Rating: 3/5
Cult Movie Challenge 2018 | 2/52 | Gothic Horror
1920s
The blood of these whores is killing me!
Count Dracula applies blood red to his cheeks and lips, as well as black hair coloring to his pale white hair, all to hide his sickness. Anton, his manservant, encourages him to leave Romania and travel to where he can find more virgin blood to drink. Anton believes that because the Catholic church requires virgins for their marriages, Italy will be the ideal place to find them. So, the Count reluctantly abandons his family and ancestral home. They strap his coffin and wheelchair onto the car’s roof and hit the road.
Meanwhile, the Di Fiore family lives on their declining Italian estate, reminiscing about a time when their gardens were in full bloom. The four daughters tend to the grounds but live decent lives. Saphiria and Rubinia strip off their top as they till the garden, seeing themselves as workers and peasants. The estate handyman, Mario, regularly hooks up with them. The Count arrives in Italy, and Anton asks around for families with virgin daughters for the Count to marry. An innkeeper mentions the Di Fiore family.
When the Fiore’s get word that the Count is looking to marry, they agree, desperate to bring new money into the family. We follow Dracula as he tries to figure out who is actually a virgin in this family.
The film has an oversaturated, overblown look, making the decent sets and costuming look cheaper than they are. It would be easy to blame a cheap remaster, but being in the Criterion Collection, I don’t think they would intentionally do that. As of now, it’s only an out-of-print DVD, anyway.
Mario is a Marxist for humor purposes, performing that familiar centrist routine of Fascism and Marxism, both being equal forms of oppression, just with different oppressors in power. The former designs a world of ostensible purity, one which should be safe for a vampire whose survival demands it. The latter is an equal-opportunity rapist, unsatisfied with just two of the daughters and desperate to rape the youngest.
— He’s a disgusting person with money. After the revolution, he’ll be a disgusting person without money!
The film is meant to be funny, but I don’t find it particularly amusing. I think a good chunk of it is just, “Italians, am I right?” And then there’s the scene where Anton tries to pick up a young girl for Dracula in a bar, and Roman Polanski speaks up. It makes sense he would be involved with a comedy featuring this much rape.
Udo Kier brings a certain sympathy for Dracula, especially after we see him painfully vomiting blood over and over as he accidentally drinks non-virgin blood. If this film had been released a decade later, one could draw parallels with the AIDS crisis. It is amusing that, in a decade where Dracula became a symbol of sexual liberation and repressed desires, the film sticks to Dracula as an old-world mechanism of exploitation.
Let me clarify: I don’t think this is a bad movie. It’s weird and entertaining in its own fucked up way. But I don’t think I am the target audience for this movie’s sensibilities. The last ten minutes are a wild gorefest!