I have yet to read Bram Stoker's
Dracula, but I understand in the original novel, Dracula has a mustache. For this reason and perhaps others, Jess Franco's
Count Dracula is considered one of the more accurate adaptations, from my understanding. In this exact respect, Ray Dennis Steckler's
The Mad Love Life of a Hot Vampire is perhaps an accurate adaptation as it too features a mustached Dracula. In probably every other respect, I suspect it takes a lot of liberties with the source material. As I have not yet read the source novel, I cannot analyze it from this perspective, but I will note that it features probably the sorriest Dracula I can remember. The character has been played by the likes of Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee, guys who look the part of an evil vampire and have great presence. Here he's played by a guy who looks like Nathan Lane and sports a Shemp haircut. Now, I like Nathan Lane enough (I have fond memories of seeing
Mouse Hunt as a child and enjoyed his role in
Frankie and Johnny when I watched it earlier this year), but he is no Dracula, and neither is this guy. Also extremely pathetic is his hunchbacked assistant, who at least gets to partake in a sex scene while keeping on his turtleneck while Dracula nods and pumps his fist in approval, as well as Van Helsing, played by a portly guy who we're introduced to as he interrupts a couple making out.
The title implies that Dracula gets a lot more action than he does, but alas his love life consists of instructing his female minions to collect blood on his behalf. The girls are sent in robes carrying vials (and no pockets to put them in; also their robes don't match) and go pick up their victims, and proceed to have sex with them in separate motels. One of the guys comments on his partner's strange outfit ("like out of a horror movie or something") but alas neither of them are any wiser until the scenes reach their gruesome denouement (instead of the usual money shot, we get to see the expected results of a vampiric blowjob, accompanied by manic zooms). The scenes with each couple takes place in a separate motel room and are cut together. One of the scenes has the girl getting mad at her partner for his poor performance and slaps his ass like a pair of conga drums; the other is mostly shot from the most dreaded angle in porn, the under-the-balls shot. (I preferred the former.) These scenes take up most of the sub-hour runtime, and the climax involves Van Helsing using a stake that looks an awful lot like a knitting needle, and the hunchback getting beaten up by a guy in a shiny shirt. This is far from good, even by the standards of the genre, but does have a certain halfassed charm to it. Steckler isn't taking this all that seriously and at least injects some humour into the proceedings, while his ex-wife Carolyn Brandt (credited as "Jane Bond") appears as Dracula's wife, and provides colour commentary ("Dracula decides to make love, not war", "Dracula is grooving", "Run, Dracula, Run!"). I enjoyed seeing her pop up in this, even if all her scenes were obviously shot separately.
Compared to
The Mad Love Life of a Hot Vampire, Carolyn Brandt has a bigger role in
The Sexorcist, in that she actually interacts with other cast members. This one is about a sex-mad devil worshipping cult who demonically possess a prostitute (who explains her profession succinctly: "I **** and suck and make a buck") and the sexorcist who must defeat them. Brandt, playing a reporter doing a story on the sexorcist, helpfully explains what a sexorcism is ("Removing the devil from your body while he's sexually possessing him"), which sounds like the difference between a GP and a specialist. The bulk of the movie involves a cultist, who resembles a more unsavoury Adam Driver and wears a robe but no underpants, possessing (read: having sex with) the prostitute and then commanding her to do his bidding (read: have more sex). At one point a portly guest with a porcine demeanour (he makes snorting and slurping noises) arrives and is murdered. (The cultist makes uncharitable comments about his stature: "Oh master, he's a big one, open both doors and accept this sinner.") The sex scenes are interminable and set to festive steel drums (think
Commando or
American Ninja II: The Confrontation), and the one vaguely stylish shot (from overhead) is immediately jettisoned in favour of the dreaded under-the-balls angle. (The cultist also boasts that she can't hurt his dick, no matter how hard she bites it: "See, you've tried, you can't hurt it!". Also, "Abandon all hope! Your will is mine! I am the power!") There are some brief jolts thanks to the slasher movie style violence, but Steckler's direction is nowhere near forceful enough for these moments to actually save the movie. The mix of the occult and sluggish, low energy sex brings to mind Ed Wood's
Necromania, but Wood seemed to be having fun there and Steckler does not here, and neither does Brandt, to be honest. Still, I enjoyed spending time with her much more than anybody else in this dismal affair. Hard pass.
In
Red Heat (not to be confused with Walter Hill's Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle), Steckler directs under the pseudonym Cindy Lou Sutters, which is also the name of the narrating character played by Brandt, a lady pornographer who came from L.A. to Las Vegas to make porno movies. When Brandt's character isn't "directing" the sex scenes we see, she offers a lot of insights about the business. ("It's important when making adult films that you get good wet shots. Those cum scenes can make your film a success. People who pay to see x-rated films want to see some real action. They're not interested in lots of dialogue. They can see that for free on TV.") Her attempts to direct a porno are intercut with scenes where a redhead (the "Red Heat" of the title) goes around killing people and a motorcyclist separately goes around sticking people up at gunpoint ("Hey ****ers, the tax collector's here"). All of this is punctuated with endless street footage of Las Vegas, and we get to see all kinds of signs and billboards (Tom Jones, Redd Foxx, Buddy Hackett and Tina Turner at Caesar's Palace, Tony Bennett & Joey Heatherton, "All drinks 75 cents", "Peekarama", America, Poco, Helen Reddy, the list goes on).
There is a fun time capsule quality to this footage, and there is an interesting concept at the core of this movie (a mix of slasher, crime thriller and meta movie), yet Steckler's direction is nowhere near firm enough to capture the necessary sense of drift or interplay to hold the different elements together or mine them for engaging rhythms. This is a very obvious attempt to salvage completely unrelated footage into a movie, but the end result doesn't flow together at all and feels interminable at an eighty-minute runtime. The sex scenes are a bit more enjoyable than the ones in
The Mad Love Life of a Hot Vampire and
The Sexorcist, in that they at least seem competently directed if not especially stylish. (One scene does however feature some POV shots, a flourish that I don't believe was common in pornography at the time. Also, this is the third movie in a row that makes a reference to having one's manhood bitten. To paraphrase Voltaire, I suspect Steckler was into this kind of thing.) Brandt's narration lampshades a lot of the film's shortcomings ("The girls weren't much to look at, but we had to make do with them as we were running low on money", "We decided to shoot downtown Vegas. We needed a more seedy atmosphere"), and she must have been an especially good sport to deliver the porno dialogue (replete with moans and groans) during the sex scene her character "participates in" via a stand-in. I assume the divorce was amicable.