Retro Review: THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES (1974)

THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES
aka THE 7 BROTHERS MEET DRACULA
(UK/Hong Kong - 1974; US release 1979)

Directed by Roy Ward Baker. Written by Don Houghton. Cast: Peter Cushing, David Chiang, Julie Ege, Robin Stewart, Shih Szu, John Forbes-Robertson, Robert Hanna, Chan Shen, James Ma, Liu Hui Ling, Liu Chia Yung, Wong Han Chan, Chen Tien Loong, Fong Kah Ann. (Unrated, 89 mins/R, 75 mins)

With 1970's THE VAMPIRE LOVERS, Hammer Films started spicing up their horror offerings with generous doses of skin and sex in an attempt to inject new life into their product. They made a play for the youth market by benching Peter Cushing in favor of Ralph Bates as a much-younger Dr. Frankenstein in 1970's little-loved HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN, and while they didn't replace Christopher Lee as Dracula, they did transport him with Cushing's Van Helsing to mod, swinging London in all its Austin Powers glory for 1972's DRACULA A.D. 1972 and 1973's THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA. Neither film was a hit, and while Cushing soldiered through them, Lee made sure to voice his displeasure with Hammer and the DRACULA series to anyone who would listen. Warner Bros. shelved SATANIC RITES in the US, where it wouldn't be released for another five years, and when pandering to the counterculture demographic failed, Hammer took an even more unpredictable approach by partnering on two 1974 projects with Hong Kong's Run Run Shaw, whose Shaw Brothers outfit was for responsible much of the burgeoning martial-arts craze: the horror/kung-fu hybrid THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES and the Stuart Whitman-starring Hong Kong-set actioner SHATTER.

Hammer was in a strange place by 1974. THE EXORCIST was enough of a game-changer that "classic"-style horror was falling out of fashion. Cushing returned to his Dr. Frankenstein role for one last time with 1974's FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM HELL, by far the goriest entry in the series and the same year saw the release of their most inspired film in years with Brian Clemens' horror/swashbuckler cult classic CAPTAIN KRONOS: VAMPIRE HUNTER, which was actually completed in 1972 but Hammer didn't have any confidence in it and shelved it for two years. Bad decisions, diminishing returns, and a changing genre landscape would eventually cause the company's classic incarnation to fold after 1976's TO THE DEVIL...A DAUGHTER, but THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES, like CAPTAIN KRONOS, was a film tragically unappreciated in its time and one that has aged remarkably well over the decades.

It would've been even better had Lee returned as Dracula, but he was so fed up with whole thing after SATANIC RITES that he walked away and refused to have anything more to do with the series, and it's doubtful that he would've been wooed back by the prospect of Dracula in a kung-fu setting. While Cushing returned as Van Helsing, Dracula was now played by jobbing British character actor and one-and-done trivia question response John Forbes-Robertson, the George Lazenby of the Hammer DRACULA series. Since Dracula's screen time is limited to the beginning and the end, the actor doesn't have much of a chance to make an impression beyond his excessive rouge and pasty makeup. And on top of that, he's dubbed over by veteran voice actor David de Keyser, whose familiar tones can be heard revoicing John Richardson in THE VENGEANCE OF SHE and Gabriele Ferzetti in ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE. Forbes-Robertson has very little to do here, and it's likely Dracula would've received more face time had Lee agreed to be in it, but with the end result, it hardly matters. Directed by the venerable Roy Ward Baker (ASYLUM, THE VAULT OF HORROR, AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS), with uncredited assistance from top Shaw Brothers director Chang Cheh, who handled the action sequences, THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES is a dark horse underdog in the Hammer canon that's long overdue for respect and appreciation. As recently as 2018's comprehensive, 992-page chronicle Hammer Complete: The Films, The Personnel, The Company, author Howard Maxford calls the film "a letdown on almost every level." Quite the contrary...it's clever, wildly entertaining, paced like a freight train, and better than at least the last four of Lee's DRACULAs.

Disregarding the A.D. 1972 and SATANIC RITES continuity even though, like those two, it was written by Don Houghton, 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES opens in 1804 Transylvania, where Chinese priest Kah (Chan Shen) awakens Dracula (Forbes-Robertson) to beg for his help in resurrecting the legendary "seven golden vampires." A weakened Dracula decides to use Kah as a vessel to strengthen his own evil spirit and to use the seven golden vampires to wreak his vengeance on mankind (having Dracula possess Kah is also a convenient way around Forbes-Robertson being cast late in production). 100 years later, Van Helsing (Cushing) is in Chung King as a guest lecturer on the subject of vampirism, telling his students of the legend of the seven golden vampires who have terrorized the remote village of Ping Kwei for the last century. Most scoff and walk out, but one, Hsi Ching (David Chiang) knows he speaks the truth: his family comes from that village and his grandfather lost his life battling the seven golden vampires, but not before killing one of them. Van Helsing, with his son Leyland (Robin Stewart) and wealthy, widowed Scandinavian socialite Vanessa Buren (Julie Ege), who thinks "a vampire hunt sounds exciting," agrees to accompany and advise Hsi Ching, his six brothers, and their ass-kicking little sister Mei Kwei (Shih Szu) on a treacherous journey to Ping Kwei to find and destroy the six surviving golden vampires while frequently fighting off a growing army of their undead victims, now resurrected as kung-fu zombies.

I'm not sure how "Peter Cushing leading a band of sibling martial-arts warriors against vampires and kung-fu zombies" wasn't the most slam-dunk cinematic sales pitch of 1974. It's handsomely-produced and stylishly shot in garish greens, blues, and reds, with spirited performances (this is one of Cushing's best turns as Van Helsing, even taking part in some of the kung-fu fighting) and a sharp use of the region and its iconography (Van Helsing warns that crosses are useless against these vampires, who can only be warded off by Buddha imagery), but THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES was met with general apathy by UK audiences. Like THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA, it was shelved in the US by Warner Bros, who ended up selling both films to the short-lived grindhouse outfit Dynamite Entertainment. They eventually released SATANIC RITES in 1978 as COUNT DRACULA AND HIS VAMPIRE BRIDE, while 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES underwent a drastic restructuring into the cheesily-titled THE 7 BROTHERS MEET DRACULA, which hit theaters in the summer and into the fall of 1979. It's one of the worst botched re-edits of all time, gutting the film from 89 to 75 minutes, losing tons of exposition and shifting scenes around to the point where the story makes no sense at all. This had to be part of the reason the film was dismissed as gutter schlock and was maligned for so long by American audiences until Anchor Bay's original DVD release in 1999 finally made the original 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES cut widely available (the butchered 7 BROTHERS MEET DRACULA was included as an extra, and both cuts are present on Scream Factory's new Blu-ray, because physical media is dead). Considering how well-crafted the original version was, and that kung-fu films were all the rage in 1974--especially with Warner Bros., who had huge hits with  5 FINGERS OF DEATH and the landmark ENTER THE DRAGON--shelving the film in the first place was an astonishingly bone-headed decision, let alone Dynamite's later catastrophic mangling of it, basically reducing it to fight scenes and T&A, with one topless shot of a woman repeated three times. Forget the 7 BROTHERS cut unless you need to analyze just how badly a good movie can be fucked up beyond recognition. THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES is an absolute blast and a worthy conclusion to Hammer's DRACULA series, and it's time for it to be given its rightful place among the studio's crowning achievements.

The butchered 7 BROTHERS MEET DRACULA version
opening in Toledo, OH on 10/5/1979

Retro Review: THE BLOODTHIRSTY TRILOGY: THE VAMPIRE DOLL (1970); LAKE OF DRACULA (1971); and EVIL OF DRACULA (1974)

THE VAMPIRE DOLL
(Japan - 1970; US release 1971)

Directed by Michio Yamamoto. Written by Ei Ogawa and Hiroshi Nagano. Cast: Kayo Matsuo, Akira Nakao, Yukiko Kobayashi, Yoko Minamikaze, Kaku Takashina, Junya Usami, Atsuo Nakamura, Jun Hamamura. (Unrated, 71 mins)

Japan's Toho Co, Ltd. will forever be inextricably linked with GODZILLA and the entire kaiju universe that it spawned nearly 65 years ago. A close second would be the classic films of Akira Kurosawa, but prompted by the success of the Poe series being churned out by AIP and the Hammer frightfests of the day, Toho briefly dabbled in classic horror in the early 1970s. That type of classical "western" horror was unusual for Toho or any Japanese production company, as most instances of Japanese horror (1965's KWAIDAN being a good example) were based in Japanese and "eastern" myths, customs, and styles. The so-called "Bloodthirsty Trilogy" is a loose collection of mostly classically traditional vampire films produced by Toho from 1970 to 1974, all of them directed by Michio Yamamoto, a former assistant to Kurosawa (1957's THRONE OF BLOOD) who never really broke out and established himself beyond the "Bloodthirsty Trilogy." Born in 1933, Yamamoto was only 43 when he quit the movie industry and became a minor footnote in the grand Toho story, never heard from again before his death in 2004. Just out on Blu-ray in a three-film set from Arrow Video, the titles in the "Bloodthirsty Trilogy" are available in their intended versions for the first time in years (the second film in the series, LAKE OF DRACULA, had the most exposure on American TV back in the day and was released on VHS by Paramount in 1994), hopefully rescuing the forgotten Yamamoto from oblivion.

1970's THE VAMPIRE DOLL is a stylish and eerie contemporary tale with ominous goings-on that begin on a dark and stormy night in a cursed, Usher-like house of the damned in the middle of nowhere. After working in America for six months, Kazuhiko Sagawa (Atsuo Nakamura) arrives at the family home of his girlfriend Yuko (Yukiko Kobayashi) only to be told by her grieving mother Mrs. Nonomura (Yoko Minamikaze) that she was killed in a car accident two weeks earlier. Kazuhiko is devastated and ultimately skeptical, especially when he keeps seeing Yuko in the house and on the grounds, confronting her at her own grave where her pale visage greets him and begs "Please kill me." Back home, Kazuhiko's younger sister Keiko (Kayo Matsuo) senses he's in danger and drags her fiance Hiroshi (Akira Nakao) to the Nonomura house to investigate. They arrive only to be told by Mrs. Nonomura that Kazuhiko left, but car trouble forces them to stay the night, and it isn't long before Keiko starts seeing Yuko as well. Yamamoto fills THE VAMPIRE DOLL with memorably creepy imagery, whether it's the appearance of the undead Yuko with her bloodied arms and glowing yellow eyes, Hiroshi exhuming Yuko's corpse and finding a lifeless doll in her coffin, an untraceable sound of weeping that faintly echoes through the house ("It's the wind blowing through the skylight window," Mrs. Nonomura claims), or Hiroshi's discovery of Kazuhiko's bloodstained cufflink at Yuko's grave, proof that he never left the grounds and that Mrs. Nonomura and her loyal, mute manservant Genzo (Kaku Takashina) are hiding something. THE VAMPIRE DOLL does stumble a bit when it tries to explain too much in regards to the tragic Nonomura family backstory as it ventures down a path that prefigures the later JU-ON films and J-Horror tropes as the town doctor (Junya Usami) shows up to function as a Japanese Basil Exposition. But it gets back on track fairly quickly, with Yamamoto fashioning the film as an almost identical replica of AIP, Hammer, and Amicus (Hiroshi even compliments his host's "splendid Western-style house") and despite the cultural differences, the universal language of classic horror translates beautifully. This is a moody, vividly atmospheric, and scary little gem with well-done jolts, wonderful set design and shot compositions and it benefits greatly from a brief 71-minute running time that relentlessly cuts through the bullshit.

LAKE OF DRACULA
(Japan - 1971; US release 1973)

Directed by Michio Yamamoto. Written by Ei Ogawa and Masaru Takesue. Cast: Choei Takahashi, Sanae Emi, Midori Fujita, Shin Kishida, Kaku Takashina, Hideji Otaki, Michiyo Yamazoe, Fusako Tachibana. (Unrated, 82 mins)

Yamamoto and VAMPIRE DOLL co-writer Ei Ogawa were back the next year with LAKE OF DRACULA, a peculiarly uneven vampire outing that gets off to a terrific start but stumbles and bumbles when it starts trying to pretend it's not a vampire movie. On a seasonal leave from her studies, Akiko (Midori Fujita) is spending her break at a cabin in a lakeside village with her younger sister Natsuko (Sanae Emi). She's haunted by a childhood memory 18 years earlier when her dog Leo wandered into a strange house and she encountered what appeared to be a vampire. A strange cargo delivery dropped off for local handyman Kyusaku (Kaku Takashina) is revealed to contain the coffin of Dracula (Shin Kishida). Dracula immediately puts the bite on Renfield...er, I mean, Kyusaku, who proceeds to kill Leo (who's pretty spry and energetic for a dog who must be at least 18 years old by this point) and attack Akiko. She gets away, but as Natsuko falls under Dracula's spell, Akiko and her doctor boyfriend Saeki (Choei Takahashi) attempt to get to the bottom of the strange occurrences.

Kishida is a terrifying Dracula, complete with a guttural, gurgling growl that makes him sound possessed. When LAKE OF DRACULA focuses on him--which isn't nearly enough--it's great stuff. But the film makes the bizarre decision to go off on a psychological tangent, with Saeki, who functions as whatever the plot needs him to be at any given moment (hard-working ER doc, vampire expert, psychologist, hypnotist), convinced that Akiko's problems lie with her repressed memories of sibling jealousy and that "Dracula" is just a mortal madman hypnotizing everyone into believing he's a vampire. It's an absurd bit of misdirection that only serves to pointlessly pad the story, since a) it's obvious from the supernatural shenanigans that this is a purely evil agent of the undead wreaking havoc, and b) the already short movie would only be about an hour long without it. The script tries to draw parallels between Akiko's family issues and a curse affecting the family of the vampire--who may be Dracula or just a present incarnation of him--but it's all psychological smoke and mirrors that works to the film's detriment. It's so preoccupied with bending over backwards to not be a Dracula movie that it ends up sabotaging itself, especially since Kishida is so great in the role. LAKE OF DRACULA has been the easiest of the "Bloodthirsty Trilogy" to see over the years. In addition to its surprise VHS appearance in 1994, it got a subtitled theatrical release in the US in 1973 before turning up in a dubbed version in a TV syndication package in 1980, along with its follow-up, EVIL OF DRACULA.

EVIL OF DRACULA
(Japan - 1974; US release 1975)

Directed by Michio Yamamoto. Written by Ei Ogawa and Masaru Takesue. Cast: Toshio Kurosawa, Kunie Tanaka, Katsuhiko Sasaki, Shin Kishida, Mariko Mochizuki, Mio Ota, Mika Katsuragi, Keiko Aramaki, Yunosuke Ito. (Unrated, 83 mins)

The final installment in the "Bloodthirsty Trilogy" rights the ship after the erratic and uneven LAKE OF DRACULA. Shin Kishida is back as, if not Dracula, then a very similar vampire, this time in the guise of a principal at an isolated girls school in northern Japan. Prof. Shiraki (Toshia Kurosawa), a young instructor from Tokyo, arrives for a new teaching post and is shocked to walk into an already grief-filled situation: the professor's wife died two days earlier and her body is being kept in coffin in the basement per "local custom," and one of the students has gone missing. It doesn't take long for Shiraki to find both of them when they attack him in his room after he's been drinking, which causes him to dismiss it as a bad dream. Then next morning, the principal tells Shiraki that he's ill and wants him to take over his job. He's apprehensive, especially after meeting superstitious colleague Dr. Shimomura (Kunie Tanaka), an expert in local folklore, who informs him of a well-known area legend involving a European shipwreck survivor from two centuries earlier who was forced to drink his own blood to survive. He met a local woman and they continued feasting on one another's blood, thus perpetrating a curse that has haunted the region since. Doing some further digging and finding evidence of a string of long-missing "principals" who ran the school (which is a front for the vampire to procure slavishly-devoted "brides"), Shiraki and Shimamura discover that the vampiric "spirit" lives on, assuming the shape its latest victim and requiring a new body when its host is about to die.

Again drenched in atmosphere and showcasing numerous chilling moments (few more haunting than a student nearing the completion of her turn into the undead and using her last traces of humanity to make the conscious decision to fling herself to her death), EVIL OF DRACULA is also an interesting, almost HORROR EXPRESS-meets-THE THING-like take on vampire lore, with Kishida once again crushing it as one of the most ferocious of all cinematic "Dracula"s, for all intents and purposes. Like LAKE OF DRACULA, EVIL OF DRACULA doesn't use Kishida as much as it should, but it's a much more consistent and straightforward film with some inventive ideas and several solid jump scares. Yamamoto directed a couple more TV projects before calling it a career in 1976, while Kishida stayed busy as a character actor (he turned up in SHOGUN ASSASSIN in scenes culled from the first two LONE WOLF AND CUB movies) until he succumbed to lung cancer in 1982 at the far-too-young age of 42. If Arrow's release of this trilogy can lead to a renewed appreciation of the obscure Yamamoto as a sort-of Japanese Mario Bava, then let's hope it also serves to show horror fans that they've been missing one of the great screen Draculas in the form of Shin Kishida.

Cult Classics Revisited: COUNT DRACULA (1970)

COUNT DRACULA
(Italy/Spain/West Germany - 1970)

Directed by Jess Franco. Written by Augusto Finocchi. Cast: Christopher Lee, Klaus Kinski, Herbert Lom, Maria Rohm, Fred Williams, Soledad Miranda, Jack Taylor, Paul Muller, Franco Castellani, Jesus Puente, Jeannine Mestre, Emma Cohen, Jess Franco, Colette Giacobine. (Unrated, 97 mins)

He seems more at peace with it now, but for many years, Sir Christopher Lee openly despised his reputation as a horror icon, specifically his inextricable link with Dracula. Right on the heels of playing Frankenstein's monster in Hammer Films' THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN in 1957, 36-year-old Lee had his breakout role in the studio's HORROR OF DRACULA (1958), and while Dracula films only make up a tiny percentage of the now 92-year-old actor's nearly 300 credits over a storied and versatile career that's still trucking along in its eighth decade, it's indeed Dracula that will always be the first thing that comes to mind upon hearing the name "Christopher Lee." After HORROR OF DRACULA established Lee as a bona fide horror star, it didn't take long for him to spoof that image in the 1959 Italian comedy UNCLE WAS A VAMPIRE, but he didn't actually reprise his Dracula role in Hammer's official series until 1965's DRACULA: PRINCE OF DARKNESS. That was followed by 1968's DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE and two films in 1970: TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA and SCARS OF DRACULA. Lee was growing disillusioned with Hammer's Dracula films and the writers' refusal to stick to Bram Stoker's novel, instead concocting what Lee thought were absurd ideas that had nothing to do with Stoker's vision of the character. After resurrecting Dracula in mod, swinging London with 1972's DRACULA A.D. 1972 and 1973's THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA, which had Dracula masquerading as a wealthy real estate mogul attempting to unleash a deadly virus upon the world, Lee reached his breaking point. By this time, he was openly bashing Hammer and the DRACULA films to the press and when Hammer announced a co-production deal with Hong Kong's Shaw Brothers for THE LEGEND OF THE SEVEN GOLDEN VAMPIRES, which would pit Dracula against a team of Bruce Lee-inspired kung-fu fighters, Lee refused to have anything to do with it and was replaced by a bland and ineffective John Forbes-Robertson. The film was eventually released in the US as THE 7 BROTHERS MEET DRACULA, and marked the end of Hammer's DRACULA series.

Before his frustration reached critical mass, Lee did enjoy spoofing his Dracula image in cameos in the Peter Sellers-Ringo Starr film THE MAGIC CHRISTIAN (1969) and in the Sammy Davis Jr-Peter Lawford post-Rat Pack comedy ONE MORE TIME (1970), the latter at the personal request of horror aficionado and Lee superfan Davis. Even after his acrimonious departure from Hammer's series, Lee would play Dracula one last time in the 1976 French comedy DRACULA AND SON, directed by Eduardo Molinaro, who would go on to make the 1978 smash LA CAGE AUX FOLLES. In addition to appearing in two Hammer DRACULAs in 1970, Lee also made a Dracula film outside of the studio, almost as an open act of rebellion. Lee had done several films with producer Harry Alan Towers and Spanish exploitation legend Jess Franco in the preceding few years, including five FU MANCHU films (Franco directed the final two) as well as the softcore porn outing EUGENIE: THE STORY OF HER JOURNEY INTO PERVERSION (1970), a film in which Lee has maintained the racier elements were added after his scenes were shot. Lee was upset with Franco and Towers, but when they offered him a chance to star in a Dracula adaptation with the promise to remain faithful to Stoker's novel, the disgruntled actor couldn't resist.

To put it in era-appropriate terms, Lee making COUNT DRACULA in 1970 is akin to Sean Connery making a 007 film for a rival studio while still starring in the official Bond series. Shot in Barcelona, COUNT DRACULA is a low-key affair with a script (credited to Augusto Finocchi in the print on Dark Sky's DVD, though Franco and Towers worked on it, and the US ads gave sole writing credit to Towers, under his screenwriting pseudonym "Peter Welbeck") that takes whole chunks of dialogue directly from Stoker's novel. Dracula is even introduced as an old man who gets progressively younger as the film proceeds and he gets a fresh supply of new blood from his victims. Intending to sell his decaying residence, an aged Dracula is visited at his castle by young lawyer Jonathan Harker (German actor Fred Williams). Dracula promptly puts the bite on Harker, who escapes from the castle and is transported back to a sanitarium in London, where he's treated by Dr. Seward (Paul Muller). His situation attracts the attention of clinic head Dr. Van Helsing (Herbert Lom) as a spry and younger-looking Dracula has followed Harker back to London to buy a neighboring castle so he can stalk and vampirize his fiancee Mina (Towers' wife Maria Rohm) and her friend Lucy (Franco muse Soledad Miranda). Dracula has also established a psychic hold on crazed asylum inmate Renfield (Klaus Kinski), who lost his mind after his family had a fateful encounter with the vampire years earlier.

While staying generally faithful to Stoker in spirit, COUNT DRACULA takes some liberties in its execution, especially in the way it takes elements of the book's Van Helsing's backstory and transfers them over to Renfield. The film is very slowly-paced and, like most Franco efforts, budget-deprived. Many of the sets look like they belong in a high school play, with some interiors appearing ready to topple over at any second. At times, the cheap, sparse look of Dracula's castle adds to the sense of gloomy despair looming over the elderly vampire (a happy accident I'm sure, given Franco's track record). Elsewhere, dangling rubber bats are laughably phony-looking, the camera occasionally doesn't seem to be pointed in the right direction, and the day-for-night work is atrocious, with one scene taking place at night when it's obvious it was shot in the middle of a bright, sunny day. Lee underplays it for the most part, but you can see his commitment, especially in one epic monologue to Harker early on that's delivered directly into the camera in a way that only Lee can. Lee absolutely nails this long sequence ("This was a Dracula indeed!") and it ranks with the finest acting of his career.

Franco did some of his most professional work during his years with Towers, a veteran exploitation huckster who was great at corralling money to lure name actors who maybe weren't at their pinnacle of their career (like a visibly drunk Jack Palance in Franco's 1969 De Sade chronicle JUSTINE) or were just cool with whatever as long as the check cleared (Lee and Lom, the latter having just appeared in Franco's sleazy 1969 women-in-prison classic 99 WOMEN and would continue slumming in Eurotrash until Blake Edwards rescued him to reprise his role as the perpetually-flustered Dreyfus when he restarted the PINK PANTHER franchise in 1975). Towers managed to get Lee, Lom, and Kinski together for COUNT DRACULA, but the three headliners are never seen together and were never on the set with one another. Franco leaves a lot of the plot's heavy lifting to Harker and Lucy's fiance Quincy Morris (played by American expat and Franco regular Jack Taylor), while Lee, Lom, and Kinski only worked on the film for a few days each. Dracula and Van Helsing's sole scene together is shot in a way that makes it quite apparent Lee and Lom were not there at the same time. It's worth noting that there is the possibility that Dracula and Van Helsing were meant to interact more than they do--Lom was a last-minute replacement after Vincent Price backed out just before shooting began. Perhaps his hasty casting and limited availability necessitated changes, which may explain why Van Helsing doesn't even take part in the final ambush of Dracula, instead sending Harker and Morris to deal with it after suffering a stroke from which he's apparently recovered two scenes later. Kinski's Renfield never leaves his asylum cell, where he makes funny noises, smears food on the walls, and eats flies, which may have just been Franco filming Kinski's lunch break. As an actor, Kinski only interacts with Muller, Franco Castellani (as an abusive guard) and, for one scene, Rohm, who's said that Kinski initially refused to appear in a Dracula movie and Towers had to convince him that his scenes were for another project. According to legend (and Rohm, who perhaps embellishes somewhat but it's still amusing and, considering Kinski's volatile personality, quite plausible) when Renfield attempts to choke Mina, Kinski had his hands around her neck and whispered "Maria, I think that husband of yours has me in a fucking Dracula film." Interestingly, Kinski would star in two Dracula adaptation years later, with Werner Herzog's NOSFERATU: THE VAMPYRE (1979) and its unofficial sequel, NOSFERATU IN VENICE (1988).

Even with its flaws and cut corners, COUNT DRACULA is an unusually ambitious project for Franco and Towers, and one that makes a good pairing with the same year's THE BLOODY JUDGE, released in the US in 1972 as the misleading NIGHT OF THE BLOOD MONSTER (it would be 1973 before COUNT DRACULA managed to find a US distributor). THE BLOODY JUDGE is obviously inspired by Michael Reeves' WITCHFINDER GENERAL, itself ripped off in 1969 with the West German tongue-ripper MARK OF THE DEVIL, starring (wait for it) Herbert Lom, but like COUNT DRACULA, it features one of Lee's best performances as puritanical Judge Jeffreys, yet another in a long line of impotent, sexually-frustrated witchfinders taking their penile inadequacy issues out on accused witches and assorted wenches, harlots, and other undesirables of dubious moral standing. Both films catch Franco just before 27-year-old Soledad Miranda's tragic death in a car accident would, for better or worse, completely alter the course of his career. Franco could hold his own as a journeyman gun-for-hire, but he was starting to explore his auteur impulses, which usually meant plotless fever dreams and constant crotch-zooms, an artistic shift that would reach its apex when he met his next muse and eventual life partner Lina Romay. There's a fine line between auteur and perv, and as Franco aged into the emeritus raconteur phase of his career in the years before his death in 2013, his work was reconsidered as that of a legitimate trail-blazer and cinematic genius. I'm not entirely onboard with that--there's some interesting films there in his post-Towers dive into horror erotica, but a large chunk of it is clearly the work of an often sloppy filmmaker who just had a fond appreciation for naked women.  Not that there's anything wrong with that...

In Theaters/On VOD: DRACULA (2013)

DRACULA
(Italy/Spain/France - 2012; 2013 US release)

Directed by Dario Argento.  Written by Dario Argento, Antonio Tentori, Stefano Piani, Enrique Cerezo.  Cast: Thomas Kretschmann, Rutger Hauer, Asia Argento, Marta Gastini, Unax Ugalde, Miriam Giovanelli, Mariacristina Heller, Augusto Zucchi, Franco Guido Ravera, Giuseppe Loconsole, Giovanni Franzoni, Christian Burruano. (Unrated, 110 mins)

By now, there's no longer a question of whether a new Dario Argento film will be the comeback that his devoted fans have been anticipating for years.  No, we now know not to expect it.  The Dario Argento of today is not the Dario Argento who gave us an incredible run of classic Italian horror films from 1970 to 1987.  Films like DEEP RED (1975), SUSPIRIA (1977), INFERNO (1980), and TENEBRE (1982) have transcended their cult status and are commonly embraced even by mainstream critics as important and influential films.  After 1987's OPERA, it's been a near-continuous downward spiral for the legendary horror icon, with only 1996's THE STENDHAL SYNDROME standing as his last all-around good movie, and that's only if you watch the Italian-language version with English subtitles and even then, it suffers from Argento's then-21-year-old daughter Asia being completely miscast as a driven detective pursuing a serial killer (she could pull the role off now in her late 30s).  Based on my love for his past classics, I've graded these Argento "lost years" on a generous curve, even finding things to appreciate in much-maligned films like THE CARD PLAYER (2004), DO YOU LIKE HITCHCOCK? (2005), and MOTHER OF TEARS (2007).  But it's getting harder and harder for even a superfan/apologist like myself to keep making excuses, and after 2009's disastrous GIALLO, I gave up--not on watching new Argento films, but on the notion of expecting anything from them. The biggest problem with Argento's output over the last two decades is that, with each new film, they feel less and less like the work of their maker.  MOTHER OF TEARS, his belated conclusion to the "Three Mothers" trilogy that started with SUSPIRIA and INFERNO, felt like a generic horror film that could've been made by anybody.  It certainly didn't feel like an Argento film.  The tracking shots, the inventive murders, and the grandiose set pieces of the past were nowhere to be found.  And even something like THE CARD PLAYER felt like a gorier-than-usual TV police procedural that may as well have been called CSI: ROME.  The last Argento film to feel like an Argento film was probably 2001's SLEEPLESS, which wasn't really anything special but was at least unmistakably Argento in its execution.

Irene Miracle in INFERNO

By now, in 2013, it's dispiritingly clear that Argento is never going to have another SUSPIRIA.  He's never going to make another INFERNO.  He may never even have another SLEEPLESS.  His best days are behind him and they're not coming back.  He's not the same filmmaker.  Filmmakers both old and new continue to mimic the style of Argento's essential work (Brian De Palma's recent PASSION had a shot that was blatantly lifted from TENEBRE, and it's not the first time he's done it).  Argento's films used to have a look, mood, and feel all their own.  Now, his movies feel like everyone else's.  He's still active, he still wants to work, but the fire's gone.  The only way to approach anything new by him is to go in with the lowest possible expectations and let the chips fall where they may.  If it were most other filmmakers, the solution would be simple:  if his movies suck, then stop watching them.  But Argento is different.  There was a time when he was unstoppable.  There was a time when he was the arguably the greatest living horror filmmaker.  Anyone who appreciates his accomplishments and his significance to the horror genre can't just turn their back on him.  Even if his bad films outnumber his good ones (and I think they do at this point), he's still Dario Argento.  So, every few years, he makes a new movie and people wonder "Will this be the comeback?"  But we know the answer and we brace ourselves and try to find something good in the latest work of a legend who's simply lost his mojo and shows no signs of getting it back.  Good directors make bad movies all the time.  It just hurts to see Argento floundering like this for the better part of 25 years.  It would be a lot easier on the fans and even Argento himself if he just retired and enjoyed his emeritus status on the convention circuit and on horror documentaries, where everyone will just remember the good times and it'll be like nothing after 1987 ever happened.

But filmmaking is in his blood, so the now-73-year-old Argento soldiers on.  His latest, DRACULA, was shot in stereoscopic 3-D and is getting a limited release in the US by IFC Films, a year after its release in Europe.  Argento's last crack at classic horror was 1998's apocalyptically awful PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, almost unanimously reviled as his career nadir (it's no accident that SLEEPLESS was hailed as a "back to basics" thriller, almost as if he was apologizing for PHANTOM).  Approaching DRACULA with the lowest expectations, the answer is yes, it's better than PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, but so are things like identity theft, herpes, tetanus, and the Jacksonville Jaguars.  But, as is the case with Argento's recent output, it doesn't feel anything like Dario Argento.  With its sometimes gratuitous nudity and abundance of Asylum-level CGI, it seems like "Dario Argento's DRACULA" could just as easily be called "Jim Wynorski's DRACULA" and no one would know the difference.  Watching Argento's DRACULA as if it's premiering on SyFy in prime time on a Saturday night, it's acceptable enough and sometimes entertaining in a cheesy way.  But there's nothing here that says "Dario Argento," unless you count his continued insistence on putting Asia in nude scenes, which used to feel weird (especially a topless shot in 1993's TRAUMA when she was still a teenager), but now it's just expected (yes, she has two nude scenes here).  Where is Dario Argento?  Does he even enjoy making movies anymore?  Where are the elaborate set pieces and the creative kills?  Where are the intricately choreographed tracking shots?  The garish colors?  The killer soundtracks?  They're not here, and they haven't been for several years.  Even having old collaborators like cinematographer Luciano Tovoli (remember that Louma crane shot in TENEBRE?), effects master Sergio Stivaletti, and a score by Goblin's Claudio Simonetti (that doesn't sound like Goblin or Simonetti, by the way) on board does nothing to convey that singularly unique Argento feeling.  Are they all out to lunch?  Are they all just punching a clock?  Are any of them cognizant of their past accomplishments?

DRACULA follows the basic template of Bram Stoker's novel, with minor and often major tweaking throughout.  Jonathan Harker (Unax Ugalde) arrives in the village of Passo Borgo to catalog the library of Count Dracula (Thomas Kretschmann, who previously worked with Dario and Asia on STENDHAL).  Dracula and his busty vampiric minion Tania (Miriam Giovanelli) take turns biting Harker, who then disappears.  Meanwhile, his wife Mina (Marta Gastini) arrives in the village and reconnects with her old friend Lucy Kisslinger (Asia Argento), the daughter of the mayor (Augusto Zucchi).  Lucy is soon vampirized by Dracula and convinces Mina to go to the castle to look for Harker.  Sensing danger, Lucy consults the local priest (Franco Guido Ravera), who summons psychiatrist and vampire expert Dr. Van Helsing (Rutger Hauer), who has battled Dracula before.

Aside from some character name changes, the essential plot is there--Giovanni Franzoni is Renfield; Dracula scales an exterior wall like a lizard; Kretschmann gets to gravely intone "Children of the night...what music they make"--but for every clever departure like Dracula having a deal in place with the village elders for them to look the other way while he goes about his business, there's ten howlers that have you shaking your head in disbelief.  Chief among them is Dracula's ability to shapeshift into an owl (the Drac-owl attacks Tania in the opening scene in a way that looks suspiciously like Argento's tribute to THE COLBERT REPORT), a swarm of flies, and, in the silliest scene of Argento's career (yes, even sillier than a climactic online poker showdown in THE CARD PLAYER), a giant, human-sized mantis. Kretschmann is an OK Dracula, though it's hard to take him seriously when he gets all emo with Mina and actually utters the line "I am nothing but an out-of-tune chord in the divine symphony."  Hauer is possibly cinema's dullest Van Helsing.  Peter Cushing owns this character on film, but even when the vampire hunter was portrayed as an old man by the likes of Edward Van Sloan in the 1931 DRACULA or by Laurence Olivier in the 1979 version, he was a quick-witted, energetic guy.  Hauer turns up 75 minutes in and plays him as half-asleep, and his halting, stumbling delivery sounds like he's being fed the lines and is hearing them for the first time.  There's a couple of scenes where he's talking to Gastini but looking off to the side as if reading cue cards.  All due props for NIGHTHAWKS, BLADE RUNNER, and THE HITCHER, but Hauer's having a really off-day here and turns in a terrible performance.  Between the dubious, bush-league CGI splatter, the shapeshifting silliness, the ludicrous dialogue, the ornate but too-stagy sets, Hauer apparently guzzling ZzzQuil between takes, and the awkward dubbing of the supporting cast (Kretschmann, Hauer, Argento, and Gastini use their own voices; everyone else is dubbed, often badly), the possibility crosses your mind that Argento is trying to be funny and something's just getting lost in the translation.  But no, that's not the case.  This is just how newer Argento movies are.

I guess in the overall big picture, DRACULA is a better film than GIALLO and it's certainly an improvement on PHANTOM OF THE OPERA.  But that's really all you can say about it.  It's not as bad as its reputation, but it's not very good, either.  With rare exception (Dracula's massacre of the cowardly village elders is a nicely-done scene), anything entertaining or memorable in DRACULA is entertaining or memorable for the wrong reasons.  Imagine if the Dario Argento of 30 years ago did his own unique spin on DRACULA.  Hell, an in-his-prime Hauer could've played the title role, and he would've been terrific.  That's a film we'd still be talking about today.  Argento's got several undisputed classics to his name and those can never be taken away from him.  But it's hard to ignore the fact that 25 years of almost completely subpar output has more than slightly diminished his reputation.  I think I'll watch DEEP RED or INFERNO again.  (VOD version is not in 3-D)