Random Film Review: Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein

Dir: Jess Franco | 1972 | Spain | 85min

On one level: crap. But on another: beautiful, terrifying, sublime, mysterious, poetic, erotic and just plain weird. There’s no talking for the first twenty minutes (apart from an out-of-place diary voice-over), and not much after that. Its images recall Dreyer, Hitchcock and Borowczyk. Its camerawork recalls Altman, porno films and botch jobs – a constant moving (in part because of panning-and-scanning, I guess), zooming, going in and out of focus. Its characters recall Bruegel paintings.

It’s a film of astonishing moments and images: the extreme close-ups of the eye of the professor and the dead girl; then the terrifying moment when he puts a spike through her eye, and you see no blood, and the candles go out; the woman with the kinky boots getting undressed and then killed by Dracula; the bat drowning in blood then turning into Dracula; the gypsy scene; the zoom into the woman’s red dress; the same woman rolling around screaming for no apparent reason; the use of windows like in Nosferatu (Dreyer, 1922); the extreme close-ups of medieval Bruegel-like faces; the upward shot of the spiral staircase; the coffin that opens in the middle; the way Dracula can turn into bats, men or women; the women all kinky and sexy and the men all old and ugly; the choral music; the gypsies again; the strong contrasts of light and dark, and people just standing around; no one really talks to anyone; the dance routine with the end zoom shot – the woman taken away and tied up in her underwear; fast motion trees blowing and the bell ringing; the woman’s large eye staring at us through the dark and dirty window; the skeletons in the coffins with branches, and the gypsy on-lookers; the bad make-up... What the hell was going on and did it really matter anyway?