Sign up to add this to your collection
|
Sign up to add this to your favorites
|
|
61%
Overall Rating
|
|
Ranked #5,359
...out of 20,700 movies
|
Sign up to check in!
|
Deathly ill Count Dracula and his slimy underling, Anton, travel to Italy in search of a virgin's blood. They're welcomed at the crumbling estate of indebted Marchese Di Fiore, who's desperate to marry off his daughters to rich suitors. But there, instead of pure women, the count encounters incestuous lesbians with vile blood and Marxist manservant Mario, who's suspicious of the aristocratic Dracula.
--TMDb
|
|
Review by Ginose
Added: January 27, 2010
Now, I'll never be one to call Andy Warhol a "bad artist"... mostly because it seems the whole purpose of his venue was to make it all the more obvious that art, of any medium, is always of a subjective quality. So, refusing to fall into his trap, I will say this: Andy Warhol was a shitty filmmaker.
I can only liberally apply this to his works as a director, though his produced works aren't anything more significant; most are just boring jabs at political and social satire of their times, but normally nothing more relevant than that... the dual films of "Flesh for Frankenstein" and "Blood for Dracula" are no different. This could be considered a good thing, due to the fact that they're all laughably campy and yet tug heavily on the art-house strings that all of Warhol's filmography tries to, but it could be considered bad in the fact that they are still mediocre films that squander a great amount of talent on no story and such a shallow use of social-commentary that one could not get their socks wet in a puddle of it.
We start with Dracula applying make-up as to hide his clearly worn and aging body before laying his dear sister to her final rest and taking off, cross-continent by car with his servant, in order to find fresh virgin-blood in the... eh... assumed still heavily religious country of Italy with his obnoxious uptight servant, Anton.
Upon arriving at a small village inn, Anton is informed that there is a vineyard owned by a higher-class family, with four beautiful daughters, waiting to be taken by the hand of our sickly count... However, there is also a (greatly overstated) class-identity conflict with the dumb-ass, socialist groundskeeper and some subtle lesbian incest and other pointless fucking frivolities going on in the mansion, really culminating to nothing at all, in the end.
Yeah. That's the story, more or less.
Truth be told, I mentioned that this isn't actually an Andy Warhol film, but, by fucking GOD does it feel like one, at times. There's an utter lack of anything driving or interesting happening at great lengths during the run time, the characters are flat, undeveloped and produce absolutely nothing to contribute to the story.
I'm sorry, but this "characterization" of Dracula people seem to praise the film for is essentially no-existent. He isn't ever REALLY characterized, he's just given the persona of the sick, weak vampire in desperate need of virgin blood and, at first, sure, it makes sense, but it doesn't feel much like a vampire story at all. Does Udo Kier totally make the character his own? Yes, very much so, but this doesn't save it from being a hollow character used to create a new... eh... "artsy" interpretation of the story.
The other performances aren't anywhere near as likable, but the characters equally empty. Oh, I forgotten to mention the other... ummm... developed character, the groundskeeper, Mario, who is a hilarious socialist stereotype, constantly going on about how he's just as good as the family he works for and that the socialist revolution will soon sweep over all of Europe (a point the film seems to want to FUCKING POUND INTO OUR SKULLS RELENTLESSLY) and, through the length of the film, develops from rude, obnoxious, socialist bastard to rude, obnoxious, socialist VAMPIRE-HUNTING bastard... with an ax. I exaggerate not when I say that this is the most any character changes through the entire running-time of this movie.
Not to say that the film doesn't look good, though it doesn't, it still does a good job of setting a mood (be it a trashy, boring one) and put a lot of effort in the art-design. Though the gore is almost as remarkably hilarious to look at as the dialogue is to hear, but its overall aesthetic design may be one of the few things worth praising in this mess of a movie...
The biggest sin of this alleged "horror" film is that nothing REALLY happens in the running length. We get the same sex-scenes with the same reasoning repeated time and time again (terribly boring ones at that), only three people are attacked violently, there's a bit of blood vomiting and a few rather horrid looking dismemberments... but, aside from that, and I shit you not, NOTHING HAPPENS.
There are great cult-classics that I understand the status of (such as the majority of ill-remembered Euro-gore films from the 70s and early 80s), there are AWFUL cult-classics that I can understand the status of ("Rocky Horror Picture Show" comes to mind...) and then there are movies like this... there's nothing memorable, really... nothing interesting... nothing great... nothing laughably bad...
There's just nothing here.
2.2/10.
Kier's excellent work and the art-design give me a bit to enjoy here, and I was TRYING to like this one.
|
|
Rate Movie? 
