Blood for Dracula (Paul Morrissey, 1974)

Also known as Andy Warhol's Dracula, Blood for Dracula is a companion film to the previous year's Flesh for Frankenstein, sharing writer/director Paul Morrissey, special effects artist Carlo Rambaldi (who went on to create E.T. and the psychic sex monster in Zulawski's Possession), most of the same sets, Warhol's name for marketing purposes, three leading actors (Joe Dallesandro, Udo Kier, and Arno Jürging), and a peculiar and distinctive tone and sensibility. I love these films.
Blood for Dracula opens with a pale and sickly Count Dracula (Udo Kier) urged by his servant Anton (Arno Jürging) to leave Romania for Italy. In order for the Count to maintain his immortality, he needs the blood of virgins (pronounced "wirgins" throughout), but the modern world is too full of people getting it on. Anton and Drac believe Italy's devout Catholics keep their pants on until marriage, ensuring an untainted blood supply. Meanwhile, down-on-their-luck aristocrats the Di Fiores live in a decaying mansion in the Italian countryside. Il Marchese Di Fiore (Vittorio De Sica) has gambled away the fortune, and La Marchesa (former model and food writer Maxime McKendry, in her only film role) thinks a wealthy Romanian count looking for a bride is just the ticket to get the Di Fiores rich again. The poor Di Fiores are in such dire straits that they can only afford one servant, handyman Mario (Joe Dallesandro), and they have to occasionally set aside their leisure for actual work. They're even reduced to making their own wicker furniture. The horror, the horror!

The Di Fiores have four daughters, and they believe two of the four are good candidates for a marriage to the pale Count. The oldest daughter, Esmeralda (Milena Vukotic), is considered a washed-up old maid by the rest of the family due to a previous engagement that almost resulted in marriage and her general old-timey, goody-two-shoes vibe, and the youngest daughter, Perla (Silvia Dionisio), is only fourteen and not ready for marriage. That leaves the middle sisters, Saphiria (Dominique Darel) and Rubinia (Stefania Casini). Unfortunately for old Drac, these two sisters are wild, decadent, modern, and horny, and they both have a lot of sex with Mario and, sometimes, each other. Dracula thinks he's getting some fresh virgin blood, but, to paraphrase hard rock legends Judas Priest, he's got another thing coming.
Morrissey captures the damnedest tone, occupying a strange space between homage and parody without landing on either side. Part of this is due to Morrissey letting each actor use his or her own accent. The characters are either Romanians or Italians, but the cast contains Germans, Brits, Americans, Italians, French, and Poles, all speaking in their own regional dialects. The film is hysterically funny and tongue-in-cheek without being campy, and Morrissey both critiques and pays tribute to classic horror, the European art film, the soft-core sex film in the Radley Metzger vein, aristocratic decadence, left- and right-wing politics, and the emerging proto-punk sensibility (particularly in the scenes of Kier vomiting tainted blood). Dracula is a whining, pampered, pathetic figure here, subservient to his assistant, sickly, easily tricked. It's a hilarious indictment of the aging, posturing hipster, but Morrissey is a complex guy who also recognizes how attractively funny and charismatic that kind of person can be.

Morrissey also uses Dallesandro's handyman character, Mario, to make some sharp points. Mario is a socialist who is constantly talking about the workers' revolution, but he's also a sexist pig who takes his frustrations at the rich out on the sisters, humiliating them, forcing himself on them, slapping them around. They use him, too, and Rubinia seems to get off on the rough treatment. There's a lot going on with this character, and Morrissey depicts a world where the class divide brutalizes everyone, and where unearned wealth makes people decadent and empty, but he also recognizes the hypocrisy in many male lefties who preach equality and utopia and revolution while treating women like shit. In the end, though, Mario, the only one who knows what it's like to work for a living, is also the only one who realizes what's happening and does something about it. (I'm not sure what Morrissey's politics were during the mid-'70s, but he's very politically conservative in his '80s and '90s interviews while holding some pretty wild and unorthodox opinions about art and aesthetics at the same time. The left and right both get hit hard in this movie.)

It's also fascinating that Morrissey cast Vittoria De Sica in the role of the Di Fiore patriarch. De Sica was a prominent filmmaker alongside his acting career, and he made his reputation directing neo-realist classics like Bicycle Thieves and Umberto D. By the end of his directing career, he was making a lot of frothy, colorful entertainments (with the occasional exception pointing back toward his early films, such as The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, though even these films were splashier and more conventionally professional). Was Morrissey making a parallel between the Marchese's move from prominence to decadence and De Sica's own trajectory from pioneering artist to professional entertainer? Whatever the case, De Sica is very funny in the part, which was one of his last. He died later that year.
If you haven't seen Blood for Dracula yet, what are you waiting for? It's got it all. Gore, sex, comedy, some beautiful shot compositions, political satire, great sets, sibling rivalry, practical coffin transportation tips, and Udo Kier, baby!

The Unholy Three (Jack Conway, 1930)

Almost two years ago, I wrote about Tod Browning's 1925 weirdo silent film classic The Unholy Three. Here's a link to that review. A short but cinematically eventful five years later, Hollywood remade The Unholy Three as a talkie, with Lon Chaney and Harry Earles reprising their roles. What results is an interesting curiosity that closely follows the earlier film's plot, structure, and beats, but is a far less satisfying experience. Film is a visual medium, which seems like such a blatantly obvious statement that I shouldn't even have to mention it, but too many people look at film primarily as a storytelling mechanism. Here we have two films with the exact same story, told in the same way (though one is silent with intertitles and the other is a talkie) and in the same order, with two of the same actors, and the 1925 film is a work of visual art while the 1930 remake is just a filmed story.
The remake is not a failure, but it is a more pedestrian, less thrilling experience if you've seen the original. The story is so ingenious and weird and needlessly complicated that it remains compelling a second time. Lon Chaney, in his only sound film (he died later that year from a throat hemorrhage), has the same charisma and presence he exhibited in his many silent film classics (though his ventriloquist dummy is less creepy in this version), and Lila Lee, taking over the Rosie role from Mae Busch, handles her complex character with a naturalism that feels modern.

On the negative side, director Jack Conway is a Hollywood pro who dials down the strangeness and personality that Browning can't help but exude, and the film's best moments are direct lifts from Browning's framing and the actors' movements in the '25 film, though sometimes shot from the opposite side of the set. Harry Earles, a hilarious and disturbing presence in the silent film, is an almost indecipherable mushmouth in the sound film. I could only pick up about every fifth word he said. Credited as Tweedledee in Browning's film, Conway lists him as "Midget" in the credits, with the other characters referring to him as "the midge." Browning, who worked in circuses, traveling carnivals, and vaudeville prior to his film career, has a more respectful and nuanced approach to his "circus freak" characters than Conway does. Ivan Linow as Hercules in this film is a duller, flatter performer than Victor McLaglen in Browning's film. Last but not least, the ape in the remake is a man in an ape suit, while Browning used a chimpanzee and trick camera angles to create a wilder and more visceral experience.
I don't know what else to say about this film. It sticks so closely to the original without capturing its magic but is a fascinating piece of film history. It's the only place to hear Lon Chaney's voice and for many years was much easier to see than the Browning film. And now I'm sad that Lon Chaney won't be appearing in any more films on our list. He and Conrad Veidt dominated the 1920s world of horror, suspense, crime, and indescribable strangeness, and I salute them for it.