COUNT DRACULA (Italy/Spain/West Germany - 1970) Directed by Jess Franco. Written by Augusto Finocchi. Cast: Christopher Lee, Klaus Kinski, Herbert Lom, Maria Rohm, Fred Williams, Soledad Miranda, Jack Taylor, Paul Muller, Franco Castellani, Jesus Puente, Jeannine Mestre, Emma Cohen, Jess Franco, Colette Giacobine. (Unrated, 97 mins)
He seems more at peace with it now, but for many years, Sir Christopher Lee openly despised his reputation as a horror icon, specifically his inextricable link with Dracula. Right on the heels of playing Frankenstein's monster in Hammer Films' THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN in 1957, 36-year-old Lee had his breakout role in the studio's HORROR OF DRACULA (1958), and while Dracula films only make up a tiny percentage of the now 92-year-old actor's nearly 300 credits over a storied and versatile career that's still trucking along in its eighth decade, it's indeed Dracula that will always be the first thing that comes to mind upon hearing the name "Christopher Lee." After HORROR OF DRACULA established Lee as a bona fide horror star, it didn't take long for him to spoof that image in the 1959 Italian comedy UNCLE WAS A VAMPIRE, but he didn't actually reprise his Dracula role in Hammer's official series until 1965's DRACULA: PRINCE OF DARKNESS. That was followed by 1968's DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE and two films in 1970: TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA and SCARS OF DRACULA. Lee was growing disillusioned with Hammer's Dracula films and the writers' refusal to stick to Bram Stoker's novel, instead concocting what Lee thought were absurd ideas that had nothing to do with Stoker's vision of the character. After resurrecting Dracula in mod, swinging London with 1972's DRACULA A.D. 1972 and 1973's THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA, which had Dracula masquerading as a wealthy real estate mogul attempting to unleash a deadly virus upon the world, Lee reached his breaking point. By this time, he was openly bashing Hammer and the DRACULA films to the press and when Hammer announced a co-production deal with Hong Kong's Shaw Brothers for THE LEGEND OF THE SEVEN GOLDEN VAMPIRES, which would pit Dracula against a team of Bruce Lee-inspired kung-fu fighters, Lee refused to have anything to do with it and was replaced by a bland and ineffective John Forbes-Robertson. The film was eventually released in the US as THE 7 BROTHERS MEET DRACULA, and marked the end of Hammer's DRACULA series.
Before his frustration reached critical mass, Lee did enjoy spoofing his Dracula image in cameos in the Peter Sellers-Ringo Starr film THE MAGIC CHRISTIAN (1969) and in the Sammy Davis Jr-Peter Lawford post-Rat Pack comedy ONE MORE TIME (1970), the latter at the personal request of horror aficionado and Lee superfan Davis. Even after his acrimonious departure from Hammer's series, Lee would play Dracula one last time in the 1976 French comedy DRACULA AND SON, directed by Eduardo Molinaro, who would go on to make the 1978 smash LA CAGE AUX FOLLES. In addition to appearing in two Hammer DRACULAs in 1970, Lee also made a Dracula film outside of the studio, almost as an open act of rebellion. Lee had done several films with producer Harry Alan Towers and Spanish exploitation legend Jess Franco in the preceding few years, including five FU MANCHU films (Franco directed the final two) as well as the softcore porn outing EUGENIE: THE STORY OF HER JOURNEY INTO PERVERSION (1970), a film in which Lee has maintained the racier elements were added after his scenes were shot. Lee was upset with Franco and Towers, but when they offered him a chance to star in a Dracula adaptation with the promise to remain faithful to Stoker's novel, the disgruntled actor couldn't resist.
To put it in era-appropriate terms, Lee making COUNT DRACULA in 1970 is akin to Sean Connery making a 007 film for a rival studio while still starring in the official Bond series. Shot in Barcelona, COUNT DRACULA is a low-key affair with a script (credited to Augusto Finocchi in the print on Dark Sky's DVD, though Franco and Towers worked on it, and the US ads gave sole writing credit to Towers, under his screenwriting pseudonym "Peter Welbeck") that takes whole chunks of dialogue directly from Stoker's novel. Dracula is even introduced as an old man who gets progressively younger as the film proceeds and he gets a fresh supply of new blood from his victims. Intending to sell his decaying residence, an aged Dracula is visited at his castle by young lawyer Jonathan Harker (German actor Fred Williams). Dracula promptly puts the bite on Harker, who escapes from the castle and is transported back to a sanitarium in London, where he's treated by Dr. Seward (Paul Muller). His situation attracts the attention of clinic head Dr. Van Helsing (Herbert Lom) as a spry and younger-looking Dracula has followed Harker back to London to buy a neighboring castle so he can stalk and vampirize his fiancee Mina (Towers' wife Maria Rohm) and her friend Lucy (Franco muse Soledad Miranda). Dracula has also established a psychic hold on crazed asylum inmate Renfield (Klaus Kinski), who lost his mind after his family had a fateful encounter with the vampire years earlier.
While staying generally faithful to Stoker in spirit, COUNT DRACULA takes some liberties in its execution, especially in the way it takes elements of the book's Van Helsing's backstory and transfers them over to Renfield. The film is very slowly-paced and, like most Franco efforts, budget-deprived. Many of the sets look like they belong in a high school play, with some interiors appearing ready to topple over at any second. At times, the cheap, sparse look of Dracula's castle adds to the sense of gloomy despair looming over the elderly vampire (a happy accident I'm sure, given Franco's track record). Elsewhere, dangling rubber bats are laughably phony-looking, the camera occasionally doesn't seem to be pointed in the right direction, and the day-for-night work is atrocious, with one scene taking place at night when it's obvious it was shot in the middle of a bright, sunny day. Lee underplays it for the most part, but you can see his commitment, especially in one epic monologue to Harker early on that's delivered directly into the camera in a way that only Lee can. Lee absolutely nails this long sequence ("This was a Dracula indeed!") and it ranks with the finest acting of his career.
Franco did some of his most professional work during his years with Towers, a veteran exploitation huckster who was great at corralling money to lure name actors who maybe weren't at their pinnacle of their career (like a visibly drunk Jack Palance in Franco's 1969 De Sade chronicle JUSTINE) or were just cool with whatever as long as the check cleared (Lee and Lom, the latter having just appeared in Franco's sleazy 1969 women-in-prison classic 99 WOMEN and would continue slumming in Eurotrash until Blake Edwards rescued him to reprise his role as the perpetually-flustered Dreyfus when he restarted the PINK PANTHER franchise in 1975). Towers managed to get Lee, Lom, and Kinski together for COUNT DRACULA, but the three headliners are never seen together and were never on the set with one another. Franco leaves a lot of the plot's heavy lifting to Harker and Lucy's fiance Quincy Morris (played by American expat and Franco regular Jack Taylor), while Lee, Lom, and Kinski only worked on the film for a few days each. Dracula and Van Helsing's sole scene together is shot in a way that makes it quite apparent Lee and Lom were not there at the same time. It's worth noting that there is the possibility that Dracula and Van Helsing were meant to interact more than they do--Lom was a last-minute replacement after Vincent Price backed out just before shooting began. Perhaps his hasty casting and limited availability necessitated changes, which may explain why Van Helsing doesn't even take part in the final ambush of Dracula, instead sending Harker and Morris to deal with it after suffering a stroke from which he's apparently recovered two scenes later. Kinski's Renfield never leaves his asylum cell, where he makes funny noises, smears food on the walls, and eats flies, which may have just been Franco filming Kinski's lunch break. As an actor, Kinski only interacts with Muller, Franco Castellani (as an abusive guard) and, for one scene, Rohm, who's said that Kinski initially refused to appear in a Dracula movie and Towers had to convince him that his scenes were for another project. According to legend (and Rohm, who perhaps embellishes somewhat but it's still amusing and, considering Kinski's volatile personality, quite plausible) when Renfield attempts to choke Mina, Kinski had his hands around her neck and whispered "Maria, I think that husband of yours has me in a fucking Dracula film." Interestingly, Kinski would star in two Dracula adaptation years later, with Werner Herzog's NOSFERATU: THE VAMPYRE (1979) and its unofficial sequel, NOSFERATU IN VENICE (1988).
Even with its flaws and cut corners, COUNT DRACULA is an unusually ambitious project for Franco and Towers, and one that makes a good pairing with the same year's THE BLOODY JUDGE, released in the US in 1972 as the misleading NIGHT OF THE BLOOD MONSTER (it would be 1973 before COUNT DRACULA managed to find a US distributor). THE BLOODY JUDGE is obviously inspired by Michael Reeves' WITCHFINDER GENERAL, itself ripped off in 1969 with the West German tongue-ripper MARK OF THE DEVIL, starring (wait for it) Herbert Lom, but like COUNT DRACULA, it features one of Lee's best performances as puritanical Judge Jeffreys, yet another in a long line of impotent, sexually-frustrated witchfinders taking their penile inadequacy issues out on accused witches and assorted wenches, harlots, and other undesirables of dubious moral standing. Both films catch Franco just before 27-year-old Soledad Miranda's tragic death in a car accident would, for better or worse, completely alter the course of his career. Franco could hold his own as a journeyman gun-for-hire, but he was starting to explore his auteur impulses, which usually meant plotless fever dreams and constant crotch-zooms, an artistic shift that would reach its apex when he met his next muse and eventual life partner Lina Romay. There's a fine line between auteur and perv, and as Franco aged into the emeritus raconteur phase of his career in the years before his death in 2013, his work was reconsidered as that of a legitimate trail-blazer and cinematic genius. I'm not entirely onboard with that--there's some interesting films there in his post-Towers dive into horror erotica, but a large chunk of it is clearly the work of an often sloppy filmmaker who just had a fond appreciation for naked women. Not that there's anything wrong with that...
When Jess Franco died in April 2013 at the age of 82, cult cinema lost one of its most beloved icons, a legendarily prolific writer/director with over 200 films to his credit, but a comprehensive Franco filmography is all but impossible, given the number of unfinished films and the plethora of pseudonyms he used. Franco bounced around from genre to genre for the length of his career, sometimes for money, sometimes for personal expression, but from 1959 until his death, he never stopped working, often making multiple films in any given year (11 in 1975 alone). He's best known for his contributions to the horror genre, but he made comedies, dramas, spy thrillers, action films, erotica, and hardcore porn. Over the last couple of decades, serious film scholars have reconsidered Franco's gargantuan output and many, most notably Video Watchdog's Tim Lucas, have called him a genuine auteur. Indeed, many of Franco's self-financed films of the 1970s are some of the most aggressive examples of a filmmaker putting his obsessions front and center for everyone to see. I've always had conflicted feelings about Franco. When he had a budget, a competent crew, and real actors, he was completely capable of putting a thoroughly professional film together. His association with British producer Harry Alan Towers in the late 1960s resulted in several box office hits with actors who rarely turned down a sizable paycheck (Christopher Lee, Herbert Lom, Klaus Kinski) to others who may have been in a career slump and took what they could get (Jack Palance, Mercedes McCambridge, George Sanders, Leo Genn). But on his own, the low budgets and lack of quality control are sometimes too distracting to ignore. Franco would later express feelings of discontent working in commercial cinema, which led to his more independent films of the 1970s and beyond, but many of those "commercial" films represent his best filmmaking (1969's VENUS IN FURS is probably my favorite Franco film). Franco often had ambitions that lied beyond the capabilities of his budget (1970's COUNT DRACULA is a perfect example, finally allowing a frustrated Lee the chance to play Dracula as Bram Stoker intended, but hampered by cheap sets that appear ready to collapse around the actors at any moment). By 1970, Franco had grown tired of working for other producers and trying to make his own films while dealing with Spain's strict censorship laws. He needed a change, but had to leave Spain to do so. Two of those films are out on Blu-ray from Kino/Redemption on August 20, along with Franco's 1962 breakthrough THE AWFUL DR. ORLOF.
THE AWFUL DR. ORLOF (Spain/France - 1962)
Considered to be the first Spanish horror film, THE AWFUL DR. ORLOF owes a lot to Georges Franju's EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1960) with its central plot element of Dr. Orlof (Howard Vernon) and his deformed, blind sidekick Morpho (Ricardo Valle) murdering women in order to perform skin graft experiments to restore the disfigured face of Orlof's daughter. The Franju film would be a major influence on Franco's career, with several subsequent Orloff (the extra 'f' was added by the US distributor in 1964 and it stuck) films, all the way up to 1988's FACELESS, where murderous surgeon Helmut Berger pulls an Orloff to try and salvage his sister's scarred face, even seeking counsel from Vernon's Orloff at one point. THE AWFUL DR. ORLOF isn't very original and suffers from some clumsy exposition in spots, but it's an important film in the evolution of Spanish horror, Eurocult, and Franco himself, and looks terrific in this new Blu-ray edition. The 1.66:1 transfer looks appropriately film-like and doesn't see fit to remove every flaw and scratch in the image, but the detail is superb. Kino presents the film in its uncensored French version (with an English-dubbed option), which had two instances of nudity clumsily inserted by the French co-producers. Lucas contributes an extremely informative, exhaustive commentary that's overflowing with trivia (American expat actor Frank Wolff, best known as Brett McBain in Sergio Leone's ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, was one of the voice actors for the English-dubbed version), and comprehensively details Franco's influences for the film (Franju and THE LODGER/HANGOVER SQUARE director John Brahm being the major ones, but also classic Universal horror, Hammer, AIP's Edgar Allan Poe series, and the expanding Italian horror scene headed by Riccardo Freda and Mario Bava), the earliest examples of recurring Franco themes and archetypes (Orloff, the Morpho character, as well as incompetent police detective Tanner, played here by Conrado San Martin, would reappear in various forms in many subsequent Franco works), and the differences in the various versions of the film (the bombastic jazz score that opens the French print is significantly toned-down in the Spanish version). Despite its many derivative elements, THE AWFUL DR. ORLOF is one of Franco's most accessible and satisfying horror films, progressive in its themes and presentation but very deeply-rooted in classical and traditional horror. It was his first success and fittingly, the perfect starting point for anyone interested in exploring the director's work. The Blu-ray also features an interview with a frail-looking Franco, where he addresses his battles with the Spanish censors and his love-hate relationship with the horror genre in general, saying he wanted to be an Antonioni-style filmmaker but ended up doing other kinds of films. But, as he finally admits with a smile, "I like horror films." (Unrated, 86 mins)
NIGHTMARES COME AT NIGHT (France/Liechtenstein - 1970)
NIGHTMARES COME AT NIGHT was considered a lost film for over 30 years. Given a theatrical release only in Belgium in 1970, the film vanished from view and only when a print was discovered in the early 2000s, followed by a DVD release from Media Blasters in 2004, were Franco fans able to see it and place it in its proper context. According to Lucas' commentary on the new Blu-ray, Franco shot NIGHTMARES during some down time between two 1970 Harry Alan Towers productions--THE BLOODY JUDGE (released in the US in 1972 as NIGHT OF THE BLOOD MONSTER) and COUNT DRACULA. Franco had more personal projects in mind and by the time THE BLOODY JUDGE came around, grew tired of working in these multi-country co-productions and trying to appease the various producers involved. NIGHTMARES COME AT NIGHT serves a sign of things to come from Franco throughout the rest of his career--the more auteur side of him as a filmmaker that would explode once he met his muse and life partner Lina Romay in the next few years. NIGHTMARES stars Diana Lorys (who co-starred in THE AWFUL DR. ORLOF) as Anna, a former stripper at "a second-rate nightclub in Zagreb." She fears she's being driven insane and confides in Dr. Lucas (Paul Muller). Living with Cynthia (Collette Jack), she's haunted by vivid dreams in which she commits murder. Meanwhile, a mystery couple (Andre Montchall and Soledad Miranda, billed as "Susan Korda") watch the proceedings from a neighboring house.
If NIGHTMARES COME AT NIGHT feels disjointed and patched together, that's because it was. The scenes with Montchall and tragic Franco muse Miranda (who was killed in a car accident in Portugal the same year) came from an unfinished Franco project shot around the same time. Franco worked the footage into the film by creating a jewel heist subplot where Cynthia was in cahoots with these two and their plan is to drive Anna insane and pin the crime on her while they get away. Lucas doesn't go into this in any great detail, but there is a supplemental feature where Kino Blu-ray producer Bret Wood demonstrates how the film came from two different sources: the Lorys/Muller/Jack scenes are shot in 1.33:1 and the Montchall/Miranda scenes are shot in 1.66:1. Kino reformatted the entire film to 1.66:1 for the sake of continuity, while also pointing out that the final scene between Muller and Jack is shot in 1.66:1, indicating that Franco shot it after the fact in an attempt to bring both plots together. Of these three new Blu-rays, NIGHTMARES COME AT NIGHT probably fares the worst, though it's not really any fault of Kino's. The flaws in the visual presentation are inherent in the film itself, culled from a test print since wide-release prints were never struck and the negative is lost. By design, the dream sequences are grainy, but here, they're so grainy that it's impossible to tell what's going on. The Blu-ray offers the option of French with English subtitles or an English-dubbed track. The English-dubbed track is one of the worst I've ever witnessed, so French is clearly the way to go here.
This is the conundrum of watching Jess Franco films. Few filmmakers are given such wide leeway for sloppiness as Franco, whose status as an iconic movie maverick is often confused with his extraordinarily prolific output. Quantity is often mistaken for quality, and NIGHTMARES COME AT NIGHT may be given a bit of a pass since it was a "lost" film and fans were eager to discover it. It's really not very good at all. On his commentary, Lucas makes some credible and thoughtful arguments for Franco's recurring metaphors for Spain's fascistic government, but elsewhere, his defenses of the shoddy cinematography, mismatched footage, and haphazard construction seem like real reaches: the backdrop of Anna's dance routine is a wrinkled curtain; Lucas says that's by design but I'm going with "Franco was in too much of a hurry to give a shit about having it ironed." Devoted Franco fans insist that the amateurish filmmaking, the continuity errors, shots out of focus, the camera pointed in the wrong direction, etc are all part of some grand, subversive, Luis Bunuel master plan to mock the rules of conventional cinema. I just don't buy it. He was capable of solid filmmaking and occasionally stunning images, but he was also a guy who liked to make movies with a lot of hot, naked women (Lorys is nude for about 90% of the movie and she's spectacular). This became very apparent once Romay entered his life: it's around this time (1973's FEMALE VAMPIRE and on) that the quantity of the films becomes inversely proportional to the quality. And yet, this period is one of his most revered and Franco's personal favorite. But it's during this phase that the sloppiness becomes epidemic and he seems to be going for as many lingering crotch-zooms as possible, almost as if low-budget, pervy, DIY Franco was holding the camera with one hand and fondling himself with the other. Franco loved to make movies--all kinds of movies--and, especially in his later years, became a beloved cult figure and captivating raconteur in interviews for the many DVD releases of his films. Franco's interviews are frequently more interesting than his films. Look, I love Franco. How can you not? I could watch interviews with him all day long, but some of these films are indefensible and there seems to be a calculated movement to put him on the same iconoclastic pedestal as Orson Welles, frequently cited as "Franco's mentor," even though Franco only assisted him on two films (the unfinished-in-Welles'-lifetime DON QUIXOTE and 1966's CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT). I agree that there is something there with Franco. His more disciplined films (and something like CHRISTINA, PRINCESS OF EROTICISM--more on that shortly) prove it. But sometimes--to use but two examples, as shown in CANNIBALS and DEVIL HUNTER, Franco's two dismal 1980 contributions to the Italian cannibal craze that show jungle natives who look like they were rounded up from the nearest disco, right down to the perms, sideburns, and in one case, a visible wristwatch--shitty filmmaking is just shitty filmmaking. That said, the completists and apologists will get far more out of NIGHTMARES COME AT NIGHT than the casual viewer. (Unrated, 85 mins)
A VIRGIN AMONG THE LIVING DEAD (1973/1981) with CHRISTINA, PRINCESS OF EROTICISM (France/Liechtenstein - 1973) and A VIRGIN AMONG THE LIVING DEAD (France - 1981)
The biggest surprise in this latest batch of Kino/Redemption Franco titles has an even more complicated backstory than NIGHTMARES COME AT NIGHT. Shot in 1971 as NIGHT OF THE SHOOTING STARS but unreleased until 1973 under a handful of various titles, the film most popularly known as A VIRGIN AMONG THE LIVING DEAD is quite a revelation in this new Blu-ray edition. If you've only seen this in its mid-1980s big-box Wizard Video incarnation as A VIRGIN AMONG THE LIVING DEAD, then it's worth a reconsideration. Presented in a full-frame, washed-out, terribly-dubbed print, the old VHS edition was ejected fairly quickly when I gave it a look back in the day, not even bothering to fast-forward to the inevitable nude scenes and zombie attacks. As fans learned later on, that version was reworked from what Franco had originally intended. That version contained zombie footage directed by French cult auteur Jean Rollin (FASCINATION) in 1981, presented as dream sequences with an unconvincing double for lead actress Christina Von Blanc, as well as some softcore sex footage directed by Pierre Queret that utilized equally dubious-looking doubles for the main actors. French distributor Eurocine wanted to hop on the post-DAWN OF THE DEAD/ZOMBIE bandwagon and figured adding some nonsensically inserted zombies into an existing film would be the cheapest way to do it. Franco disowned this VIRGIN AMONG THE LIVING DEAD cut of the film, but confusion is inevitable since Eurocine also used that title on Franco's original 1973 cut, which has come to be known as CHRISTINA, PRINCESS OF EROTICISM, a misleading title that seems more fitting for a softcore porn romp than the somber, meditative art film that Franco made.
Released on DVD by Image Entertainment several years ago, the CHRISTINA, PRINCESS OF EROTICISM cut looks quite nice on Blu-ray. Flaws inherent in the print itself remain in the 1.66:1 transfer, but it looks fine. The previous DVD edition included the Rollin-added scenes as an extra, but this new Blu-ray set offers two cuts of the film: Franco's preferred CHRISTINA cut, running 79 minutes, and the 1981 Eurocine revamp A VIRGIN AMONG THE LIVING DEAD, with the Rollin/Queret scenes, running 90 minutes. It's amazing what a mere 11 minutes of padding can do to throw off the rhythm of an entire film. Despite my utmost respect for film scholars like Lucas and the many Franco fans and apologists, I've often dismissed the notion that Franco is some misunderstood genius, but watching CHRISTINA, PRINCESS OF EROTICISM, regardless of its ridiculous title, goes a long way in almost validating many of those claims. Self-financed and shot on the fly with a skeleton crew, the film is often technically inept (less than three minutes in, shooting some location footage along the coast of Portugal, a local man looks directly into the camera and quickly looks away), but has numerous moments of undeniable, poetic beauty that you'd never figure seeing given either of the film's grindhouse-ready titles. Von Blanc stars as Christina, who travels from London to Portugal upon the death of her estranged father (Paul Muller), a man she never really knew and hadn't seen since she was a small child. At her father's estate, she encounters other members of the "family," including her uncle Howard (Howard Vernon), seductive mystery woman Carmence (the stunning Britt Nichols), and grunting, dimwit handyman Basilio (Franco, billed as "Jesus Manera"). The film becomes a surreal fever dream as Christina is plagued by nightmares and nothing seems real, encounters the ghost of her father (in a great shot where they both seem to be floating through the air), leading to a terrific plot twist in the finale and culminating in a final sequence that's one of the most heartbreaking, haunting scenes in Franco's entire filmography.
Conceived as a mournful eulogy for the late Soledad Miranda (Lucas points out in his typically thorough and info-packed commentary that the footage shot along the coastal road seen in the opening credits was the same route Miranda was taking before she was killed in the car accident), CHRISTINA, PRINCESS OF EROTICISM is one of Franco's best films, even with its many gaffes and Franco self-indulgences. Sure, there's the requisite day/night continuity errors, an actress playing a corpse is seen blinking, and there's one incredibly annoying scene where Franco's Basilio laughs and giggles and makes assorted noises while Nichols' drunk Carmence rolls around on the floor in front of him for about four solid minutes of screen time, but the images captured by Franco and cinematographer Jose Climent are often breathtakingly beautiful. Watching this in its intended form, you get the impression that this is the kind of film Franco always wanted to make. This is the kind of film his devout fans are talking about when they praise him as an unheralded cinematic genius. 1970s Franco is often compared to Rollin (who also dabbled in hardcore porn when his financial situation demanded it), and for my money, Rollin was the more consistent and visionary filmmaker (his FASCINATION is a brilliant work that feels a lot like what Jess Franco might've accomplished with time, budget, a full crew, discipline, and a little self-control), but CHRISTINA, PRINCESS OF EROTICISM comes very close to that Rollin level of dream-like surrealism. It's incredibly atmospheric, at times feeling a lot like Mario Bava's LISA AND THE DEVIL (which was actually made a year later, before anyone would've had a chance to see Franco's film) with its gathering of cursed souls at an eternally damned house. I noticed this before listening to Lucas' commentary (over the CHRISTINA cut), and while he touches upon the similarities--including von Blanc's Christina having the surname "Reiner," also the last name of Elke Sommer's Lisa--he doesn't delve into them as much as I thought he would, considering his status as the world's foremost Mario Bava scholar, having written a comprehensive, 1128-page doorstop of a biography of the legendary father of Italian horror. Also contributing greatly to the hazy, dream-like aura of CHRISTINA is the score by Bruno Nicolai, which prominently features everything from the mournful vocals of Edda Dell'Orso, a frequent Ennio Morricone associate, to an all-out prog-rock freakout near the end. The schizophrenic score is as unpredictable as the film itself. CHRISTINA, PRINCESS OF EROTICISM is one of Franco's most ambitious films. If all the other alleged "classics" had the hints of greatness that this film demonstrates, I'd be onboard with the whole "Franco is a genius maverick of cinema" movement. Kino's Blu-ray presents the film with two audio options: French with English subtitles and in English. The English dub isn't quite as bad as the one on NIGHTMARES COME AT NIGHT, but it's close. Among the bonus features: an interview with Franco; a short piece detailing the various versions of the film, and five minutes of "alternate erotic footage" with Alice Arno that was shot for an unrealized third variant of the film.
The biggest bonus feature is the complete, 90-minute 1981 cut of A VIRGIN AMONG THE LIVING DEAD that was on the old Wizard Video VHS issued in 1985. Queret shot some sexually explicit footage with doubles for Vernon and Nichols--including a shot of "Vernon"'s character with an erection and turned the climactic accosting of Christina into a rape (with Vernon getting a thrusting-butt double), while Rollin shot several minutes worth of quickie zombie attack scenes that represent Christina's nightmares. These scenes were shot at the same time as Rollin's Eurocine hackjob ZOMBIE LAKE (also 1981), and feature a double for von Blanc, clearly indicated by the fact that her hair always seems to be covering her face. These inserted scenes are hastily-shot and hilariously awful (ZOMBIE LAKE was purely a money gig for Rollin, who stepped in when Franco abandoned the project over disagreements with the producers), and show that it's very easy for zombies to bust through a door when production assistants have already clearly removed the hinges. The 1981 revamp of A VIRGIN AMONG THE LIVING DEAD is barely entertaining on a bad-movie level (though with enough proper medication, I suppose it could be fun), but it's an outright travesty after seeing CHRISTINA, PRINCESS OF EROTICISM. (Unrated, 79 mins/90 mins)
