubbling cauldron; I love witnessing the exultant return of wild, expressionistic gel lighting and moth-eaten, cobweb shrouded sets to the hammer universe (Shaw Bros certainly didn’t mess around when it came to ensuring their horror movies looked the part), and I love the way the British scriptwriters seem to keep trying to rip off ‘The Seven Samurai’ during the big, climactic save-the-village battle scene (was it the only Asian film they dredge up from the memories to use as a reference point?) – yep, there’s a lot to love here, that's for sure.

What I love somewhat less however is the fact that the filmmakers were forced to crowbar Dracula into the story at the behest of Warner Bros (who then never even bothered releasing the damn thing), necessitating the last minute employment of some truly hopeless geezer to play him in Lee’s absence (no disrespect intended to the late John Forbes-Robertson, for turns out it is he, but seriously, W and indeed TF). Also, Dracula’s presence here raises a question that has long haunted me in the dark hours of the night: if, as the prologue makes clear, Dracula upped sticks and buggered off to China one hundred years before the events of this film take place, then who the hell has Van Helsing spent his life traipsing across Europe fighting..? I’ve never quite figured that one out.

6. The Vampire Lovers (1970)

From May 2013: “Delivering pretty much exactly what you’d expect in terms of lavish Victoriana, nocturnal cemetery hi-jinks, furtive hints of lesbianism and craggy-faced puritanical ass-kicking, Roy Ward Barker’s initial take on the Carmilla mythos essentially defines the agenda for the ‘70s Euro-vampire movie, setting a bar that the continent’s other purveyors of such material could proceed to soar above or mambo under as they saw fit. Although it never really achieves anything exceptional (beyond a gentle bit of first-time-in-a-British-horror same sex petting), ‘..Lovers’ is solid as a brick shithouse - as generic and satisfying as horror movies get.”

7. Kiss of the Vampire (1962)

AKA, the one everybody always forgets, this modest production is another splendid piece of ‘60s gothic horror, its atmosphere of brooding decadence very much in keeping with ‘Brides..’ two years earlier. Though perhaps a tad over-lit in places, the scenes in the castle and at the masque ball nonetheless feature some striking, proto-psychedelic photography, whilst the plight of our honeymooning lead couple is actually quite affecting, and Noel Willman and Isobel Black are wicked sinister as members of the predatory vampire family. I’m also pretty sure this must be one of the first films to have ever directly connected vampirism with Satanism and black magic, and the latter element plays directly into a bat-shit crazy climax (no pun intended) which must be seen to be believed. Fantastic stuff.

8. The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973)

Notorious for playing out more like a ‘70s pulp spy novel or an ITC action show than a traditional vampire movie, this tale of the diabolical Count using a Satanic coven as a front for manipulating a gaggle of weak-willed politicians and scientists into providing him with enough super-charged bubonic plague to blackmail the entire globe is…. well, it’s a bit of a head-scratcher, to be honest. It certainly left me happily confused when I videoed it off late night TV as a teenager, that’s for sure, but you’d be hard-pressed not to find it one hell of a lot of fun too. In retrospect, it’s wild tonal inconsistencies and cavalier approach to genre expectations kind of reminds me more than anything of Gordon Hessler & Chris Wickings’ wonderfully bizarre Scream and Scream Again from a few year earlier.

Cushing in particular plays a blinder here, proving once again that he could lend gravitas to an outer space volleyball match should the need arise, and, as I mentioned in the comments on this blog just a few months back, the scene he shares where the late Freddie Jones – playing a tormented bacteriologist – is a real highlight, a tour de force of thespian muscle, with a few fistfuls of ominous dialogue helping out too. Likewise, the desk-bound confrontation between Van Helsing and Dracula is great, perhaps reigniting some of the fire of their original ’58 face-off for a stranger new age.

In fact, Lee gets some considerably more interesting stuff to do here than in most of the previous Dracula instalments, what with the Count passing himself off as some kind of reclusive Eastern European billionaire, more like a blood-drinking Bond villain than anything else, with the genuinely horrifying prospect of Count Dracula presiding over a global plague pandemic inadvertently returning the figure of the vampire to the rat-like death-bringer of Murnau’s ‘Nosferatu’, perhaps.

Elsewhere meanwhile, we’ve got, oh, I dunno – motorcycle stunts, shoot-outs and moody, hirsute cops running around, loads of campy Satanic hoo-hah, plus a few moments of startling, mean-spirited gore and…. Joanna Lumley being consumed by the Sapphic attentions of the chained up vampire brides…?! Good lord.

It’s a shame the whole thing culminates in the most egregious you’ve-gotta-be-fuckin-kidding-me ending of any film on this list (hawthorne bushes, I ask you), but… that in itself was almost a tradition by this point, I suppose.

9. Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972)

Oh, man…. I mean, what can you say? I mean, as bad as ‘1972 AD’ undoubtedly is, I don’t know if there’s a single fan of British horror who could refuse to unconditionally love it on some level. If you’re reading this, you know the score, I’m sure. Stoneground performing ‘Alligator Man’! Reversed tape recordings and Caroline Munro getting blood all over her cleavage at Johnny Alucard’s swinging Black Mass! And how about that opening prologue with Dracula getting a cart-wheel where the sun don’t shine? Beat THAT, Terrence Fisher!

10. Dracula (1958)

A bit of a shocker I realise, but, despite the impossibly vast scale of this film’s influence on genre cinema, as a stand-alone viewing experience, it’s never really clicked with me, despite numerous attempts to go back to it with a fresh eye.

Moreso than any of the other early Hammer horrors, ‘Dracula’ strikes me as having dated really badly, making it difficult to dredge up much contemporary relevance from it. All of the scenes that don’t directly involve Dracula feel dry and tedious, suffocated by those plush, Gainsborough interiors and formal, stiff upper lip acting styles. The dismissive treatment of the female characters within the film meanwhile plays as flat-out comical to modern audiences (even more-so than in Stoker’s novel, where Lucy and Mina are allowed at least a certain amount of agency), and, personally, I’ve always found the make-up and hair-styling in this one to be pretty disastrous too.

On the plus side however, marvellous performances from Cushing and Lee, obviously, and the final confrontation between Dracula and Van Helsing is impossible to fuck with – an immortal and historic scene, still exhilerating to this day, without which this film would likely be languishing even further down this list, despite it’s having directly fathered all of the other entries.

FUN TRIVIA: I know everyone has heard this story before, but my dad was working in a regional cinema in South Wales when ‘Dracula’ was released, and he actually did once tell me that he remembered people screaming and fainting in the aisles, and complaining to the management that they hadn’t been able to sleep for a week etc. after seeing it. Imagine that! Incredible to reflect upon how thoroughly our senses must have been blasted over the subsequent six decades, given that this film is now barely able to keep most modern viewers awake, to be perfectly honest.

11. Dracula Has Risen From The Grave (1968)

The boilerplate script for this ho-hum ‘Dracula’ sequel may be thoroughly uninspired, but I nonetheless have a soft spot for the film, based largely on the extravagant, fairy tale-like production design overseen and quite beautifully captured by master cinematographer turned uneven horror director Freddie Francis. Never has mittel-European fantasyland of pre-1970 Hammer looked as richly colourful and unreal as it does here, with the entire movie seemingly taking place inside some dark recess of Tim Burton’s fevered childhood brain, where he keeps the long-supressed good stuff. The climax, which as I recall sees Dracula impaled upon a massive stone cross on a windswept mountainside as lightning flashes above him, is pretty cool too.

12. Countess Dracula (1971)

Hungarian director Peter Sasdy’s under-stated take on the Countess Bathory mythos is a perfectly creditable historical drama, with fine performances from Nigel Green and Sandor Elès, but its dour formalism and pointed refusal to dish out the horror / exploitation goods soon becomes a drag. Despite her top billing, Ingrid Pitt has very little to do here, whilst the special effects brought in for her brief supernatural scenes feel silly and incongruous, and the sketchy vampire component has all too obviously been grafted onto the script for the sake of commercial necessity, creating a ruinous disjuncture between the film promised by Hammer’s marketing, and the one which Sasdy actually delivered.

13. Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966)

Like a number of films on the lower reaches of this list, ‘Prince of Darkness’ has always struck me as simply playing like a realisation of the Hammer back office’s idea of what a bog standard, utilitarian vampire movie should look like. No spark, no invention, and certainly no unnecessary expense; just eighty-something minutes of the same old stuff, assembled in the customary order to appease the market. You’ve got some coaches rumbling through the woods, a big ol’ pasteboard castle, a few rubber bats, some bits with Dracula popping up in ladies’ bedrooms and rather comically enfolding them in his cloak… what more do you want, blood? (Sorry.)

I dunno – am I missing something here? I remain eternally disappointed that the Fisher / Sangster / Robinson dream team turned in a picture this uninspired. Basically the only things which really stick in my memory are Dracula’s initial resurrection scene (which is pretty damn cool), and Andrew Keir as the priest, warming his arse on the fire in the tavern.

14. Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter (1974)

I know this one has its fans, so I’ll throw in a “I’ve only seen it once, quite a while ago” disclaimer, but I remember being decidedly underwhelmed by this one. In theory, the idea of letting Brian Clemens re-invent the Hammer vampire film as a swash-buckling, action-adventure type franchise sounds like a brilliant one, but sadly I recall the result delivering precious little action and a total lack of adventure. Perhaps budgetary constraints and production difficulties were to blame, who knows, but Horst Janson is certainly wooden as a box of stakes in the title role, little of interest happens in the script, and basically the cast just seem to spent half the movie half-heartedly trudging around in a patch of woods and some out-buildings. On the plus side, well…. Caroline Munro. That’s all I’ve got. Perhaps I should give this one another try some time?

15. Lust for a Vampire (1971)

The story of how Jimmy Sangster made the transition from an incisive and inspired scriptwriter to a frankly terrible director, crassly attempting to reinvent Hammer’s most iconic franchises as low-brow, self-parodic comic capers, may have been told many times, but you’ll get to revisionism from me on this score. ‘Lust for a Vampire’ is witless, embarrassing guff which can’t even seem to get the simple business of being sexy right, replacing the genuine eroticism of ‘The Vampire Lovers’ with woeful, sub-Benny Hill type tomfoolery. I’ll confess, I happily sat through this one a few times on late night TV back in the day and wasn’t too appalled, but woe betide anyone who tries to watch it sober.

16. Scars of Dracula (1970)

I think my review from last year’s October Horrors marathon probably already did a pretty good job of setting out the extent to which I hated this one. Let’s just say that it gets my vote as Hammer’s absolute worst (‘Holiday On The Buses’ possibly notwithstanding) and leave it at that.

Franco Files / October Horrors 2019 # 4: Dracula’s Daughter (Jess Franco, 1972)

The early 1970s found Jess Franco’s restless creative spirit riding high in terms of both profligacy and artistry, hitting a peak of productivity that he would never again match (although the purple patch which followed his return to Spain in the early 1980s came pretty close).

According to the information compiled by Stephen Thrower for his exhaustive Franco filmography [see the link to his book below], no less than ten Jess Franco films were completed or released during 1971, with eight more to follow in 1972, including some of the director’s best (and strangest) work – ‘A Virgin Among The Living Dead’ (at this point still bearing it’s intended title, ‘La Nuit de L’etoiles Filantes’), ‘The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein’, Les Demons and ‘Le Journal Intime d’une Nymphomane’, alongside a steady stream of more forgettable quote-unquote “mainstream” pictures like ‘The Vengeance of Dr Mabuse’, ‘Un Silencio De Tumba’ and ‘Devil’s Island Lovers’. Suffice to say, the images which unfolded before our hero’s retina across these few short years would have been enough to send lesser men screaming to the asylum (hopefully that one from Lorna the Exorcist in which nobody wears any pants).

Amidst this frantic whirlwind of cash-strapped cinematic alchemy, it’s unsurprising that a relatively low key venture like the generically titled ‘Dracula’s Daughter’ - shot right in the centre of this exhausting period, in the early months of ’72 - could easily be over-looked. Generally regarded by Francophiles as a slight entry in the great man’s explosive early ‘70s catalogue, this one has often been seen either as a scrappy after-thought to the far wilder pair of monster-based horror movies the director shot a few months earlier (the aforementioned ‘Erotic Rites..’ and Dracula: Prisoner of Frankenstein), or else as a poor relation to his more striking and sublime vampire-sex epics, the earlier Vampiros Lesbos and the later ‘Le Comtesse Noire’ / ‘Female Vampire’.

A dismissive review in Thrower’s definitive Murderous Passions: The Delirious Cinema of Jesús Franco a few years ago would seem to have sealed ‘Dracula’s Daughter’s fate as an also-ran, but, returning to it recently after a period in which I’ve largely been forced to go cold turkey on my Franco habit, I actually enjoyed it a great deal.

Viewed in quick succession with the lunatic works which surround it in the director’s catalogue, I can understand that ‘Dracula’s Daughter’ might fade into the background, but hitting it up cold still gave me a pretty dizzying high – like a drink from a crystal clear oasis amid the arid desert of films not made by everybody’s favourite perverted Iberian hobbit.

As Thrower’s review discusses at length, the quote-unquote ‘plot’ here is indeed a back-of-a-badly-shredded-napkin bunch of nonsense, leaving character relationships and emotions / motivations flimsy and mutable in the extreme, and reducing the inevitable, exposition-clogged ‘police investigation’ segments to a meaningless bore, with Franco once again re-heating the same tepid leftovers from The Awful Dr Orlof that he’d return to endlessly in his horror projects over the years, for some godforsaken reason. But, such was my happiness at returning to the Francoverse on this occasion, I welcomed even these scenes, whilst elsewhere, more ambient pleasures of Franco’s filmmaking were all present and correct.

Though they understandably tend to get over-shadowed by Soledad and Lina in fans’ affections, Britt Nichols (with an earthy, shop-soiled Jane Fonda kind of look) and Anne Libert (fresh off her equally dazed, acid-witch turn as Melissa the bird-woman in ‘Erotic Rites..’) are both exceptional Franco women, as oddly mysterious as they are self-evidently beautiful, and it’s great to see them both stepping up and doing their thing here, as a pair of dreamy-eyed cousins / lovers falling victim to the vampiric pull of the Karnstein mansion.

And as to the nature of that ‘thing’ they’re doing meanwhile, well, I won’t need to remind readers that Franco was a filmmaker who approached lesbian sex scenes with the same enthusiasm more conventional directors might reserve for a car chase or bank heist, and Nichols & Libert’s big number at the mid-point of ‘Dracula’s Daughter’ is a bravura sequence indeed, in spite of some rather plain photography.

Franco’s characteristic abstraction of the female body into fleshy fields of hill and valley is intercut here with footage of the director’s long-term friend and collaborator Daniel White playing the piano (the same one we see Howard Vernon tickling away on in ‘A Virgin Among The Living Dead’, I believe) with dramatic gusto, beneath glimmering crystal chandeliers. The composer’s lithe, drowsy explorations of suffocatingly romantic melodicism cast their spell as powerfully here as at any point in Franco’s cinema, helping transform this sequence into a pure, uncut dose of the director’s intoxicating artistry.

A later tryst between the two women, in which Nichols’ breasts rise in the foreground like mountains as Libert’s face writhes out of focus behind them and an incongruous ‘suspense’ cue plays on the soundtrack, is also remarkable for its sheer strangeness.

(White, incidentally, plays the role of the geriatric Count Karnstein in the film, and if you’re expecting an explanation of why a refugee from Sheridan LeFanu’s writing lives in Portugal and keeps Count Dracula in his basement, well… you’re watching to wrong movie here, frankly.)

‘Dracula’s Daughter’, like many films of this period, was filmed around the towns of Cascais and Sintra near Lisbon, in and around the same set of extraordinary buildings that lent their unique atmos to ‘A Virgin…’, ‘Erotic Rites..’ and ‘Les Demons’ amongst others, and they looking as startlingly otherworldy here as ever, particularly when Nichols and Libert take some long walks amid the tropical greenery.

Highlights elsewhere meanwhile include the way that the film pretty much opens with waves crashing upon some deserted beach, cutting to a crash zoom into an extreme close up of a female eyeball, followed by some trademark Franco in-camera weirdness as a woman stripping off for a bath in her hotel room fights to remain on-screen as reflections of the churning coastline, caught in some kind of balcony window that Jess appears to be shooting through, swamp the frame, to the accompaniment of a lugubrious dinner jazz cue. (She’ll soon be murdered by a roaming vamp we presume must be Count Dracula though, so no worries.)

Later on, I also enjoyed a staggeringly beautiful shot in which Libert strolls out across an ancient-looking stone balcony, observing the foggy coastal hills below; nothing special really, but something about the leisurely pace, the blinding sun shining across the water and Libert’s uncanny presence just struck me as a great little bit of Franco magic. (MENTAL NOTE: must book part # 2 of The Great Jess Franco Location Tour ASAP.)

Elsewhere, I also loved the Franco’s own role in ‘Dracula’s Daughter’, essaying the role of one “Cyril Jefferson”, Count Karnstein’s ‘secretary’ - a lank-haired, spaced out occult oddball who (in a distant nod perhaps to the plotting of Hammer’s 1958 ‘Dracula’) we eventually learn has taken the Karnstein job specifically in order to destroy the vampire menace. Prior to that however, he is happy just to infuriate Alberto Dalbe’s dour police inspector by turning up at random intervals to deliver unfathomable metaphysical pronouncements (“In the night the silence of death will surround us, interrupted from time to time by screams of horror; that’s the eternal law of mystery and terror”). Definitely one of the director’s best acting performances in a non-idiot role, and he even gets to wear a top hat in a few scenes, which is awesome.

Combined with the humid, wave-crashing atmospherics of Franco’s familiar coastal interzone, and the ceaseless chirping of sea-birds on the soundtrack, Cyril’s rolling stream of fervent blather (he even pontificates at one point about “the blood-drinking birds of death”, or somesuch) does a wonderful job of torpedoing Dalbe’s doomed attempt to hang on to some torn thread of rationality. He may persist with pottering about looking for alibis and forensic evidence, but we in the audience know it’s a lost cause – like us, he’s beyond Franco’s looking glass here, neck-deep in the primordial stew of this familiar holiday villa dreamworld.

On the horror side of things meanwhile, Howard Vernon may not have much to do as Dracula, but it’s still nice to see the old boy enjoying himself, in footage presumably shot simultaneously with ‘Dracula: Prisoner of Frankenstein’. He certainly has the same full-on boggling eyes / open-mouthed fangy grin thing going on here as he arises from his coffin in some dank basement, although Franco’s character seems to have stolen his top hat from the earlier film. (You could possibly argue that the use of wide angle(?) framing for these basement shots pays tribute to Karl Freund’s uncanny crypt tracking shots in Browning’s ‘Dracula’, but… it would be a push.)

Although The Count never gets a chance to get out and about in this one, he does at least get to roll around in his coffin with a kidnapped nightclub stripper whilst Nichols, as his ‘daughter’, nails down the lid - which was presumably a lot more fun than Christopher Lee was allowed in all those ‘Dracula’ sequels where Hammer insisted he spend his time skulking about in darkened basements.

In another example of Franco’s perplexing tendency to obsessively recreate the bad as well as good elements of his earlier films however, the lacklustre finale of ‘Dracula’s Daughter’ seems to echo that of his disastrous 1970 ‘Count Dracula’. Nonetheless, for what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure this is the first and only time I’ve ever seen Dracula dispatched by getting a stake between his eyes, and to be honest, if you’re still awake and sober enough to object by that point in proceedings, that’s your problem.

For some, ‘Dracula’s Daughter’ will seem like a gossamer thin veil of Franco mystique spread far too thin, betraying the exhaustion that his relentless early ‘70s schedule had led him to, and marking the point at which the thread of his “shoot first, ask questions later” approach (assembling new films out of footage stolen during shoots for other projects, essentially) finally snapped. For me here in 2019 though, it still served as a welcome reminder of the reasons why we (or at least, I ) have dedicated so much time and effort to following the star-dust trail of this man’s sensuous, mind-altering, defiantly irrational approach to filmmaking. (And, a few glasses of red wine probably helped too, TBH.)

As per Franco Files tradition, I’m obliged to conclude with a scorecard, and, after careful consideration, it looks as if ‘Dracula’s Daughter’ gets a straight run down the middle:

Kink: 3/5
Creepitude: 3/5
Pulp Thrills: 3/5
Altered States: 3/5
Sight Seeing: 3/5

A creditable score.

Bloody NEL: Dracula’s Brother by Robert Lory (1973)

Until I picked this up somewhere the other day, I’d never heard of this series of Robert Lory 'Dracula' books. (This is the third in a series of five, following on from ‘Dracula Returns’ and ‘The Return of Dracula’, apparently.)

Once again, this is a reprint of a U.S. book, published earlier the same year by Pinnacle, and the book’s copyright notice bears the telltale name of ‘70s paperback kingpin and ‘Nick Carter – Killmaster’ overlord Lyle Kenyon Engel.

Despite this copyright however, Robert Lory was a genuine writer, and there is no reason to believe this is not his work, presumably written on spec for Engel's publishing operation.

Much like Marvel’s '70s 'Tomb of Dracula' comics, these books seem to feature Dracula running around getting into scrapes in the modern world, acting almost as a kind of sympathetic / super-heroic figure, whilst a bunch of human protagonists follow in his wake, trying to piece together the secrets of his power - insofar as I can tell, at least.

A quick skim read doesn’t suggest that there’s much in the way of atmos or strong horror content going on here, but there is a whole bunch of hoo-hah about Atlantis, a load of occult profanations, and lots of run-of-the-mill action / adventure / espionage type stuff, so…. what can I tell you folks, this thing looks nuts.

Gothic Originals / October Horrors # 11: Scars of Dracula (Roy Ward Baker, 1970)

Another year, another straggler crossed off the increasingly short list of “Hammer horror films I’ve never seen”. In fact, if we strictly limit things to their period/gothic horror output, I think this might be the very last one to unfold before my tired eyes.

I suppose I’ve previously avoided ‘Scars of Dracula’ due to the general consensus that it is not very good, but I’ve recently noted some people speaking positively about it, and it’s had a re-release on disc, so… I mean, at the end of the day it’s a Christopher Lee Dracula entry with a reputation for gory violence and Roy Ward Baker calling the shots. How bad can it be, really?

The answer, unfortunately, is very bad indeed. Seriously folks, this one is shockingly poor. It is so unapologetically shit in fact that, if I hadn’t already been in my own living room, and if it hadn’t been raining outside, I probably would have walked out in protest.

Say what you like about Jimmy Sangster’s much-maligned ‘Lust for a Vampire’ and ‘Horror of Frankenstein’ (both of which went into production the same year as this one – ye gods, what on earth was going on over at Hammer House?), at least they were trying to do something a bit different.

‘Scars..’, by contrast embraces the same tone of smirking, half-hearted crappiness, but applies it to a script that is bluntly derivative of earlier entries in the series, barely even summoning the energy to drag itself through the same old clichés one more time.

If you’re feeling charitable (which I tend to be, when it comes to this sort of thing), the two Sangster films could also be excused to a certain extent by the fact that they were helmed by an inexperienced director, trying to bring the blackly humourous aspect of his writing to the screen, with fairly disastrous results.

‘Scars..’ however has no such excuse. Indeed, Baker usually managed to bring some notably superior cinematic chops to the British horror films he directed, sometimes elevating mediocre material to a higher level than it really deserved. Like all work-for-hire directors though, he was at the mercy of what was placed before him by his employers, and it is painfully clear that he has given naff all to work with on ‘Scars..’, whether in terms of budget, scheduling, script, crew or anything else.

The first real warning sign, I think, is the bats. The film opens with the unedifying spectacle of a big, floppy bat-on-a string drooling Kensington gore all over Dracula’s ashes, which are helpfully spread out along with his best cape, on a slab in his mid-European castle at some unspecified point in the fairy tale past (never mind the adventures he had enjoyed in 1890s London in Peter Sasdy’s excellent ‘Taste the Blood of Dracula’ six months earlier). (1)

Admittedly, achieving decent bat effects has always been a problem for gothic horror films, but this one looks particularly onerous, with a sculpted plastic face and an overstuffed body like some giant bluebottle. For a single shot, perhaps we could excuse it, but unfortunately these bats actually go on to play a pretty significant role in the film. Acting as Dracula’s primary avatars, they’re flapping about all over the place, and are central to several of the film’s main horror set-pieces. And yet -- they look absolutely stupid throughout.

The fact that neither Baker nor line producer Aida Young were able to have a quiet word in the ear of one of Hammer’s big-shots to say, look, we’ve got to do something about these bloody bats or the film will be a laughing stock, speaks volumes about how little the company actually cared about the quality of their product at this point in time.

A few years earlier, viewers could have had confidence that even the most mindless horror films Hammer turned out could to some extent be redeemed by their technical accomplishments, proving that a little bit of beautiful photography and classy production design can go a long way. (The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb is a good example.) Those days seem to have been long gone by 1970 though, and ‘Scars of Dracula’ is blandly over-lit throughout, leaving no shadows, no room for atmosphere, and nothing to hide its rather ugly, poverty-stricken sets.

In stark contrast to the attention to detail that used to prevail at Hammer, the props and costuming too are almost unbelievably shoddy here. When Patrick Troughton, playing Dracula’s craven servant Klove, is seen dragging an animal carcass over the back of his horse at the end if a hunting expedition, it looks as if he’s been handed a bedraggled soft toy splashed with red paint and told to make the best of it. I’m not even sure what kind of animal it was supposed to be, to be honest.

Again, I only bring this up as a symptom of the wider malaise affecting every aspect of this production. The fact this scene was filmed and printed, rather than being put on hold whilst the art director was bawled out and some production assistants dispatched to come up with something better before the next tea break, again speaks for itself. (2)

I should make clear that it’s not really my intention to get all high-minded when it comes to assessing the quality of Hammer Dracula movies. I have no desire to echo Christopher Lee’s snooty approach to such things, and I’d be perfectly happy to enjoy a ragged, pulpy Dracula movie full of sex and violence (for such is the reputation of ‘Scars..’ has acquired over the years). But… this damn thing can’t even get being sleazy right.

The bawdy behaviour that comprises much of the first half of the film is pitched strictly at a Benny Hill / pre-‘Confessions of..’ level, with Christopher Matthews as a leering, jack-the-lad type chancer getting his end away with a succession of flirtatious barmaids and the like, but with no actual nudity, and none of the (relatively) grown up eroticism that caused such a stir in Baker’s previous assignment for Hammer, ‘The Vampire Lovers’.

As to violence meanwhile, Baker seems to have realised that his only hope of winning the fans over with this one was to just go for it (I’m reminded of Brian Trenchard Smith’s tales of how he started desperately hacking off limbs and throwing blood around when his budget for 1980’s ‘Turkey Shoot’ was cut in half mid-way through production), and if nothing else, ‘Scars..’ is at least a contender for the goriest film Hammer ever made.

Even here though, things are compromised by those bloody layabouts in the art department. Hammer’s preferred shade of bright scarlet house paint never looked as absurd as it does here in the light of Moray Grant’s remorselessly bland photography, and the resulting parade of rubber bat attacks and lurid close-ups of poorly applied wound make-up achieves the rare distinction of simultaneously feeling both prurient and boring. (3)

One of the more interesting aspects of ‘Scars..’ is its apparent attempt to associate Dracula with bladed weapons. (“Be careful, it’s sharp” is his introductory line, as he walks in on Matthews’ character admiring the obligatory crossed swords mounted on his castle wall.)

This isn’t necessarily a bad idea (and I’m sure Lee would have relished the opportunity for a bit of supernatural swashbuckling), but it is poorly developed here – most notably in an absolutely astonishing scene in which, following an almost shot-for-shot re-tread of the bit in Terrance Fisher’s ‘Dracula’ where The Count reprimands his bride for trying to take a bite of the Harker-surrogate’s throat before him, Dracula here proceeds to punish her by whipping out a butcher’s knife and stabbing her to death.

Aside from the fact that it is entirely unmotivated by the script, this is… very un-vampiric behaviour, to say the least. (If Dracula were to resort to sword-play, surely he’d do so purely for the purposes of pageantry and sadism, rather than hacking away at one of his vassals like some back alley slasher?)

This is basically only a taster though for an even more witless moment later on, when the Lord of the Undead, whose mesmeric powers can crush a man’s soul with a mere glance, apparently resorts to drugging the heroine’s soup. As Jonathan Rigby laments in his review in English Gothic, “what use has Dracula for these pantomime contrivances?”

Anyway – on to positives. There must be some, I suppose?

Well, it’s hard work, but… at least Christopher Lee gets some lines in this one I suppose, with Dracula speaking calmly and assuming his ‘cold but polite host’ role for the first time since Fisher’s 1957 ‘Dracula’, I believe.

Given the voluminous litanies of complaint Lee liked to issue each time he was – ahem – “forced” to appear in another Dracula film, one can only imagine how cheesed off he must have been whilst participating in this particularly shabby instalment, but even if he’s not exactly giving it his all, such are the meagre pleasures offered by ‘Scars..’ that merely hearing Christopher Lee say some things is quite nice.

As always, it’s nice to see Hammer lucky charm Michael Ripper getting a significant role too, appearing here as the world’s least hospitable inn-keeper. He gets quite a lot of screen time in ‘Scars..’, and spends almost all of it ordering people to get out of his inn, refusing to let them in in the first place, or telling them to “go to the devil”. He does though have one lovely moment when he temporarily drops his guard, wistfully telling our lead couple they should enjoy their best years together… shortly before he discovers they’re also would-be vampire hunters and manhandles them out of the front door before they’ve even finished their soup.

As a fan of ‘The Sweeney’, I was delighted too to see a young Dennis Waterman popping up as our ostensible hero, although it’s doubtful that this role did much to help propel him to his later TV fame, as he delivers a veritable master-class on the theme of “ineffectual youth”, despite being thirty two years old at the time.

I also found it interesting that – for some reason – ‘Scars..’ takes the opportunity to include the rarely filmed scene from Stoker’s novel in which Jonathan Harker abseils out of his locked room in Dracula’s castle and find himself trapped in the lower chamber which houses The Count’s coffin. This bit was relatively well done, and provided a welcome break from the remorseless grind of reheated cliché that comprises the rest of the film’s action.

And… that’s about it really.

[Deep sigh.]

In general, I tend to feel a great warmth and fondness for British horror films of all stripes, and for Hammer films in particular. As such, I can usually find a certain amount to enjoy in just about any of them, even if it’s just a bit of period charm and some familiar faces popping in for a scene or two. Even on this basis though, I can’t stress enough just how dispiritingly rubbish I found ‘Scars of Dracula’ to be. It’s really the pits.

Essentially playing out like some cruel, self-reflexive pastiche of the company’s public image, ‘Scars..’ feels less like an actual Hammer film, and more like a realisation of what the closed-minded contemporary critics who wrote horror films off as juvenile trash and never went to see them might have imagined a Hammer film to be like.

By pandering to this kind of Lowest Common Denominator public expectation, the company did themselves a dreadful disservice in ‘70/’71, and this one seems to me to be the absolute nadir of the particularly dodgy patch they seemed to be going through at the time.

At least we can take succour in the fact that they bounced back shortly thereafter with great pictures like ‘Twins of Evil’ and ‘Vampire Circus’, keeping themselves afloat creatively speaking for at least a few more years before the inevitable end arrived in the mid ‘70s. Maybe I should watch one of those again to help take the taste away...

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(I do LOVE some of this foreign language poster artwork for this film though…)

(1) At the risk of sounding like the worst kind of nit-picking fanboy, the fact that ‘Scars of Dracula’ completely blunders the (admittedly loose) sense of chronological continuity established by the other Hammer Draculas just seems to add insult to injury. I mean, after Dracula is defeated in London at the end of ‘Taste the Blood..’, it would seem to set things up perfectly for his resurrection in the same city almost a century later in ‘..AD 1972’ – yet we’ve got this damned mess in the middle, which drags him back to the vague, mittel-european gothic setting we’d previously kissed goodbye to (and frankly had quite enough of) in ‘..Risen from the Grave’ a couple of years earlier!

Is ‘Scars..’ thus non-canonical? Is it a prequel? This being 1970, I’d imagine Tony Hinds and Michael Carreras would have had little to say on the subject beyond, “What the bloody hell are you talking about? Get out of my office!”, but it still irks me.

(2) For further evidence of just how badly put together this movie is, I suggest consulting the unusually extensive list of ‘goofs’ on IMDB.

(3) We should make clear that, after serving a long apprenticeship as a camera operator through the ‘60s, Grant did far better work as DP on ‘The Vampire Lovers’ and ‘Vampire Circus’ amongst others – so again, we can perhaps chalk up the fact that ‘Scars..’ looks as if it was shot under office strip lighting to budget and schedule shortcomings.

October Horrors #5:‘The Dracula Business’(Anthony de Lotbiniere, 1974)

Originally broadcast as a Tuesday night documentary by the BBC in August 1974, ‘The Dracula Business’ is a thoroughly entertaining forty-five minutes, structured in the ever-popular “this thing happened, also this largely unconnected thing happened” manner beloved of mondo movies and parapsychology paperbacks.

After an (unattributed) playback of the ship scene from Murnau’s ‘Nosferatu’, proceedings begin, naturally enough, in Whitby. “I wonder if Count Dracula found this church yard as odd as I do?” muses presenter and Boris Johnson lookalike Dan Farson. Farson is the great nephew of Bram Stoker no less, and a “renowned Soho character” according to my (extremely limited) online research.

After treating some local children to a round of ‘Count Dracula’s Secret’ ice lollies, Farson quizzes them on their knowledge of vampire lore (chalk that up as “scene you definitely wouldn’t see in a documentary these days” # 1), before he attends a meeting of The Dracula Society at Purfleet (and these guys deemed 1972’s ‘Blacula’ “…the mosty horrifying film of the decade” according to my copy of the soundtrack LP, so they know what the hell they’re talking about). “Haven’t you got even ONE crank?” Farson asks the assemblage of mild-mannered eccentrics somewhat disappointedly.

In an attempt to demonstrate how much these programmes cost to make (gag © Eric Idle/Neil Innes), Farson next travels to Transylvania (“..there IS such a place..”) in present-day Romania, where the production captures some remarkably atmospheric footage, visiting a medieval convent decorated with appropriately infernal frescos, wherein nuns ward off evil by circling the grounds hammering planks of wood, whilst peasant-folk who look as if they could have stepped straight out of a Universal torch-wielding mob meanwhile queue up to kiss a carved icon above a well.

We are even presented with a picturesque rural funeral procession, featured in-between shots of mist raising from the forest, as Farson rambles on in pompous Wheatley/Lee type fashion about the depths of ancient superstition and an apparent “outbreak of Vampirism” that ravaged the area in the 18th century.

Remarkably, the filmmakers even manage to track down a woman – one of the singers at the funeral – who, interviewed against a backdrop of the local cemetery, tells Farson (via an interpreter) that her own father was suspected of being a vampire, and was disinterred and staked by village elders. Beat that for local colour.

Back in London meanwhile, things get a tad sillier, as Farson stalks about Highgate cemetery, musing on some recent cases of premature burial. Jarringly, we then jump straight from Farson recalling some spectacularly grim family tales about the ordeals faced by the Stoker family during a cholera outbreak in County Sligo during Bram’s youth, to the London offices of Lorimer Press, where some eager fanboys are sorting through a huge pile of Euro-Horror posters, preparing “..the latest work on vampire films”.

“Paul Naschy, the hunchback of the morgue!”, one of the guys exclaims happily, drawing our attention to a one-sheet for that very motion picture, which sits atop a fairly awesome French poster for (of all things) ‘Blacula’. I’m not sure who these fellows are (we’re not given their names at any point), but they seem like some cool dudes, with a lot of interesting things to say on their subject – perhaps the 1970s precursors to the Kim Newmans and Stephen Throwers of today?

Arguably somewhat less of a cool dude is good ol’ Michael Carreras, whom Farson corners at Hammer House, where he is checking out a test-pressing of Hammer’s cash-in Dracula LP. Carreras says something about the fantasy horror provided by Hammer being contrasted with “modern horror, more of a social realist document kind of thing..”. “Like Belfast?,” Farson jumps in. “Yes, very much so.”

Next up is Denholm Elliot, who gives us a great recitation of a passage from Stoker by way of demonstrating the “sexuality of vampirism”, following on from his 1968 TV version of ‘Dracula’ (which, on the basis of his hamming it up here, I should probably get around to watching). Elliot concludes his reading with perhaps the single greatest suggestive “HMMMMmmmmm…” ever captured on film. “Did you enjoy the devouring?” asks Farson. “Well, quite frankly, that isn’t really my scene…” responds Elliot.

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any better, we then move to an on-set report from the making of Jose Larraz’s ‘Vampyres’ at Oakley Court. “How stunned my poor old Great Uncle might have been by these scenes,” Farson opines as Anulka and Marrianne Morris lounge naked on the bed waiting for the camera to roll, “and of the hard professionalism that goes into the making of this latest style of vampire film”.

We actually get a great glimpse here of Larraz in action, directing his leading ladies in rather hands-on fashion (“now, you go like that, and then like that, now… that is the thing… you come again, alright, with your hands like this…”, etc), all of which proves absolutely fascinating given the complete lack of ‘making of..’ footage that exists for most Euro-horror films of this era.

Sadly though, the scene cuts quite soon, as we return to Romania for a segment exploring Dracula sight-seeing tours, and plans for the “Count Dracula Castle”, which is to be opened to tourists in the Borgo Pass “hopefully in around 1977”. This in turn leads into a bit exploring the history of Vlad Tepes (“he was cruel, but… he had a certain style”) and the theories that have sought to connect him to Stoker’s Dracula.

Apparently running low on purely Dracula-related material, Farson next moves on to “..the general resurgence in the idea of the occult, which is greater in Britain today than it has been in the past few hundred years”. To pursue this further, he heads to a London sci-fi/fantasy bookshop (“specialising entirely in the occult, science fiction, and the ramifications of the Dracula cult..”), which needless to say looks amazing.

Here, he meets a woman, who, put on the spot by the presenter’s blunt questioning, states that she is attracted the idea of reading vampire novels due the fact she is “feeling rather aggressive” because her has husband left her, prompting her to seek vengeance against him through the form of “fantasy violence”. It’s all pretty awkward, to be honest.

From there, we return to Highgate, where poor old Mr Laws, the cemetery caretaker, is dragged out once again to hold forth on the “Highgate vampire”, Alan Farrant and the unfortunate flap of related grave desecrations that generated so much press in the early ‘70s. (For more on this, see my post here from 2010, featuring a report on a BFI screening of a contemporary news report that covered much of the same ground.)

As ever though, Mr Laws is good value for money. Choice quote: “one person said that he’d seen a horrible grey thing wrigglin’ down the road… all this bloody nonsense, y’know… I had to have the police clear them all off out of it..”.

And so it goes on: “Last year, in Stoke On Trent, a man was found dead in this house, in most extraordinary circumstances”. This leads us into the unfortunate tale of a paranoid individual who apparently died after swallowing an entire clove of garlic in an attempt to ward off vampires – a sad tale, somewhat leavened by the fact that the coroner Farson interviews on the subject has such a wonderful, Donald Pleasance-esque manner he could have fared pretty well in a horror movie himself.

The (rather questionable) Rev. Neil Smith subsequently rambles on a bit about his belief in vampirism and his attempts to exorcise people apparently suffering the attentions of vampires, before Farson states his belief that dabbling with the occult has “assumed the scale of an epidemic in modern day Britain”, travelling to “..the reassuring surroundings of a vicarage in Hull” to discuss the issue with a slightly more grounded clergyman, who again, manages somehow to turn his reflections on prevalence of mental illness encouraged by poking about with the powers of darkness into a highly entertaining turn.

Indeed, if there is anything to be said for the entirety of this confused, digressive and fatuous documentary, it is that it is hugely entertaining throughout - probably more so now than when it was first broadcast. The random insights it provides into pop culture and horror fandom circa 1974 are a delight, and it’s massively over-romantised, alien-coded visions of Northern Romania are likewise quite remarkable in their own right.

A perfect palette cleanser to throw on mid-way through your next Halloween movie marathon, ‘The Dracula Business’ can currently be viewed on the BBC iPlayer here, or via Youtube here.

October Shorts: A Pre-Halloween Horror Round-up.

Every year, when October rolls around, I survey the movie bloggers and film forums undertaking “31 films in 31 days” pre-Halloween countdowns and so forth, and feel a profound sense of envy as I consider those lucky enough to enjoy a lifestyle that allows them the time to view, let alone write about, a feature film every single day - that being a circumstance which usually feels beyond the reach of my wildest dreams at this time of year, sad to say.

Nonetheless though, this year I’ve been doing my best – aggressively ring-fencing movie-watching time, squeezing in double-bills wherever possible, prioritising horror above all other genres and trying to find a few minutes to scribble down some thoughts afterwards. Thus far I’ve only clocked up a mere six films in seventeen days, but believe me – under the circumstances, I count that a success.

Hopefully I’ll be able to rack up enough to compile a “Part # 2” to this post later in the month, but for now, let’s crack on. Needless to say, all the write-ups that follow are “first thought / best thought” type efforts banged out with a minimum of forethought or proof reading, so make of them what you will.

The Wasp Woman 
(Roger Corman, 1959)

Well, this was… quite alright I suppose. It’s snappily paced, smartly scripted (by b-Western ‘heavy’ actor Leo Gordon, no less), has an agreeably loopy premise and is full of likeable characters portrayed by a crew of familiar AIP/Corman faces. Unlike Corman’s best black & white era films however, ‘The Wasp Woman’ never really manages to transcend its status as a five-day-wonder double bill timewaster, failing to offer up anything that is liable to live long in our memories the way that ‘A Bucket of Blood’ or ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ did, or to challenge an audience’s pre-existing expectations of a movie named “The Wasp Woman”. There are any number of interesting directions that the Countess Bathory-esque ‘aging-woman-will-go-to-any-lengths-to-preserve-beauty’ storyline could have been taken in, but instead Corman and Gordon just serve it straight, avoiding of any social commentary/satirical twist despite the film’s self-aware, cosmopolitan atmosphere and Madison Avenue setting.

Still, it’s a thoroughly diverting seventy-something minutes that remains approximately 126 times as entertaining as what might have resulted had any other director active in 1959 made a film about a woman turning into a giant wasp with a budget roughly equivalent to Charlton Heston’s dry-cleaning bill.

Shock Waves 

(Ken Wiederhorn, 1977)

Similarly, this little number – in which Peter Cushing and John Carradine lead a cast of younger/lesser known performers pitting their wits against undead Nazi super-soldiers in the Florida keys – has all the necessary ingredients in place for an absolutely bad-ass under-the-radar ‘70s horror…. but somehow, it just never manages to get the engine running.

The main boons to the film’s intermittent effectiveness come from it’s incredibly atmospheric shooting locations, which convey a convincing sense of isolated deprivation, and it’s uniquely conceived antagonists, who rise from the water uniformed and be-goggled like some nightmare combination of Golan-Globus ninjas and Amando de Ossorio’s Blind Dead. The cast are all fairly good too (Brooke Adams, who went to better things in the ’78 ‘Invasion of The Body Snatchers’ particularly stands out), and much of the photography is superb, despite being shot on 16mm.

Quite why such a promising outlay eventually fails to deliver the expected thrills therefore, I’m unsure, but let’s reluctantly grit our teeth and think it through. Firstly, continuity is all over the place (at several points early in the film, the characters seem to be discussing and acting upon terrible events that we have not been privy to), and, cool though it is, the whole Nazi zombie concept is rather undeveloped, as early suggestions that we’re dealing with an occult/supernatural menace are dropped in favour a presumably scientific rationale for their existence, which likewise remains unexplored, as does their obvious thematic status as a potent return-of-the-repressed atavistic terror, ala those aforementioned Blind Dead.

Furthermore, once they’re wandering about on land, the zombies gradually shed their initial menace, moving like ordinary human beings (presumably whilst being shouted at by an Assistant Director) and failing to demonstrate any abilities that would render them significantly more threatening than any other bunch of semi-mindless, unarmed men.

Perhaps most damaging of all though is the production’s decision to avoid any gore or explicit violence, which, though in some sense admirable, also wreaks havoc with the essential build up and release of tension necessary to the success of any chase/stalk/kill-orientated horror movie. When the expected crescendo of bloodshed that would traditionally accompany the demise of each of the zombies’ victims is watered down to an “oh, well… I guess he’s supposed to be dead now?” damp squib, the theoretically remorseless survival horror showdown of the film’s final act is stripped of any real urgency, leaving us instead to simply admire the view and reflect that the poor extras in the nazi/zombie get-up must have had a really rough time shooting this thing.

Carradine and Cushing are both under-used – presumably bacause the production cut corners by only hiring them for a few days each, which I’m cool with – but, whilst the former is as boisterous as ever, this is sadly one those mid-‘70s movies in which poor Peter seems to be at his lowest ebb, looking more cadaverous than ever before. Though professional to a tee, his lack of engagement with the material is clear, as he fails to really put any meat on the bones of his potentially fascinating character, the way he would almost certainly have done a decade earlier.

But, I should step back at this point and stop knocking this movie. I’ve made my point. If nothing else, it’s a fairly unique entry in the canon of ’70s American horror, and if you come to it with your expectations primed for ‘interesting failure’ rather than ‘lost classic’, you’ll likely find it a somewhat worthwhile experience.

Count Dracula’s Great Love 

(Javier Aguirre, 1972)

Ah, now we’re talkin’! Despite a plodding and rather campy opening half much concerned with hunts for lost coach wheels and inconsequential romantic trysts, Paul Naschy’s sole outing as the Count eventually warms up into not only one of his best films, but one of the most exultantly delirious slices of euro-horror nirvana ever to emerge from the sainted ‘70s. The set up that gets us there may be clumsy, but as soon as “Dracula”s voice-over starts delivering ultra-reverbed metaphysical pronouncements and his be-fanged ladies begin their slow motion peregrinations through the cobwebbed corridors, we’re on a different plain entirely, supping an intoxicating brew that leaves our heads spinning happily as love and death commingle, footsteps clang through a brace of effects pedals and Kensington (Madrid?) Gore dribbles ‘pon cleavage.

Infused (in its stronger ‘export’ cut, at least) with a degree of sexual content that pushes it firmly into the realm of the Erotic Castle Movie, the genius of ‘Count Dracula’s Great Love’ is that, whilst it is undoubtedly delirious, it nonetheless remains emotionally coherent throughout, as the trivial faffing about of the film’s poorly drawn human characters is gradually replaced by that of a love story from another world, played out with aching seriousness, as Naschy – ever the tragic romantic – essays one of strangest and most conflicted Draculas in screen history, anticipating a conclusion that is startling to say the least for devotees of vampire lore.

Over the past few years, I’ve watched this film several times in various stages of degradation, and each time the closing card rears up and the music plays out over blackness, it never fails to hit me with that feeling of having just awakened from some extraordinary dream, the usual whys and wherefores of cinema long forgotten – an instant hit of exactly the phenomena that keeps me coming back to these mind-warping euro-horrors again and again in other words, and to finally see it returned to its full glory via Vinegar Syndrome’s recent blu-ray edition feels like a minor miracle. Really, just an absolute pleasure to experience this one again in such fine form.

Dracula AD 1972 

(Alan Gibson, 1972)

As you will no doubt be aware, this film has attracted its fair share of mockery and critical brick-bats over the years, so now I think is as good as time as any to come out and say it loud and proud: I really like ‘Dracula AD 1972’.

Though it is certainly not one of Hammer’s best, and the damaging effect it’s oft-lamented drawbacks (the five-years-out-of-date Swinging London goofery, the almost total absence of Dracula, the rushed and inconclusive final confrontation, the antics of “Johnny Alucard”) remains substantial, I nonetheless maintain that this one is a lot of fun, and actually has quite a lot going for it beside the potential for ironic sniggering. Though not in the same league as the genuinely great ‘Taste the Blood of..’ (which the script here to some extent reworks), I’d probably place it above most of the other ‘Dracula’ sequels.

For one thing, I love the way that it – as is only appropriate, I suppose - oozes pure essence of “Britain in the early ‘70s”, in spite of the uproariously off-message ‘youth culture’ stuff. From the young Mr Alucard’s straight-from-a-NEL-paperback occult proclamations at his black mass, to the heavy-handed allusions to the Manson murders, to the Scotland Yard detective with a desk covered in ‘executive toys’ who dresses and behaves like a slightly younger and posher dry run for Jack Regan in ‘The Sweeney’ (I particularly love the bit where his partner begs some time off to get “a cup of coffee and a cheese roll” before they head off to bust the kids’ drug party)…. you could just bottle this stuff and I’d buy it by the crate.

It helps too that Alan Gibson largely directs the picture more like a crime drama than a traditional horror, rendering it one of the snappiest films Hammer ever made, with Van Helsing Jr and the cops’ pursuit of the vampire menace taking on a frantic feel akin to an episode of ‘Kolchak: The Night Stalker’ – an approach I very much appreciate.

The ‘deconsecrated church’ set upon which much of the action takes place is genuinely impressive too, and the aforementioned black mass, with reversed tape recorder freakouts and Johnny slitting his wrists all over Caroline Munro, is a real showstopper, probably one of the coolest scenes of its kind in early ‘70s horror.

Meanwhile, Peter Cushing – in stark contrast to his subdued turn in ‘Shock Waves’ - just radiates gravitas here, playing it straight enough to add weight to any amount of patently ridiculous plotting, and momentarily imbuing his final confrontation with Lee with a fateful intensity that successfully recalls their hair-raising showdown in Hammer’s first Dracula all those years ago (until the filmmakers bugger it all up a few moments later, but the less said about that the better).

I even quite like weird, ‘alternate world’ aspect of the script, wherein we’re presented with a 1970s wherein Count Dracula isn’t a pop culture household name, but a dread figure of obscure esoteric lore, mentioned alongside Belphegor and Belial in Johnny Alucard’s run-down of demonic top trumps, whom “legend has it” was buried somewhere in Hyde Park one hundred years prior.

Oh yeah, and if that wasn’t enough to win you over, I’ll put it to you that Stoneground’s ‘Alligator Man’ absolutely rules – a monster jam that sounds like it could have come straight off Lou Reed’s ‘Transformer’, perhaps lending credence to the argument that those upright cats at Hammer weren’t as far off the pulse of AD 1972 as is generally supposed.

The Brood 

(David Cronenberg, 1980)

Almost four decades later, and this remains Cronenberg’s most thoroughly disturbing film to date [persuasive counter-arguments welcomed at the usual address]. Almost entirely devoid of the “don’t worry kids, it’s just a horror movie” retreats into genre convention that softened the unsavoury subject matter of his earlier (and indeed, later) efforts, his heavy-handed use of a SF/horror metaphor to unpack the cyclical nature of familial abuse, together with a side order of disdain for the machinations of the psychiatric profession, grinds toward its conclusion with a sense of doom-laden inevitability, leavened only by the creepy feeling of ‘scientific distance’ from human behavior that characterizes so much of the director’s work.

With the exception of a startlingly effective horror movie ‘kill scene’ early on, no diversions, escape routes or sign-posts toward more conventional “entertainment” are offered to the viewer at any point, as Cronenberg’s determination to rub our faces in the nasty, serious business of his troubled characters’ case histories, and to generally go there each time we kinda wish he’d hold back, make this both, a) a remarkable and shocking film, and b) an extremely poor choice to open a Saturday night horror movie marathon. Cue uneasy silence and sombre discussion as the credits roll.

A couple of observations that occurred to me on this particular repeat viewing:

1. There are some striking (if entirely incidental) crossovers with the narrative of Andrzej Zulawski’s ‘Possession’ going on here. Given that that film was made roughly a year later, could we consider the possibility that a few scenes and ideas might have sunk into Zulawski’s consciousness during a screening of ‘The Brood’ and popped up again during the writing process for his own film..? Somehow I’d imagine no one ever dared put the question to him, but… just a thought.

2. Oliver Reed’s performance in ‘The Brood’ is really good. The character he plays is extremely ambiguous, as scripted –  a cruel arch-manipulator whose Frankensteinian disregard for professional ethics was solely responsible for letting the film’s supernatural menace get out of hand, but who also backs up his ‘tough love’ attitude with a genuine streak of well-meaning heroism - yet Reed embodies these contradictory impulses brilliantly. At this stage in his career, you’d have very much expected him to phone in his turn in a cheap Canadian horror flick from the nearest hotel bar, so it's surprising - and great - to instead find him putting in one of his best ever turns as a ‘serious actor’.

Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers 

(Fred Olen Ray, 1988)

And meanwhile, at completely the other end of the horror spectrum... let’s just say that if you knowingly sit down to watch a film named “Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers”, you’ll get exactly what you expect and/or deserve from this godawful piece of weirdly charming crap.

Camp as a row of tents and artlessly shot on what seems to be the same grubby, rescued-from-a-bin film stock utilised by John Waters on his early features, this basically seems to chronicle what happens when some people who theoretically work in ‘the film industry’ lower their expectations and instead begin competing with backyard SOV gore flicks made by horny teenagers – and if we think they should know better at their age, well, we’re the ones who paid money to watch the bloody thing, so who’s laughing now?

Telling the tale of a generic hardboiled private eye (yes, there are “private dick” jokes aplenty) who ends up on the trail of a cabal of prostitutes who belong to a quasi-Egyptian “chainsaw cult”(?!) overseen by TCM’s Gunnar Hansen (who, it turns out, has the least appropriate speaking voice imaginable for playing a cult leader), what we’re left with is essentially a non-stop pep rally for the delights of good ol’ LA sleaze, nothing more, nothing less, but if you’re in the right mood, then hey - dive right in.

The ostensible “gore scenes” – in which topless women wave chainsaws at off-screen victims whilst stage-hands throw blood and rubber limbs at them – are a disgrace to all concerned, whilst the relentless one-liners and tongue in cheek misogyny runs the gamut from knee-slapping to groan-inducing depending on your state of mind. Happily on this occasion, I found myself veering more toward the former. (“What do ya do, pray to Black & Decker?” was my favourite).

By the closing act, the whole thing has built up enough of a head of steam to become pleasantly deranged, and when we get to Linnea Quigley’s body painted double chainsaw dance, well… what need I do except repeat the phrase “Linnea Quigley’s body painted double chainsaw dance” and remind you that this film is commercially available on various formats? Actually, she doesn’t appear to be dancing all that effectively with those saws (they must have been quite heavy), but what the hell, it's still great, and Fred Olen Ray wins again!

Seriously though, for all my nose-holding, I had a pretty good time with this one – it’s a heck of a lot more likeable and good-natured than the Troma-type films it was presumably in competition with upon its initial release, and it’s really short too, so as long as you don’t make the rookie error of watching it sober, you’ll be home safe.

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To be continued (I hope)....