BEFORE: I spent most of yesterday in bed, dealing with a combination of exhaustion from loading everything out of NY Comic Con and a cold, no doubt obtained by spending four days in a convention center with a closed air supply and over 100,000 nerds in a confined space. Thankfully it was Columbus Day, so much less pressure to go in to the office on a federal holiday. I slept most of the day away in 3-hour blocks, waking up only to have some soup and change the tape on my DVD burner, since I have to put THIS year's Dracula films on DVD to get ready for NEXT year. TCM went and made Dracula their "Monster of the Month", but I can't work those new films into my chain because they won't be done airing them until the end of October, and I can't wait that long, I've got other monsters and creatures I want to cover.
But my last version of "Dracula" for this year comes from 1970, directed by Jesus Franco, who also seems to be referred to as either Jesse Franco or Jess Franco. So there's a little confusion here, also over the title of the film, which is "Count Dracula" on the IMDB, but "Bram Stoker's Count Dracula" on the poster. It seems we may finally get in a Dracula film this month that was based on the original novel, and not the stage-play from the 1920's.
The poster below also has a confusing tagline in "Finally! The original version!" Well, since original usually means "first", and "Finally!" seems to be a poke at those OTHER Dracula films, especially the famous one with Bela Lugosi, you can't really say this film is "original" because it had so many predecessors, right? But I know what they were trying to say, taking credit for being the first film to really go back to the source, but they clouded it up with contradictory grammar.
THE PLOT: This version of the Bram Stoker classic has Count Dracula as an old man who grows younger whenever he dines on the blood of young maidens.
AFTER: Apparently this fact was mentioned in the novel, that Count Dracula would appear to get more vital, or "younger" the more blood he drank - so they gave him gray hair at the start of this film, and he makes references to being old and in need of a change when he rents the property in England from Jonathan Harker's firm, but by the end his hair is darker and he appears younger. (Again, language problems, he can't "become" younger, that's impossible without reversing time, he can only appear to do so.).
We're back to Harker traveling to Transylvania, but Harker's really dumb here - he doesn't pick up on the fact that the villagers are all afraid of the Count, and even when he's seduced by the three female vampires, who Dracula distracts with a live baby for them to eat, he convinces himself that it's all a dream. At least he doesn't think those two puncture wounds on his neck come from mosquito bites, but since he doesn't offer up any other possible explanation, he just might as well have.
What about those three female vampires in Dracula's castle, anyway? After seeing several versions of this story now, some call them "the sisters" and others "the Brides of Dracula", I'm wondering why they were such under-utilized characters. We see them seduce Harker, and then we never see them again. Why introduce them into the story if they serve no other purpose? Did everyone, including Bram Stoker, forget to use them in the latter part of the story? Why does Dracula want so desperately to move to the U.K. if he's got three wives? (Wait, that question maybe sort of answers itself...)
Harker escapes from Dracula's castle in this one, and is found in a river in Budapest. But he wakes up in a psychiatric clinic in London. NITPICK POINT: How did anyone in Budapest know that he was from London, and who had the knowledge and resources to send him home? Shouldn't someone in a coma not be moved across such a great distance? This seems like just a cheap way to get all the relevant characters - Mina (Jonathan's fiancée), Lucy (Mina's friend), Dr. Seward, and Van Helsing, who coincidentally owns the clinic, even though he's not any kind of doctor. I suppose it's not as cheap as making Mina the daughter of Van Helsing, but it's close.
They shoehorned Quincey Morris in here too, as Lucy's fiancé, and Renfield (referred to as "Reinferd" in the credits for some strange reason) is just an inmate at the asylum who eats bugs, and I don't think we ever hear him say any dialogue in this whole film, despite LONG sequences where the doctors are begging him to talk. "Come on, Renfield, you can say it. Just tell me. Come on, you can tell me now..." and so on. Renfield serves an important function to the story, not only helping Dracula move into his new castle but also giving the audience the important details about who Dracula is and what he does, even if no one in the story believes it. Removing his power of speech completely not only slows the story down, it makes him a completely tangential, useless character. I'd say that Klaus Kinski did the best job he could playing a catatonic mental patient, but that seems like a backhanded compliment.
After you watch a few of these Dracula films, like I have, you realize that Dracula spends a lot of time boxing himself up and shipping himself across Europe, along with his spare coffins. What kind of rate did he get for this, while he slept in the coffin for what, 2 weeks? And what courier did he use for this, was it UPS UnderGround? Undead-Ex? Or maybe DH-Hell?
There are other problems here, like that fact that much of the dialogue seems like it was dubbed in later, or perhaps the audio was not synched up properly, and that gives this the overall feel of a cheap foreign film. Dracula crawling down the walls of the asylum upside-down is a neat effect, but a fake bat still looks like a fake bat, so not as much changed in 40 years of filmmaking as one would have hoped. And if you are familiar with the novel, they still left a LOT of stuff out here, so the claim to be the first film based on the novel seems a bit toothless since they ended up jettisoning half of the details anyway. Maybe the decision to base the other films on the stage-play wasn't such a bad one after all.
Starring Christopher Lee (last seen in "Gremlins 2: The New Batch"), Herbert Lom, Klaus Kinski (last seen in "Doctor Zhivago"), Maria Rohm, Fred Williams (last seen in "A Bridge Too Far"), Soledad Miranda (last seen in "100 Rifles"), Paul Muller, Jack Taylor.
RATING: 4 out of 10 Gypsy servants
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