In this curio, Pere Portabella filmed many silent scenes from Jess Franco's 1970 production, the oft-derided 'El Conde Dracula', and pieced them together. His images are deliberately very grainy and clumsy, as if his goal is to create a documentary-style product - Portabella was by this point known as a documentary director after all. Christopher Lee as the main man features here, alongside other stars Soledad Miranda, Herbert Lom and Franco himself.
Any time we are in danger of being treated to moments from the familiar story, there are inserts from behind the scenes featuring false cobwebs being sprayed over coffins, a poor old rubber bat being coerced into action, and general larks from the cast and crew. What results is a curious hybrid of genuinely unsettling scenes, often filmed without dialogue and saturated with unearthly moans and noises, in stark, heavily-grained black and white.
In fact, the only dialogue we're treated to is at the end of the film, with Christopher Lee's very grand reading of a scene from the novel.
The whole experience is an odd one, and certainly not everyone's pint of blood. I'd suggest, however, it's worth a look. I rather enjoyed it.
What we have with 'Vampir Cuadecuc' is a curiously powerful, abstract experiment, some of which looks very impressive in a noir-ish kind of way, and some of it simply showing actors rehearsing and effects being applied. It reminds me of 1932's 'Vampyr' in that the imagery is stark and sombre and disconnected, but ultimately very moody and atmospheric.
Any time we are in danger of being treated to moments from the familiar story, there are inserts from behind the scenes featuring false cobwebs being sprayed over coffins, a poor old rubber bat being coerced into action, and general larks from the cast and crew. What results is a curious hybrid of genuinely unsettling scenes, often filmed without dialogue and saturated with unearthly moans and noises, in stark, heavily-grained black and white.
In fact, the only dialogue we're treated to is at the end of the film, with Christopher Lee's very grand reading of a scene from the novel.
The whole experience is an odd one, and certainly not everyone's pint of blood. I'd suggest, however, it's worth a look. I rather enjoyed it.
What we have with 'Vampir Cuadecuc' is a curiously powerful, abstract experiment, some of which looks very impressive in a noir-ish kind of way, and some of it simply showing actors rehearsing and effects being applied. It reminds me of 1932's 'Vampyr' in that the imagery is stark and sombre and disconnected, but ultimately very moody and atmospheric.