Count Dracula Reviews

Even though "Count Dracula" is another of the usual B-movies in the cinema of Jesus Franco, is possibly the most budgets. His approach was based on industrial leverage international successes of Hammer Films productions with Christopher Lee in the famous role of vampire Count.

Despite this, the film is a more accurate recreation of Stoker's novel that he had played any of the above English productions. And perhaps here is the main problem of the film. The strong personality of the filmmaker and his delirious baroque aesthetic and collide with the original Victorian text, more rigorous and subtle. Franco himself admitted the matter: "I ​​defend even acknowledge that you have to attack it (the movie)."

The movie goes more to less, with jumps and a vague aesthetic argument that the unbalance and undermine the credibility of the action, especially towards the end. On the positive side, the attention to the literary original since it is the first film about Dracula in which the vampire progressively rejuvenated by the blood of their victims. Also some other scene that should be rewarded, as the short sequence, both sweet and macabre, set in a dark park and in which Lucy Westenra (Soledad Miranda), and vampirized, captures the attention of his victim in the figure of a little girl separated from her playmates.

By the way, excellent Spanish actress in her first performance in a film by Franco. Not its main character, Christopher Lee, who seems lethargic or unmotivated in the same paper, several times repeated, which had enthroned ten years before in the world of cinema. With respect to Klaus Kinski, playing his first appearance since a Renfield mad and say that his character is at the same time, so moving and disturbing. His performance, as "balanced" as intense. His characterization is the largest decline due to complete a excessive grooming in immaculate white dress and her hair always freshly washed. Herbert Lom comprises an effective Van Helsing, though perhaps too sober. In their defense and according to the actor himself, had to make the replicas imagining the presence of Lee, all based on reverse shots, having already left the set that actor.

The musical section of lower pitch and less prominence than usual. Count Dracula is presented with harp arpeggios while other sequences show musical avant-garde abstractions, all in line with its eclectic director.

At this time, early seventies, Jesus Franco film begins to be cause for criticism in his homeland for his propensity for pornographic genre. While critics and the profession you are losing respect in Spain, across Europe work is becoming better known and well recognized.