Indeed, there are many allusions to the novel in this Dracula: he starts out as an old man and becomes younger as he feeds on blood; he has a mustache; he keeps Harker prisoner on the pretense of wanting to know what there is to know about life in England; upon arriving in England, he becomes a largely unseen, mellifluous presence as he slowly drains the life out of Lucy Westenra; and tries to retreat back to Transylvania once he realizes he's been found out, only to be killed before he can reach his castle. However, I feel Lee never gets to reach the level of presence that the literary Dracula had. I'll admit, when I read the book, I found Dracula's portrayal to be very basic but I still thought it was interesting how he was a gracious and enthusiastic host to Harker, while still holding him prisoner through manipulation and, once he made his way to England, he became an evil force, draining the life out of everyone he could and letting no one stand in his way. That is the way he is portrayed here, during the film's latter acts, but it's not as effective, as all he does is lurk in the background, slowly draw Lucy to him a number of times by repeatedly whispering her name so he can drink her blood, attempt to corrupt Mina (which doesn't go nearly as far as it did in the book) before beating a hasty retreat, as he knows there are people about who know what he is and how they can fight him. Granted, I prefer him to be an evil, no nonsense force, rather than watching him have a tryst with Mina, as Coppola seemed to think was necessary, but in the Hammer films, Lee was a rather frightening, badass Dracula, in comparison to the more creepy and yet charming Lugosi portrayal; here, save for that opening in Transylvania, you don't get either of those sets of attributes. You do get a couple of moments where he has those same red, bloodshot eyes and long fangs, with blood around his mouth, but for me, it just doesn't have the impact that it did in the Hammer films, mainly because he doesn't come across as powerful as everyone wants us to think he is. I don't feel his presence all around, as Prof. Van Helsing insists is the case, as all he does to attack those who oppose him is make the trophy animals in his house in England slowly lunge at them, manipulate Renfield, and try to take Mina at both the opera and in front of Van Helsing, only to be easily driven away. And finally, he's defeated so easily: set on fire and barely putting up a struggle, which I found to be so lame, both here and in the book. This may very well be the film portrayal of Dracula that's closest to the literary one but it still doesn't have that same kind of effectiveness.
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| That's exactly where Kinski belonged. |
Speaking of Mina (Maria Rohm), she loses the significance to the story that she had in the novel. While Dracula still attempts to corrupt her following Lucy's death, it doesn't go much farther than him tricking her into going to the opera, where he attacks her in the balcony, and when he attempts to take her from Van Helsing, only to be driven away by the professor. The subplot of her becoming connected to Dracula and Van Helsing using hypnosis to allow her to tell them where the count currently is gets dropped completely, as is the connection she develops with Renfield. She does decide to see him in an attempt to get him to tell what he knows but all that happens is that he attacks her while under Dracula's power and cowers away when he's released from it. And like Van Helsing, she has no part in the defeat of Dracula in the climax, as she did in the book. As a result, all Mina has to do in the movie is worry about Harker upon her arrival at the clinic to see him, as well as vouch for his sanity to Van Helsing upon doing so, and do the same for Lucy, as the life is slowly drained away from her. When Dracula kills Lucy, Mina walks in on him doing so and is horrified by the sight of him escaping by turning into a bat and flying out the window (she got something of a glimpse of him earlier when she followed Lucy out of the clinic and saw Dracula's shadow disappear, though she seemed to have chalked it up to a hallucination and says she was mistaken about it; she also writes off the bite marks on Lucy's neck as having been made by a pin that held her wrap). This event is what ultimately prompts Van Helsing to reveal to them what he knows about Dracula. Again, that's about the extent of her role in the story. Lucy Westenra (Soledad Miranda) has even less of a character, save for being sickly, with the journey to the clinic taking a lot out of her, and kind of timid, as she's frightened by a barking dog when she and Mina arrive and even asks what it is. Other than that, her only role is to become Dracula's victim, either by going to him when he calls to her or by letting him into her room at the clinic. Following her death, she becomes a vampire herself, killing a small child and the next night, when she returns to her crypt after out hunting for another victim (and given the blood around her mouth, she clearly found one), she's promptly destroyed by Van Helsing, Harker, and Quincey Morris, as they were lying in wait for her.
Though they call him Quincey Morris (Jack Taylor), this particular character is more in line with that of Arthur Holmwood, aka Lord Godalming, as he's another Englishman rather than a Texan, is engaged to Lucy, as Holmwood is in the book, and gives her a blood transfusion, as Morris (as well as Holmwood) does. Either way, he's another pretty bland character, one whose relationship with Lucy is quite superfluous, even more so than the one between Harker and Mina, and he doesn't have much of a reaction to her death (Mina reacts more than he does). The only meaningful thing he does is challenge Van Helsing when he takes him and Harker to Lucy's crypt after the death of the child the previous night, refusing to believe that she would do such a thing, but all doubts are erased when they see Lucy return to her grave and find her in her coffin, with blood around her fanged mouth. Van Helsing drives the stake through her heart and has Morris take a spade to her neck in order to complete the task. After that Morris, is little more than another member of the group of vampire hunters, with him and Harker being the ones who get to Transylvania ahead of Dracula and sanctify his castle and kill his brides (Morris gets a big squirt of blood in the face when staking one of them) before killing the count himself, with Morris being the one who sets him on fire. Finally, Dr. Seward (Paul Mueller) is little more than the man who actively runs Van Helsing's psychiatric clinic, rather than it being his clinic, and there's no talk of him being a former pupil of the professor's, though the fact that he works under him suggests it could be a possibility. All Seward does in the story is look after Van Helsing's patients, particularly Harker, Renfield, and Lucy, and he never questions the professor's belief of a vampire being behind everything. He even joins Harker and Morris when they investigate the abbey where Dracula is hiding and is also the one who learns from Renfield which port Dracula is using to escape back to Transylvania. In his last scene, he checks back in on Renfield and finds that he has since died.
There are many other reasons as to why this movie doesn't work and a big one for me is how cheap it feels. There's nothing wrong at all with a movie being low budget but in the case of Count Dracula, it comes through in many ways that it shouldn't. A lot of the "sets" feel very sparse, like they couldn't afford to put in many set decorations in these big, wide open spaces, save for the bare essentials. This is especially the case with the interiors of Dracula's castle during the first act, where both the dining room and the den look like they're shot in large chambers that are completely empty, save for the table, the fireplace, and the two chairs Harker and Dracula sit in. The same goes for Harker's bedroom, which looks like it merely has a bed, a big mirror, and nothing else. Maybe that's the point, as Dracula's castle is now broken down and not what it once was, but a lot of the movies of the past, like the Universal and Hammer films, always put a lot more into these kinds of sets (I know that those were studio movies that had resources these filmmakers didn't but they still weren't made on gigantic budgets; Hammer, in particular, was known for doing a lot with very little). I feel the same way about the big crypt where Dracula and his brides rest: again, it's like they were allowed to shoot in this big, empty place (according to Franco, it was the interiors of an actual castle in Barcelona) but they didn't have the money to put much in it, a feeling that's further punctuated by the large, dusty hallways connected to it (for some reason, the image that kept popping into my head was that of Al Capone's big empty vault), and Lucy's crypt ,as well as her bedroom at the clinic, later on feels the same way. The small inn that Harker stays at before heading on to Dracula's castle and Van Helsing's clinic, where most of the action in England is set, looks better, with more memorable set decorations, but it's nothing special. That said, Renfield's cell does benefit greatly from the sparseness, being a big room that's painted in a bland white, with no furniture but a bed and a nook in the wall for him to sit on. The low budget is also no doubt why they couldn't be 100% faithful to the novel and had to make some changes, like completely omitting Dracula's getting to England via a ship whose crew he wipes out, setting the majority of the action at the clinic, including having Harker recover there instead of in Budapest, combining the characters of Arthur Holmwood and Quincey Morris, deleting the vampire hunters' handful of encounters with Dracula in England, and streamlining the ending, with Mina and Van Helsing not taking part in it, among others. Since this is one of the more faithful adaptations, it wouldn't have been such a big deal had the cheapness not been so detrimentally apparent, as it is.
On the back of the Dark Sky DVD, the film is referred to as "atmospheric" but I don't know if that's an adjective I would use to describe it (they also call Jess Franco an "auteur," which I definitely can't agree with). It does manage to capture the look and feel of the period well, with the costumes, the horse-drawn carriages, and the actual locations they used for some of the exteriors, such as the inn and the train station when Mina and Lucy arrive to visit Harker at the clinic, but I never really got the kind of palpable, Gothic vibe that I do in other movies of this sort. The exteriors of Dracula's castle and the nighttime shots of the clinic when Dracula beckons Lucy to him look good, I like the shot when Dracula first opens the main door of his castle to invite Harker in (it's actually the most memorable image from the entire movie to me), and I like some of the details, such as the spider-webs on the dining room table's candelabra and on Harker's bed there, but that's as far as it goes. The nighttime scenes are often shot day-for-night but it's so obvious, with the blue filter they use not hiding anything; sometimes, they can't even get that right. After Dracula bids Harker good night, Harker goes back into his bedroom and looks out the window to see the boxes of earth that Dracula intends to send to England to use as his grave... and the shot is clearly daytime, even though it's meant to be the middle of the night (they don't even put a filter on this one). Not too long after that, when Harker awakens back in his room after the scene with him, Dracula, and the brides, he looks out his window and sees a shot of Dracula standing far away on a ridge, only for him to disappear between shots. Again, it's so obviously daytime that I thought maybe they were going by the logic that would later be used in Bram Stoker's Dracula, where vampires are able to move around in the daytime, but later, Van Helsing says that vampires must remain hidden during the day. So it was just another flub. As if that weren't enough, earlier, when Harker stays the night at the inn, he joins his fellow carriage traveler the next morning but, despite the daytime establishing shot and Harker bidding the guy good morning, it looks more like a nighttime scene, and then, as they're traveling through the woods to Borgo Pass, they're using the blue filter for the day-for-night scenes, it's dark outside during the shots inside the carriage, and yet, the man tells Harker that they'll reach the pass by "nightfall." This is why I can't get into the atmosphere, as I'm constantly wondering, "What time is it?!"
The sequence that follows that, where Harker is being driven to the castle, is further hampered by how they expect you to believe that a bunch of German shepherds are actually wolves. Earlier, I tried to give the movie the benefit of the doubt by saying that they could be meant as wild dogs, and Van Helsing, reading from old text, talks about Dracula having control over "dog" and "bat," but upon hearing the howling that accompanies them, it's clear that they're meant to be wolves and it's so jarring that it really hurts any effectiveness that sequence might have had. Again, I know they had a low budget and, regardless, probably didn't have the know-how to use real wolves, but my God, this makes it hard for me to take it seriously. The same goes for the shots of the bat outside the window. It's a good thing that the windows are always so misty that you only see a silhouette because, even then, you can tell it's nothing more than a prop on a wire, one that always moves from one side to another, with a barely turn, is always hanging in a position that makes the wire obvious, and never flaps its wings. It's definitely not the worst fake bat I've ever seen in a movie but it still makes those used in the Universal and Hammer films look like Industrial Light & Magic creations by comparison. But even that's not as ridiculous as those stuffed animals that come to life and attack Harker, Morris, and Dr. Seward when they investigate Dracula's abbey. You don't see any full-body shots of them movies, as they're all shot in close-up, but the idea is impossible to take seriously and it's not helped by the animal sounds and the shots of them moving very stiffly and slowly. Plus, they're not even animals you would be scared of when they were alive. Rather than lions and tigers, it's foxes, birds, a marlin, a pig, and even a calf! I couldn't believe what I was seeing the first time I saw this and I still can't.
What I described up above should make something else obvious: you're not going to get many stellar special effects here. That said, one that does look quite good is the first time you see Dracula's brides in the wide shots of them emerging from their coffins to feed on Harker as he lies unconscious. When they do come out and approach him, they're transparent apparitions and become solid once they reach him. Although there's a slight shift in the shot that gives an idea of how the effect might have been done, that's still a surprisingly effective and very subtle moment, one that I didn't catch the first few times around (sorry if you can't make it out in the snapshot; it's hard to make out in a still). There's also the moment where Mina sees Dracula's shadow disappear on the wall when she follows Lucy, which is much easier to figure out but serves its purpose fairly. However, aside from those instances and the laughable ones I mentioned up above, the only other significant bit of visual effects involves Dracula's death at the end. After Quincey Morris sets him aflame, we get a sequence of dissolves that show all of the youth he's accumulated from his victims draining out of him and then, before they throw the box that he's in over the edge of the cliff, it cuts from the real Christopher Lee to a very fake-looking dummy, the head of which is reduced to a skull (a skull that has no fangs, even though Dracula was brandishing them when he was struggling before). In the scene where Harker first meets Dracula at the castle and, upon being shown to his room, sees that the count has no reflection in the large mirror, that effect is pulled off simply by not having Dracula and the mirror in the same shot. There's a moment where the camera pans over from Dracula and Harker to the mirror and vice versa but that was probably simply done by having Lee quickly move out of the mirror's range during the pan, which is actually effective in its simplicity. Although, if they really wanted to be sharp, they should have had the candelabra that Dracula is holding seem suspended in the air in the reflection, since it should still be there, but they opted to have everything be invisible, either because they couldn't pull it off or they didn't think of it (truth be told, I didn't think about the candelabra still being visible until someone else pointed it out). And as for blood and gore, you're going to be disappointed on that score as well if that's what you want. The movie is rated PG, so that right there should tell you that you're not going to get a lot of bloodshed (interestingly, though, the third Hammer Dracula film with Lee, Dracula Has Risen From the Grave, is rated G and it has a scene where Dracula is staked and a lot of blood gushes out, not to mention that he's defeated by being impaled on a big cross). What blood that you see is usually right after Dracula and the other vampires have finished feeding and you see blood around their mouths, as well as when Van Helsing has Morris give Lucy a transfusion, when Morris takes the spade to her neck after she's become a vampire (presumably, he completely cut off her head like in the novel, but we just don't see it), and when Mina is found after Dracula attacked her at the opera, with bits of blood on her and the two, tell-tale fang marks on her neck. The bloodiest moment in the movie is when Morris and Harker are staking Dracula's brides in his castle and the former gets squirted in the face while doing so, which reminds me of a moment with Roddy McDowall's character of Peter Vincent on the TV in Fright Night. Despite the rating, they do manage to show the part where Dracula gives his brides an infant to feed on instead of Harker, although what they do is offscreen (it still manages to be the only effectively disturbingly moment in the film).
You also don't quite get the feeling of sexuality that you often do with Dracula in this movie. Dracula himself seems more interested in simply feeding himself than any sort of sexual urges and while he does appear to be kissing Lucy in their scenes before he bites her, it seems to be more to simply relax her and make her let her guard down even more than any sort of excitement on his part. Lucy, on the other hand, dressed in a fairly evocative nightgown, does seem quite excited in her anticipation of Dracula's touch in a couple of the moments between them and there's no doubt that she's relishing the feeling of him sucking her blood in an orgasmic kind of way but that's about as far as that goes and there's no definitely no sexuality when it comes to Dracula's fierce attack on Mina. The only other suggestion is during the scene with Harker and Dracula's brides, as the way they're so pleased with the sight of him, with one saying, "He is young and strong. There are kisses for us all," speaks for itself. And while I still see only animalistic hunger in Dracula's attack on his victims, there are still the interesting implications, as there are in the novel, about his being so intent upon keeping this man for himself. However, none of the material in this movie is as sensuous as it gets in the Hammer films, especially in the later years.
Ultimately, why I don't find Count Dracula to be a pleasant viewing experience is because the movie is downright boring to me. There's nothing wrong with a slow pace but, despite the good performances from Christopher Lee and Herbert Lom, the lack of atmosphere and sense of dread makes it come across as talky and dull. There are so many scenes of people just standing or sitting around and talking about what's going on, and while Lee and Lom can definitely hold one's attention for a while, that only goes so far, especially with the latter, namely because he's so good at delivering Van Helsing's speeches that, as I said earlier, I want to actually see him in action. That's another thing: there are very few more fast-paced or suspenseful scenes to break up all this monotony and those that are here, like the scene with Harker and Dracula's brides, his escape from the castle, the moment where Renfield tries to break out of his cell when he sees Dracula, Van Helsing breaking into Lucy's crypt and killing her with Harker and Quincy Morris' help, and the simultaneous scene of Renfield attacking Mina and the stuff animals in the abbey attacking Harker, Morris, and Dr. Seward, are either too brief, not filmed well enough, or too silly to help. Even the scenes that are meant to be genuinely creepy and suspenseful, like Lucy's encounters with Dracula and when she, now a vampire, stalks and kills a young child (the killing happening offscreen), don't work because of how poor the atmosphere is and the laughable prop-work involving the bat, which you see before Dracula appears. Plus, I find Dracula's constantly whispering, "Lucy," to be more annoying than spooky, and I never thought I'd use the word "annoying" when referring to Christopher Lee.
There are things that Jess Franco does in the filming and staging that really get on my nerves. For one, he's constantly zooming in on an actor's face to try to add an impact, like on that of the man traveling with Harker by train at the beginning when he mentions Dracula, Dracula himself when he gives his, "Children of the night," quote (it first zooms in on Harker and then cuts to Dracula, zooming on his eyes and panning down to his mouth), and on Van Helsing when he's telling Mina and Quincey Morris of the legends of vampires in Transylvania. Franco is far from the only one of these kinds of European filmmakers to do this during this era, as I've seen similar camera movement in Italian horror films, especially those by Lucio Fulci, but for whatever reason, it really annoyed me here. As if that wasn't bad enough, there then come the times where the way he shoots and blocks out scenes make things freaking confusing, and there's no better example than that scene involving the stuffed animals in the abbey. After you see them closing in on Harker, Morris, and Seward, with thunder and lightning crashing outside, you then see Dracula and the film cuts to Renfield's cell, where Mina tries to speak with him, only for the count to compel him to attack her. That scene is inter-cut with what's going on at the abbey and then, we see Harker hold up the cross Van Helsing gave him, causing Dracula to suddenly recoil where he is, causing those animals to stop their advance and Renfield his attack. Now, because of the way all of that was edited, I thought Dracula appeared in the room with them and he recoiled because he saw the cross, which made me confused as to why, in the next scene, Harker is surprised to catch sight of him looking younger than he originally was. But, when you look at that scene more closely, Dracula is obviously on the balcony he was earlier, when Renfield saw him and tried to escape his cell as a result (that, in and of itself, confused me, because it made look as if he were right there, when the abbey and the clinic seem to be a pretty fair distance from each other). He's in the upper part of the house, while the attack of the animals is happening down in the basement, but then, why did Dracula recoil if he didn't see the cross? Does this mean that you only have to brandish a cross in the same building as him to effectively repel him? I hope not, because that makes him feel even more vulnerable than he's always been portrayed before, suffering from anything holy, including a Bible in one movie, garlic, pure water, silver bullets, etc. And the transition from England back to Transylvania is done very abruptly. We know Dracula is planning to go back there, as we see him make the arrangements, and that Harker and Morris are planning to get there ahead of him in order to effectively ambush him, but then, we have that scene where he tries to take Mina, only to be driven away by Van Helsing, and right after that, we cut to these gypsies traveling across the land, carrying the box that Dracula is hiding in. It's so sudden and jarring, that I found myself thinking, "Who are these people, and why are they helping Dracula?" Now, I remember that they were probably the same people Harker saw loading up Dracula's boxes of earth at the beginning but the fact that I was so confused and didn't think back to them at all shows how well this movie did in leaving an impact on me.
The third act of this film is just "meh" and anticlimactic. Dracula tricks Mina into going to the opera, where he attacks her in the box she's sitting, and escapes before Harker and Morris arrive to save her. While they try to find a doctor for her, Dracula makes the arrangements for his trip back to Transylvania, and Renfield then gives up the name of the port that he intends to use to do so, prompting Van Helsing to send Harker and Morris there ahead of him in order to sanctify his castle. After they leave, and Dr. Seward finds Renfield dead in his cell, Dracula suddenly appears to Van Helsing, mocking him and saying that he's unable to do anything, as he moves in on the unconscious Mina. Van Helsing promptly draws a cross of fire in the floor using a poker, prompting Dracula to retreat, and he takes Mina. That's we cut to Transylvania and the gypsies, as they bring Dracula's box to the castle, the count unaware that Harker and Morris have gotten there first. The two of them stake his brides, whose high-pitched squeals and cries that are meant to be of pain sound more silly, and sanctify his own coffin in that crypt. After one last cut back to England, where Van Helsing tells Mina that they'll never be safe as long as Dracula is alive, we see Harker and Morris ambush the gypsies as they reach the castle by dropping some (obviously fake) large stones down on them, killing a few and making the others run off in a panic. They run to the crate, rip open the lid, Morris sets Dracula aflame, he dies very easily, and they push it over the edge of the cliff behind it. Very lackluster. I don't care if that is how the book ends, it still leaves me completely cold and unsatisfied, save for the relief that it means this awful movie is over.
The music was composed by Italian composer Bruno Nicolai, who was friends with and often worked alongside Ennio Morricone and also scored a number of Jess Franco's films. His score for Count Dracula is definitely one of its more memorable aspects, with a lot of harsh twanging and high-pitched string sounds thrown into the mix, the former often meant as a sting to signal Dracula's presence. The main theme, which you hear both during the opening credits and the finale, as well as in the actual story, such as when Van Helsing drives away Dracula before he can take Mina, is a pretty fair-sounding, sweeping symphony and Nicolai also comes up with a fast-moving piece that makes in those twanging and high-pitched strings I mentioned, a slowly building theme for some of the more "suspenseful" scenes, and some unusual-sounding, soft music for the quieter moments, such as when Van Helsing, Harker, and Morris spot Lucy returning to her crypt while waiting for her. I wouldn't call it mind-blowing or anything but it's definitely not a bad score, although I can imagine how bad it might sound if you heard it on a really poor, bargain bin release of this film.
While we're on the subject of sound, as this is the first of these European horror films I've ever done, I'd like to briefly touch on the way they, especially those made in Italy and Spain, approached it during this era. If you're really into this, you know that, for many decades, they merely recorded picture rather than audio, dubbing everything else in later. This not only resulted in things seeming off, even when the actors were clearly speaking English originally, but often the later recorded sounds coming across as very dry and hollow. Have you ever noticed that, how all the sounds in these movies, from footsteps, both human and animal, to doors opening, locks unlatching, wood creaking and breaking, and even the "squishier" types of sounds, tend to all come off like they were created from the driest, most barren sources they could find? Maybe it's more to do with the quality of the recording equipment they had back then but every time I watch one of these movies, that always really sticks out to me.
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| The Dark Sky release uses the French title. |
Lol imagine if Jess Franco directed Vampageddon!
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