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Dracula cerca sangue di vergine... e morì di sete!!! (1974)
Paul Morrissey
Impression published on Monday, 2010-02-22 | Film | 1 stars
Before I ever saw it, a friend of mine told me that 1961's The Hustler was irrefutable proof that there was indeed such a thing as a "timeless" film: here is film that is so well-constructed that the story it tells and the characters it depicts manage to remain stylish, compelling and relevant in spite of 40 some-odd years of creative innovations, technological advancements and cultural revolutions.
The 1974 film known as Andy Warhol's Dracula here in the states and Blood for Dracula across the pond in the UK, also makes the case for "timeless" films, but in the negative: one watches the Warhol-produced Dracula and can't help but think, "here is a film that in all ways aspires to a tawdry, ironic ephemerality and achieves it easily: there is nothing about this movie that made even a lick of sense 12 months after its release."
Which is not to say that Udo Kier is anything less than inspired as a neurasthenic Transylvanian eccentric who uses shoe polish to paint his gray hair black, or that the idea of setting up a Dracula comedy as a traditional Roman domestic comedy about lesser royalty in search of virginity (complete with a manipulative, self-interested, pandering matrona, three daughters--the naive one, the conniving one and the roundly immoral dilettante one--and a hilariously over-the-top leno character called "Anton", whose spastic performance of Dracula's bidding gets big Vaudeville laughs) was anything but a great idea, but these ideas are cut-and-pasted together so haphazardly, the film feels like a montage of ultra-campy, B horror movies and weird, 70's softcore erotica.
Which, again, isn't a problem for me, but my point is that, as time goes on, this movie necessarily becomes increasingly unwatchable and, by the time I got to it (i.e. 2010), I could barely imagine what sort of frame of cultural and historical reference you'd have to have to "get" this movie. The snarky, tongue-in-cheek humor and devil-may-care editing (of both dialog and of the actual film itself: the thing looks and sounds like it was cut in the dark with safety scissors) that must have made this movie seem so carelessly avant garde and effortlessly irreverent in the 70's, seem deliberately obscure and frustratingly obfuscatory in the year 20XX.
There are, for example, numerous "jokes" about vegetarianism ("the count's special diet", wink-wink) that, bereft of the historical context in which they were made, are just plain confusing. " There is also the problem of the gruff, man-boy house servant who, alternating between emotionless recitations from the Bolshevik talking points memo and foreplay dialog cribbed from Skin-e-max ("yeah, you like it rough, don't you!?" or "I know what I'm gonna do: I'm gonna rape you, unh! yeah!"), just befuddles crap out of the contemporary viewer: certainly his Brooklyn accent, preference for topless-ness and asymmetrical page boy haircut are meant to say something about the inevitable proletarian overthrow of "Old Europe" and its signature fruitiness*, but seeing as how this movie came out during the 1970's, what the hell could that possibly be?
And how in the name of Jupiter's balls did they manage to make virginity (and the deliberate, commercial misrepresentation thereof), which is the french toast of domestic comedy**, seem so baffling and obscure a theme?
In the final estimation, the film student in me is willing to give this one the benefit of the doubt and say that there's probably something here worth thinking about if you're on an "Italian cinema of the 60's/70's" kick. But honestly, you should definitely make sure you've got a good firm grasp on the classics (e.g. Sedotta e abbandonata) before you start into intentionally obscure, confused and confusing stuff like this that was created to lurk on the periphery, a commentary on a commentary on an in-joke about a sarcastic remark related to who-knows-what based on whatever.
* Especially since he kills Udo Kier's Dracula with a hammer or a crowbar or whatever kind of brutish manual labor prop it was.
** i.e. impossible to fuck up.
