Jesús Franco's "Count Dracula"

I watched Jesús Franco's paint-by-numbers Count Dracula this afternoon. It's strictly a lean and mean version of the old gothic chestnut, with no frills attached and a stark and almost stiff retelling of the old tale. It makes the plot, which is so familiar by now it must be a part of the collective unconscious, effortless to follow.

Harker (Frederick Williams) goes to Transylvania (really?) aboard a train, and is warned "don't go there, sir!" by a fellow passenger (ya don't say?), and then is invited inside to do some real estate business with a Count (Christopher Lee) who is straight out of Stoker's novel (long white mustache). But, actually, he's a bit stiffer; Gary Oldman as a Stokerian Count in Francis Ford Coppola's 1991 Dracula was a bit more personable and far less reserved. He plays all the correct notes, though, going on about his Magyar roots and that the Szekelys have a "right to be proud" and that Attila's "blood flows through these veins". Sounds a bit familiar.

Then we get Dracula's weird wives, the presence of his Gypsy army, and the increasingly terrified Harker, who escapes from his near-captivity at the castle to find Dracula asleep, below, in his crypt. The viewer is already surprised that Harker, who seems a little slow on the uptake, wasn't clued in that something strange was going on when he walked into his chambers and saw that his host CAST NO REFLECTION IN THE BEDROOM MIRROR. Now, to the average person, that would have stopped them right there. However, Harker seems to shrug it off, and things don't really start coming home to him until he finds old Drac sleeping in his personal coffin.

Cult Films and Midnight Movies

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Dracula goes to England (ya don't say!) and Harker is found by a river (presumably by some nuns or something) and ends up back in England at the famous Seward's Sanitorium. There, Klaus Kinski gives us a great method acting performance as Renfield, who wipes food or poop or something all over the wall with his hand and keeps a little box full of bugs to eat in the crapper. Now, there is some intense soundtrack music when he goes to snarf the bugs, but, really, after seeing G.G. Allin eat his own shit in multiple videos in my life, the sight of someone chowing on fake bugs doesn't really sicken me the way it does the average plebe.

So Professor Van Helsing (Herbert Lom) who has "studied the Black Arts" (shazam!), hears the name Dracula, and we get a comic close-up that would probably make the basis of a good internet meme, and old Drac begins tormenting Lucy Westenra (Soledad Miranda), whose lovers Arthur Holmwood, Lord Godalming, and Texan Quincy P. Morris have been combined into a single character named "Quincy Morris," (Jack Taylor) who is no longer a Texan, but is a Lord, and Lucy gets blood-drained and buried (how do you like that for the title of a death metal song?) and wakes up as the "Bloofer Lady" in her grave. She kills a small Victorian child who probably would have succumbed to cholera anyway. How do you like that for remaining close to the original source material?

Renfield renfields around, gobbling this and that for the "Master" (a totally new concept, I might add), but then tries to kill Mina (Maria Rohm), and dives out a window after bending the barred window like Superman. Dr. Van Helsing (Herbert Lom) has a stroke, and Morris and Harker follow some Gypsies to Transylvania. The whole thing has a weird, apocalyptic conclusion. One, I can assure you, you won't expect.

There is a weird scene where a bunch of wall-mounted, stuffed trophies seems to come to life, and some annoying whistling on the soundtrack, here and there. The dead actually LOOK dead here, and the blood is bloody. And that's all good. Franco also directed a version of Sade's Justine with Koo Stark that I saw when I was assuredly far too young. Oh well. Not a bad Dracula, on the whole, but a little stiff, like a warmed-over body in need of a bloody stiff drink.

Joe Bob says "Check it out!" And so do I.

Count Dracula (1970)