Dracula Sucks is, as it sounds, a pornographic
Dracula. It's not, in the vein of
The Mad Love Life of a Hot Vampire, a porno with Dracula with a bunch of **** happening. I would also hesitate to call it a parody, even in that lazy modern porn sense (hey, do you want to see [pop culture character] ****? well now you can! I mean, people aren't exactly lining up to see Renfield ****), although there certainly is some humour. It's an actual adaptation, which is where much of its novelty comes from, for better or worse. It most recognizably borrows the template from the Tod Browning version and updates the setting to somewhere around the '30s, judging by the costumes. Why? My guess is that the filmmakers had access to costumes from that period and not from the Victorian era that the story is originally set in. But this does give it a welcome level of production values. The movie also benefits tremendously from being set in a real castle, even if it's one in middle of the California desert.
Now, part of the fun of of seeing a story that's been adapted this many times is to see what the cast brings to the table. As this is a '70s porn production and features, even by the standards of the genre, a pretty stacked cast. (Not a pun...although in the case of Kay Parker, I guess it is.) Now, some of the cast, like Annette Haven as Mina Harker, carry themselves with a certain elegance and look entirely at home in a Dracula movie, what with the flowy white robes and whatnot. (On average, the women fare better than men.) Others, like John Holmes, who plays a character named Dr. Stoker, absolutely do not belong in a Dracula movie. Were Holmes a more forceful an actor, he could have had the same effect as Joe Dallesandro in
Blood for Dracula (whose thick New York accent matches his character's arrogance and sociopathy), but alas, he feels more like someone in a
Saturday Night Live sketch. And yes, if you must know, the bite that turns him into a vampire is on his, uh, claim to fame. Some of the actors fall somewhere in the middle, like John Leslie and Kay Parker as Dr. Seward and his sister, in that they're good actors even if they never really feel of the period. (The two have a scene that anticipates Parker's landmark role in
Taboo. It's still a shock to me how prevalent incest was in these movies, given that mainstream modern porn goes out of its way to avoid it.)
Which brings me to Dracula, who is played by Jamie Gillis with a beard. Gillis has been terrific in other films I've seen with him, but I never found he disappeared into this role. He models himself explicitly on Bela Lugosi and delivers much of the same dialogue in a decent approximation of his accent, but where Lugosi embodied a certain otherworldly quality, Gillis comes off like he's play acting the part. Let me put it this way: when watching Browning's
Dracula, I can't shake the suspicion that Lugosi might be a real vampire, so Gillis, despite an admirable attempt, can't help but feel like a Dracula hired for a children's birthday party in comparison. He recreates Lugosi's confrontation with Edward Van Sloan's Van Helsing, the role here played by Reggie Nalder (who does not get to ****), and the result is noticeably campier. (Nalder is one of those people who definitely feels at home in this movie.) I must also make note of Richard Bulik as Renfield, who resembles Matthew Modine and is certainly no Dwight Frye but makes an admirable attempt at that kind of manic performance, and Paul Thomas as Jonathan Harker, who seems to actually play the piano and sing in one of his scenes.
The movie is directed by Phillip Marshak, whose
Night Train to Terror I did not enjoy and left me with the most maddening, painful earworm I can remember in quite some time ("Dance with me, dance with me..."). That being said, he does have a decent handle on horror imagery and produces some of the visuals you'd expect from a vampire movie. Lots of fog and bluish lighting, vampire women in white, flowy robes, and of course the castle giving everything a touch more atmosphere. The comedic elements feel awkwardly inserted in comparison (hence why I feel it's a stretch to call it a parody), but I did chuckle regularly, particularly the manner in which Dracula dispatches Harker. There's also a running gag involving the radio, and I did like the use the dialogue from another Lugosi film (I think it's
The Devil Bat, but I could very well be mistaken). Truth be told, the movie is kind of a mess, but also more committed to being a Dracula story than you might expect, given the genre's track record. I understand there is a shorter, more explicit cut available (the version I watched runs 95 minutes and trims most of the sex scenes, although I wouldn't call it softcore given that penetration is shown), but given that the best parts of this are outside the sex scenes, I suspect that one is only preferable for the raincoat brigade.
Dracula Exotica I've seen referred to as a follow-up to
Dracula Sucks, but aside from Jamie Gillis returning as Dracula (this time clean shaven, as he normally was; O Gillis' beard, we hardly knew ye!), it's a completely unrelated movie. This one starts centuries ago, when a pre-vampiric Dracula was courting a woman played by Samantha Fox, whose family didn't approve of him so she turned to God and he turned to debauchery. But one day in a drunken rage, in the middle of a debauched gathering (featuring such wildly ill-fitting actors for the period as Marlene Willoughby, who I liked as the dowdy neighbour in
A Woman's Torment, and Ron Jeremy, who I instinctively try to shoo off the screen whenever I see him, although he does juggle in this), he rapes her, and then after she commits suicide, wracked with guilt, he condemns himself to vampirism. Now, rape scenes can be uncomfortable to watch and their presence in pornography has an added nauseating quality given that they're often meant to arouse, but I must note that I found Fox's performance in this scene dramatically effective.
The movie then jumps to present day (or 1979/1980, whenever this film was shot), and Dracula's home has been turned into a museum visited by another woman played by Samantha Fox. As we find out, Count Dracula is alive and well (or as alive and well as a guilt-ridden vampire can be) and finds himself in the middle of some international intrigue involving Romanian intelligence, the CIA (sorry, "F.I.B.", which stands for the "Federal Intelligence Bureau") and a smuggling ring run by Vanessa Del Rio. This is further complicated by the fact the Dracula develops feelings for Fox, who happens to be tasked with killing him. Will love conquer all? Or will Dracula's immortality end less ceremoniously? I wouldn't dare reveal the outcome, but will hint that a little bat guano goes a long way.
Now, as you can guess, this is far from a conventional vampire movie, but what surprised me was how well it fit together. Certainly, there are the requisite elements (spooky vampire women, crypts, fog; a few more foggy movies and I finally get that decoder ring), but they blend surprisingly smoothly with the thriller elements and seedy pre-cleanup NYC atmosphere. The mix of elements and modern setting also mean that this movie doesn't have the same issues with incongruous casting as
Dracula Sucks aside from the first few minutes. I actually liked Gillis a lot more in this than in the other movie, largely because he seems to be playing an actual character in this rather than just doing a Bela Lugosi impression. Samantha Fox provides the film's emotional core, and is a performer I've grown increasingly fond of merely for her presence in movies (I've developed a fondness for certain vintage porn actors the same way I like seeing the same group of actors pop up in Italian horror movies). Eric Edwards plays her CIA (sorry, "F.I.B.") superior in the movie's shrewdest bit of casting, his square-jawed, slightly stodgy quality a perfect fit for the contemptible authority figure he's supposed to be, and he delivers lines like "Goodbye you ****ing commie greaser" like he's spitting out chewing tobacco. (In a nice touch, he plays the entire role behind aviator sunglasses.) And of course, I must acknowledge the extremely forceful presence of Vanessa Del Rio, who does an exaggerated accent but later puts a racist cop in his place in a scene where she sports a corset and bat wings. She also wears a well chosen pair of glasses when disguised as Dracula's secretary, and folks, I'm not made of stone.
While at 100 minutes, it runs a little longer than I like from the genre, it clips along at a pretty steady pace, even if it takes over half the movie for Dracula to board the ship and come to America. This is the first film I've seen from Shaun Costello, and while I can't attest to how this compares to the rest of his work, I did feel the presence of a sure hand who'd made enough of these movies to know how to keep them engaging. Even when delivering the obligatory sex scenes, which seem devised for maximum variety (there's even one that caters to those who enjoyed the morgue scene in
Bad Boys II), there is an enthusiasm and imagination present that makes them feel far from perfunctory. I must confess that I didn't find a lot of them arousing personally (and the aforementioned rape scene I found quite hard to watch), but the climactic scene between Gillis and Fox combines the emotional throughline of the story with the vampiric atmosphere in a way that's surprisingly erotic and artful.
Dracula Sucks
Dracula Exotica
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