Simply A Masterpiece

Must See Movie...

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

This version of Dracula should never have been advertised as being based upon the original book. For one thing, Jess Franco takes far too many liberties with the source material by changing and altering many elements. Ultimately though, it is the lack of a proper budget which defeats the movie. The production values are amongst some of the worst I've ever seen. None of the sets resemble Hungary or Romania in the slightest. From the opening scene, it becomes painfully obvious that Italy was frequently used for location filming. Regarding the cast, most of them are terrible. They appear to be just going through the motions and give new meaning to the expression "sleep-walking." However, Christopher Lee, Klaus Kinski and Herbert Lom do their very best with such substandard material. Their performances are the ones to see. Christopher Lee manages to convey some depth into his familiar character and does well. Cast against type, Klaus Kinski makes for an effective Renfield. For once, he is a bit more sympathetic than most of his on-screen characters. Herbert Lom delivers a tough and steely determined Van Helsing. This co-production might be worth a look for the sake of curiosity but don't expect a classic.

This cheap international production of Bram Stoker's novel "Dracula" is poorly conceived and poorly made in most ways, but it does have the draw of featuring two actors who played the titular role in other, better films, and is, thus, interesting for comparison. Christopher Lee had already played Dracula in the 1958 Hammer production and would continue to appear in the role in the studio's sequels. He again plays the Count here. Klaus Kinski would later play Dracula in Werner Herzog's remake of "Nosferatu" in 1979, and here he plays Renfield.Although championed as faithful to the book, as an adaptation, this "Dracula" features some bad deviations from Stoker's tale and in other ways is a poor imitation of prior "Dracula" films—especially the 1958 Hammer one. Although it adopts the gore and blood splatter from Hammer, it's, overall, a tamer version, and there's very little sex appeal here as opposed to some of the Hammer productions. This film also steals from the 1958 film the part where the Count lures Mina away, but adopts from the 1931 Universal picture the scenes of Dracula prowling the streets and entering a theatre. This stuff is absent from Stoker's original. Also absent from the book is Van Helsing's weird stroke, which in this film leaves him wheelchair bound and stuck at home with Mina while Quincy and Jonathan go to Transylvania. Also, in the final scenes, a fire motif is invented, with Van Helsing making a makeshift, fiery cross to ward off Dracula, and the Count is climactically burned to death in his coffin.There's a laughable scene involving taxidermic animals supposedly coming to life to threaten our heroes, some obvious dummy boulders in the climax, and the film makes the head-scratching mistake of trying to pass off docile German Shepherds as wolves. The fake bat gimmickry is far more tolerable by comparison. Overall, the main stylistic theme of director Franco's movie is an abundant reliance on zoom-ins.Lee and Kinski can't save this dull and ill-advised mess, but their characterizations are of some interest. Kinski as Renfield seems too true to art imitating life, as the actor really had been committed to a psychiatric hospital in years past, and his continued abnormal behavior was evidenced in his frequent-director Herzog's documentary "My Best Fiend" (1999). Unlike other portrayals of Renfield, Kinski plays him comatose, with occasional screaming and violent outbursts, including jumping out a window and choking Mina. Kinski's later stilted Nosferatu isn't that far removed from his Renfield, really, except his Dracula talks more and breaths heavier. Meanwhile, Lee got the opportunity to play a Count that is a somewhat closer approximation of Stoker's characterization than his Hammer iterations, although he still manages to play him mostly mute after his castle scenes. His mustached appearance and white-to- black hair transformation is closer to Stoker's description, too, than his wild-eyed sex beast in the '58 shocker.The final embarrassment is that the filmmakers of a documentary, "Cuadecuc vampire" (1971), of the making of this film, made a better movie.The next year, Franco made a looser, Sapphic Dracula adaptation, appropriately titled "Vampyros Lesbos" (1971).(Mirror Note: Contrary to the novel, Dracula has a wall mirror in his castle, which, for further inexplicable reasons, he points to in a scene with Jonathan—revealing to him his lack of a reflection. Although also contrary to the novel, a shadow disappearance shot is handled better later in the film.)

Known in English simply as "Count Dracula", this is a very uninspired and rather badly made film. After the 1931 Bela Lugosi version, the 1958 Hammer version and the 1979 Frank Langella version, this is the fourth adaptation of the 1897 Bram Stoker novel that I have seen in the last ten months, notwithstanding the numerous sequels to the first two. Of those four, I understand that this is the most faithful to the novel - which I have never actually read - but it's also by far the weakest of them.The film's version of Dracula is not terribly intimidating. While Christopher Lee is good as the eponymous count, his performances in the Hammer series were far more entertaining. Herbert Lom made for a very good Van Helsing and he deserved to appear in a much better adaptation than this, though I preferred Peter Cushing and Laurence Olivier's takes on the character. None of the other actors made much impression one way or the other. I'm not entirely sure but I get the impression that most of them were dubbed. The film is rather low budget but that wouldn't have been a big problem if Jesus Franco had directed it with any sort of flair, art or imagination - all three of which were lacking in the extreme - rather than making every other shot a zoom shot. I assume that he had made a bet to see how many he could fit into the film. It's a bog standard version of "Dracula", I'm afraid. When it comes to great horror directors, he's no Terence Fisher, who directed the aforementioned 1958 film and most of the other top tier Hammer films.Overall, the film is deathly dull and mostly forgettable except for two things that I've already mentioned. It's always a pleasure to see either Lee or Lom in a film but it would have been a far greater pleasure to see them in a good film.

Sure this is, ultimately, a bust. Money ran out at some point. You can see the whole thing collapse halfway through, as if with money gone, all enthusiasm ran out and they were in a hurry to get it over with. And yes it's a Franco film with all that entails. Now I like the guy, more than most people, significantly less than his most vocal fans. The problem is he had absolutely no sense of how actors can embody persons who have a life in the story. In a Franco film, the actors remain actors, they go to the area blocked in rehearsal, mouth lines, nothing embodied, nothing natural. He was an anti-Altman; all the infrastructure shows.His cinematic eye was the exact opposite, a talent I prize highly and puts him higher in my estimation than many other competent filmmakers; that is an eye that does not just lushly frame the stage for actors to strut in, even though that's what they do in his films, but delves into space to know the feel.So when you bring these together in a Dracula film, we have the following vivid contrast: the Dracula story continuously pops up from a tangible space as an object of artifice, always in contrast.En route to Dracula's castle, he films marvelous gloomy views of forests with mangy dogs scouring beneath trees, a spontaneous 'found' image. And then he has Lee come down from the carriage and strike an absurdly theatric pose. He finds a marvelous catacomb to serve as Dracula's castle, nothing like the stylized studio space we usually find in these adaptations. And then he props two candelabras with fake cobwebs on a dustfree table, glaring props.You'll see this tension again and again. He threatens to film a 'real' Dracula, he lets a submerged world recede in some hazy distance, then something silly pops up right in our face. He tries to film conversations as though a hazy eye hovers in the air but then the actors mime and speak as if looking at a script. He has the same awareness of the camera as Altman, what he lacks is the ability to communicate it from the camera to the actors; it's like an exercise never carried to the end.Kinski intuitively knows he must exist in that tentative space of inarticulate wonder, a cinematic actor by comparison to Lee who simply enunciates well. His Renfield is not the usual twitching maniac, he is a lost soul wholly enmeshed in a pre-logical sense of things; it's Kinski doing Franco. So as usual for Franco this is a failure, but one of the most interesting Draculas. Something tells me that Herzog saw this before setting out to do his own Dracula.(It'll be all worth it however if it brings you to a little known film called Cuadecuc Vampir; a 'making of' documentary shot on the set of this film, but in reality a wonderful essay on exactly what we're saying here; how horror is deep down a matter of not someone assuming a horrifying pose, we see that in Cuadecuc, Lee is the actor playing Dracula, caught smiling, waiting in a coffin as cobwebs are arranged by stagehands, but beneath that, how horror is the eye being predisposed a certain way, already colored. The real starting point is the silent Vampyr which is also Cuadecuc's main reference.)