Assignment Terror / Los monstruos del terror (1970)

Halloween always gets me in the mood for the classic Universal monsters, so I thought I would revisit a Spanish monster mash-up (done in the vein of Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman (1943) and House of Frankenstein (1944)) that I had not seen in over ten years.

Assignment Terror is one of the Paul Naschy films I revisited the least for some reason. Naschy wrote and starred in it, but at the same time I couldn’t help thinking it needed a little more Naschy. Paul Naschy’s scripts usually come off as real personal projects, but, even with the presence of the Universal monsters that inspired Naschy’s childhood love for horror, I didn’t quite feel that as much with Assignment Terror. But to be fair, it is quite early in Naschy’s filmography. Plus, I can see how Naschy might’ve thought it best to have his tragic lycanthrope character Waldemar Daninsky step aside a little to make room for the other classic monsters. In the end, it still ends up being Naschy’s show and what I think is an alright old-school monster movie that has got a few neat tricks up its sleeve. The whole thing is of course messy and flawed but also kind of whacky and fun.

Daughter of Dracula / La fille de Dracula (1972)

Jess Franco filmed Daughter of Dracula back to back with the preceding film Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein (1972). These two films seem similar and for me were sometimes easy to confuse with one another, but after reviewing them both back to back, I realize they are quite different in many ways. Unlike the previous film, the eroticism is amped up this time around, particularly with the love/feeding scenes between Franco regulars of the era Anne Libert and Britt Nichols. It isn’t necessarily the monster mashup like the previous film since for monsters we just have Dracula, a femme vampire, and a mystery killer. Perhaps it’s more of a Eurocult genre mashup, as this one has a reputation for being confused as to whether it wants to be an erotic vampire horror film or a giallo-like murder mystery.

Daughter of Dracula doesn’t quite reach its potential, but it’s nonetheless a relaxing Gothic horror with a captivating modern ‘70s setting in an old-world location that provides the right ambiance us Eurocult fans can’t get enough of.

Howard Vernon reprises his role as his own odd, unique, near-lifeless version of Count Dracula from Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein. He’s even less active here, but Britt Nichols and Anne Libert get more to do this time around, even if Nichols’ vampire scenes may’ve soared a little more in the preceding movie.

Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein / Dracula contra Frankenstein (1972)

Jess Franco had already covered Dracula by directing a movie adaption of Bram Stoker’s seminal Gothic horror vampire novel from 1897 a couple years prior. So, what does Jess do next when returning to make another Gothic Count Dracula movie?... Take the Universal route and throw Dracula in with other classic monster figures, like Frankenstein and The Wolfman, to have a go at it and see who would win in a fight.

With Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein, the familiar monster mashup style gets the Jess Franco treatment, which is essentially Classic Universal horror in color with Franco’s flavor of visual and hypnotic storytelling, yet for a Jess Franco film, the eroticism is quite tame, with no nudity to be found. It adapts certain elements from Bram Stoker’s Dracula for the Dracula angle, but the Frankenstein angle borrows more from Franco’s own The Awful Dr. Orlof (1962) and less from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Curiously, the opening text, credited to David H Klunne (a Franco pseudonym), is pretty much a poetic and short synopsis of the film, rather than some sort of backstory setup to get viewers up to date, like an opening Star Wars crawl. That’s OK, because there isn’t really a whole lot to spoil, since the experience of the film, in this case, is a little more important than the story, which I think isn’t necessarily hard to follow, but it doesn’t really sink in either since there is a lot of visual depth, atmosphere, and cool ideas in what is a slow and thin plot.

Count Dracula's Great Love / El gran amor del Conde Dracula (1973)

Paul Naschy had a lot of success in a wide range of film genres, playing an even wider range of characters, but he is mostly remembered for his brand of gritty and beautiful Spanish gothic horror films. These movies had their low budget and pacing issues, but there was still something so attractive about them, with a reverence for the classic monsters, most especially the wolfman, and the inclusion of plenty of female vampires and femme fatales in general. Plus, with his charisma and sincerity to the material, it’s always a joy just seeing Naschy; whenever he makes an entrance in these movies, he causes viewers’ eyes to light up like they’re seeing a dear old friend. For me, it was always interesting to see what a zombie movie, or a mummy movie, or a cannibal movie, or even a giallo would be like after getting the Paul Naschy treatment.

It was my tendency to read other people’s takes on Paul Naschy movies, be they positive or negative, that inspired me to eventually take up the quill to see if I’d have anything interesting to contribute as a genre film blogger.

With Count Dracula’s Great Love, a costume horror drama with a satiable amount of violence and eroticism that according to Naschy in his memoirs was a critic and box office success,* we have one of my favorite classic monsters done by one of my favorite filmmakers. It was directed by Javier Aguirre (Hunchback of the Morgue) but was written by Paul Naschy who also stars as Dr. Wendell Marlow and (forgive the spoiler) Count Dracula. I believe it is also the first in a short but notable line of horror films with Naschy and actor Victor Barrera (sometimes credited as Vic Winner or Victor Alcazar); the other three Naschy movies with Barrera are Hunchback of the Morgue (1973), Horror Rises from the Tomb (1973), and Vengeance of the Zombies (1973).

The Devil’s Wedding Night / Il plenilunio delle vergini (1973)

For me, The Devil’s Wedding Night is kind of like a Dracula movie but with Rosalba Neri playing Dracula, which is just a prepossessing idea. However, that’s not quite what it is, as it plays more like a spinoff, fanfic, or sequel to Dracula, where Count Dracula is the stuff of legend, with his power being the focus of archeological research. It’s interesting that in the film’s story Edgar Allan Poe seems to be an upcoming new sensation, which sets it around the first half of the 19th century, making it predate the events in Bram Stoker’s novel that occur around the 1890s. So, The Devil’s Wedding Night could actually be a prequel to Dracula. I mean, who was that mysterious smirking man in the woods, at the tavern, and on the castle grounds we kept seeing? The mysterious man is a nice touch who’s most likely a servant to the ring, but there’s nothing ruling out that he could have been Dracula the whole time, perhaps a powerless Dracula who needs the black mass wedding ceremony to be reborn.

The Dracula Saga (1973)

Count Dracula seems to have a habit of always being reborn, both within the stories themselves as well as in different incarnations across the board of entertainment media. He’s become so synonymous with horror and Halloween that he will never leave the public consciousness. You can kill him off with a wooden stake or by overexposing him with so many variations, adaptations, tie-ins, or spin-offs, but he’s never going away; he’ll always be reborn. And why shouldn’t he? Like most great ideas, there always seems to be plenty more to explore. I wonder if Bram Stoker knew just how immortal his creation would turn out to be and that killing him off at the end of the novel was only the beginning.

Much like Hammer’s Dracula films, the Spanish horror film The Dracula Saga / La saga de los Drácula is a take that explores further possibilities with The Count. With a stretch of the imagination, it kind of works as an unofficial prequel to Stoker's Dracula, but it’s rather more of an alteration of sorts that disregards the events of the original story and takes liberties to imagine what Dracula’s family would be like, with a story told primarily through Dracula’s estranged granddaughter, Berta (Tina Sáinz – I could’ve easily seen Emma Cohen in this role as well). Although there are narrations from Dracula at the beginning and at the end, telling the story at the end as if it was his story all along, while the English trailer is narrated by Berta, who claims this is her story, so it's a bit of a toss up as to whose story this really is. 

Jess Franco's Count Dracula (1970)

As a kid, my earliest understanding of Count Dracula came from The Monster Squad (1987), Count Chocula, Sesame Street, and a mythical final boss I could never get to in the Nintendo game Castlevania 2: Simon’s Quest. None of which was the proper way to get to know The Count, of course. And so, I remained ignorant of the real legend of Count Dracula until fairly recently when I was instilled with a desire to read Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), following a pleasurably short read from Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872). Thanks to Stoker’s novel, I’ve been on quite the Dracula kick lately, watching a lot of films based on the novel, such as Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922), Dracula (1931), Horror of Dracula (1958), Count Dracula (1970), Nosferatu: The Vampyre (1979), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), and Dracula 3D (2012).

I really think we would’ve had a near-perfect adaptation with Francis Ford Coppola’s version from 1992, if it weren’t for the love story between Dracula and Mina thrown in, and I don’t think Lucy was supposed to seem so promiscuous, either. I’m actually not offended by a soft Dracula that could genuinely fall in love with a living woman without wishing her any harm; just don’t shoehorn it into an adaptation of Stoker’s novel. A lot of people who haven’t read the book will probably think it was a romance novel. I actually thought it was an interesting idea in Count Dracula’s Great Love (1974), where Paul Naschy created and portrayed, for the first time, Count Dracula as a romantic softie.

The Reincarnation of Isabel (1973)

If ever there was a movie that epitomized the weird, scattered, and strangely erotic nature of Eurohorror the most, that film would most likely be The Reincarnation of Isabel. It’s a work of art where a clear goal-driven narrative seems to have either been purposefully or unknowingly neglected. It’s still a good story but one that is awkwardly told. It may just as well have been that having a story spoon-fed to viewers was of little importance in this case, as director Renato Polselli (Delirium, The Vampire and the Ballerina) might’ve felt he had a lot more to offer by instead unloading his tale of reincarnation in a rather erratic fashion, frequently diverging from the narrative for the sake of overusing the film’s seductive set pieces, with events happening for unclear reasons and moving in unclear directions. It is also nonetheless done with gusto and a unique painterly craftsmanship. Fans of the weird and sexy side of Eurohorror should consider looking to The Reincarnation of Isabel to get their regular fix.

A supposed witch, Isabella (Rita, Nude for Satan, Calderoni), was staked and burned at an altar in front of an attentive mob of villagers. Centuries later, someone or something with a following of cultists and vampires is trying to revive/reincarnate the Great Mistress, Isabella, and they’ll sacrifice as many virgins as it takes for her to live again. Women are turning up dead with their hearts missing and strange bite marks on their necks. It all seems to be connected to a castle that has just been bought and occupied by a Mr. Jack Nelson (Mickey, Bloody Pit of Horror, Hargitay), his wife, and his stepdaughter, Laureen (also played by Calderoni). A special party in celebration of Laureen’s engagement to a local man is underway in the castle, and the epoch involving Isabella’s persecution in the long distant past begins to haunt the inhabitants in erotically bizarre and deadly ways.

What can I say about Rita Calderoni? She’s a delightful and committed lead with very pure good looks. Interestingly enough like in the film Nude for Satan, there are moments where she inexplicably has a single breast exposed without seeming to notice or care that her boob is showing. Seeing her treat us to this provocative sight of her in more than one movie has caused me to consider this look to be her trademark. Calderoni also puts on a convincing performance with her portrayal of the persecuted Isabel. She looks like she went through a lot for us, and it actually looks like it hurts when they drive a stake through her.