After the trashy thrills of Paul Morrissey's Flesh for Frankenstein I was pretty damn excited to dive into his take on Dracula. With much of the same cast and an acting role for legendary director Vittorio De Sica I could hardly wait to pop this one in and get started. I was not disappointed. All the bitchy humor and bad taste that I loved in Frankenstein were in abundance here, and while it wasn't as much of a rolicking good time, it was still a hell of an entertaining film, and left me wanting to explore more of Morrissey's filmography.
Morrissey's Dracula has some interesting differences with traditional portrayals. For one, sunlight doesn't kill him as much as it annoys him. Same with crosses, and in one instance he grabs one off the wall and puts it in a drawer so he doesn't have to see it. Finally, this Drac specifically requires virgin blood, so he can't just go off feasting on whore's blood, since that will cause him to get sick and vomit profusely, as we get to see twice in this film in extended puke scenes. The plot of this film is Drac going to Italy to find some virgin to marry, and unfortunately he keeps getting foiled by Joe Dallesandro's penis, which constantly seems to be ruining his brides-to-be for Drac gets the chance to sink his teeth into them.
Yup, Dallesnadro's back as an Italian-born farmer with a Brooklyn accent and a first year college student's enthusiasm for Communism. First, the good news: Dallesandro's acting is shitty as ever in this film. The bad news: he plays an asshole rapist who treats everyone like garbage and is "the hero." While it's fun seeing him flat-out call his boss's daughters "who-ers" and walk around with a gigantic chip on his shoulder, it's pretty hard to take him as the hero since he seems to be actively trying to get the viewer to hate him. In the climactic scene were Drac is trying to get with the last virgin daughter, Joe takes matters into his own hands by pinning her to the wall and raping her, thus saving her from a life of vampirism. This leads to a hilariously vulgar scene of Drac on his knees slurping up the blood on the floor from the daughter's popped cherry. I fucking hated Dallesandro's character, but the Monty Python-esque ending with Joe chopping off Drac's limbs one after another, leaving him as an armless and legless torso before impaling him was perfect.
This film moves at a slower pace than Frankenstein, and it isn't as consistently over the top, but there does seem to be some nice metaphors at work. Even though it's shoved right in the viewer's face, I liked the theme of the old nobility being fucked and killed by the peasants, as displayed by Dallesandro's obnoxious dialog and actions. The sickly Count feasting on virgins also works, and as a whole this film seems to have more ideas in play than Frankenstein, even if they are delivered as a standard grindhouse project. Thus, in my opinion, this one works as a better film, though it's near impossible for me to pick between the two because both of them are hilarious and entertaining. I'd probably prefer watching Frankenstein just because Joe doesn't win in the end.
Because the themes, tone, and humor are so consistent between these two films, I'm gong to keep them together in my ranking, but give Dracula the advantage because it's more thematically sophisticated to me. I loved these two films more than I was expecting, and right now they stand as the two best surprises I've encountered yet in the Criterion Collection.
1. Beauty and the Beast (1946)
2. Robocop (1987)
3. Seven Samurai (1954)
4. The Seventh Seal (1957)
5. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
6. Grand Illusion (1937)
7. High and Low (1963)
8. Shock Corridor (1963)
9. Hard Boiled (1992)
10. Sid and Nancy (1986)
11. The 400 Blows (1959)
12. Walkabout (1971)
13. The Killer (1989)
14. This Is Spinal Tap (1984)
15. Dead Ringers (1988)
16. The Naked Kiss (1964)
17. A Night to Remember (1958)
18. The Lady Vanishes (1938)
19. The Samurai Trilogy (1954-1956)
20. The Long Good Friday (1980)
21. Blood For Dracula (1974)
22. Flesh for Frankenstein (1973)
23. Amarcord (1973)
24. Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975)
25. Summertime (1955)
26. Alphaville (1965)
Next time: It's a shame Drac died when he did, because he would have been feasting at Picnic at Hanging Rock.
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