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Dracula Vuole Vivere: Cerca Sangue di Vergine!
Blood for Dracula
Dracula Cerca Sangue di Vergine ... e Mori di Sete / Andy Warhol's Dracula
Italy/France 1973
produced by Carlo Ponti, Andrew Braunsberg, Jean Pierre Rassam, Andy Warhol for Compagnia Cinematografica Champion
directed by Paul Morrissey
starring Joe Dallesandro, Udo Kier, Arno Juerging, Maxime McKendry, Vittorio De Sica, Milena Vukotic, Dominique Darel, Stefania Casini, Silvia Dionisio, Roman Polanski, Inna Alexeievna, Gil Cagne, Emi Califri, Eleonora Zani
written by Paul Morrissey, based on characters created by Bram Stoker, music by Claudio Gizzi, special effects by Carlo Rambaldi, second unit director: Anthony M. Dawson (= Antonio Margheriti), editing by Jed Johnson, Franca Silvi
Dracula
review by Mike Haberfelner
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Count Dracula (Udo Kier) is dieing.
The reason: To live he needs a special diet of virgin blood, but
virgins in Romania are rare. So his servant Anton (Arno Juerging) decides
that they should travel to Italy where the women are still devout and tell
everyone the Count is looking for a wife - in order to find a virgin.
Soon enough, Dracula and Anton stumble upon a family of impoverished
aristocrats, the Di Fiores, a decadent bunch where the Marchese (Vittorio
De Sica) seems to have totally lost contact to real life while the
Marchesa (Maxime McKendry) is hell-bent on marrying her daughters - the
spinster Esmeralda (Milena Vukotic), the sluts Saphiria (Dominque Darrell)
and Rubinia (Stefanie Carsini) and the innocent 14-year-old Perla (Silvia
Dionisio) - off to rich aristocrats ... and when she learns about Dracula,
the nobleman from the East, she immediately invites him to the family
estate.
At first, the Count is introduced to Saphiria and Rubinia, but they
both ahve a sexual relationship with their servant Balato (Joe
Dallesandro) - who by the way is full of socialist ideas and is the first
one who realizes what is happening -, so when the Count bites and
vampirizes them, their blood only makes him throw up.
Soon enough, Balato rapes Perla to save her from the vampire's
clutches, but when he tries to explain the danger they are in to the whole
family at first they, above all the Marchesa, only turn a deaf ear towards
him. And Esmeralda, now the only virgin around, even provides Dracula with
the virgin blood he is needing, as a sort of sexual awakening.
Eventually though, Balato finds himself engaged in mortal combat with
the Count, but Balato is armed with an axe, and before long, he has
chopped off the Count's arms and legs before he proceeds to stake him.
Esmeralda, seeing Dracula dead, hurls herself upon the stake sticking in
his heart to die with him ...
Of the two horror parodies Paul Morrissey made in 1973 - this one and Flesh
for Frankenstein -, Blood for Dracula is the less gory and
easier approachable one ... and it's great fun, too, an entertaining mix
of socialist ideals and vampirism (a metaphor for the upper class first
used by Marx himself), gore and (soft) sex, slapstick humour and genre
parody ... quite simply put, it's a great film !!!
By the way, as with Flesh
for Frankenstein, direction of this film is credited by some
die-hard genre fans not to Morrissey but to second unit director Antonio
Margheriti - which is quite surprising, since the film clearly has the
look and feel of Paul Morrissey's earlier films for Andy Warhol (especially Trash, Flesh and Heat),
only in period settings while it simply does not look like an
Antonio Margheriti film.
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