Bela Lugosi is my homeboy, but there is a strong case to be made for Udo Kier as the greatest Dracula in movie history. If that’s sacrilege, that’s okay because Dracula is already sacreligious. Kier’s Dracula is not a suave guy. In fact, women find him creepy, or at least sorta sad in an unappealing way. He’s sickly. Odd. Awkward. An alien. He reminds me Ziggy Stardust-era David Bowie crossed with Peter Lorre. (The opening credits scene of Kier in close-up giving himself a make-up job, complete with a red smear on his lips and black coloring that he runs through white hair is very glam-rock, as well as a striking moment of vulnerability that we never get over in this film.)
He’s got the charisma of a cockroach, but he’s a wealthy Romanian noble, so most people give him the benefit of the doubt, even when he travels with a coffin.
Not that Udo cares all that much about what anyone thinks of him. What matters most to him is fresh blood.
And it’s gotta be virgin’s blood.
That’s the wild twist in this fine midnight movie freak-out. If Udo sucks blood from anyone who’s ever had too much fun on a Friday night, he goes through convulsions and has a vomiting fit depicted at such length and in such harrowing detail, with Udo going absolutely bugfuck on screen in this star-making role, that it might turn even the strong stomachs in the audience.
I’m not one of those people who gag at vomiting scenes in movies, but this film pushed it. I’ve seen 58,000 horror films and this one made even ME queasy–and that’s how you know it’s a good movie. Bravo!
In it, Dracula has pretty much used up all of the virgins in Romania and so he goes to Italy, land of the Catholic church. There’s gotta be virgins everywhere over there, right? Easy pickin’s!
BUT…
Nope. Uh-uh. Nada. The dark comedy comes in when Dracula can’t find a virgin even when he boards with a religious family who have four nubile unmarried daughters. Oh, they SAY they’re virgins. Meanwhile, the handsome young castle caretaker (Joe Dallesandro) is plowing more than the rose garden when no one else is looking, if you get my drift.
Solving this problem means plenty of gore and several casual rape jokes. Make sure the kids are put to bed first before you watch this.
Writer/director Paul Morrissey is one of those true eccentrics in film history. He compares neatly with the likes of John Waters and Bertrand Blier, cinematic terrorists and hippie-haters who countered the counterculture and answered free love with free hate. He made films for people who didn’t like anybody.
Morrissey gets odder when you read about him and find that he identifies as a Catholic conservative who views his films as portraits of everything that he despises. They’re comedies about the decay of society. They’re mockeries. They celebrate nothing. To the point of chewing out interviewers, Morrissey rejects any label that you could possibly pin to him.
“Independent film pioneer?” Fuck you.
“Voice of the counterculture?” Double-fuck you.
Morrissey wants no part of our stupid, stupid culture and the stupid, stupid things that we have to say about it.
He doesn’t want your plaudits; he wants to drag you down into the filth of the sinner’s path. He doesn’t want to make you angry about it, though; rather he wants you to laugh at the endless idiocy. Meanwhile, he’s an uapologetic advocate for censorship while his own movies tend to feature full-frontal nudity, harsh violence and the kind of deviance that gets a film cut in some countries.
You could say that Paul Morrissey is a man of a couple contradictions, but maybe that’s what it takes to make crazy films like this one.