Count Dracula's Great Love (El Gran Amor del Conde Dracula) (1972)

One of the strangest cultural trends in my mind is the romanticizing of the vampire, recently brought to another fever pitch by the (frankly totally inexplicable) popularity of the "Twilight" novels. Putting aside the novels' neutered eroticism, anti-sex sexual politics, and selling a completely codependent relationship as the average mousy young woman's ultimate romantic ideal, the books' vampires are even more defanged than Anne Rice's glam rock nosferatu. Like Count Dracula himself, the sensitive, erotic vampire seems to keep returning to life some time after it's pronounced dead and has been around much longer than you might think (perhaps since the first early imitators of Bram Stoker who took on his kinkiness without any of the Victorian guilt ).

This brings us to Count Dracula's Great Love, which probably beats out the aforementioned works and even Bram Stoker's Dracula for the most melodramatic Count Dracula to ever appear on screen. Such a magnificent record-breaking title grab is due in no small part to the casting of Paul Naschy, often called with justification Spain's answer to Christopher Lee, as the Count. Count Dracula's Great Love is one of those b-movies that knows it's a b-movie and acts like a b-movie and yet carries some sort of apt trash culture gravitas (and films like that always seem to come from Europe...). For instance, it's clear from the start that, to paraphrase the Mystery Science Theater 3000 crew on Manos: Hands of Fate, one of the reasons the film was made was to showcase the assets - the bouncy, generously proportioned, and unencumbered by any dress designed by humankind type of assets - of actress Rosanna Yanni, and yet the film gives Dracula, who constantly talks in the third person, ultra-weighty dialogue such as, "For the first time the love of a mortal has changed the destiny of Dracula!"

The plot alone is the stuff of gloriously loopy epics. While passing through the Carpathian Mountains on the way via a coach to Germany, Imre Polvi (Victor Alcazar) tells his companions Marlene (Ingrid Garbo...no relation to Greta, I think), Elke (Mirta Miller), Karen (Haydee Politoff), and Senta (Rosanna Yanni), all of whom are wearing dresses that look like awkward combinations of various styles from different centuries, that they've ventured into what used to be the territory of Count Dracula. Then, possessed by the God of Exposition, he regales them with the story of a nearby clinic that was once headed by a famous doctor, Dr. Kargos, who was attacked and killed by a mob of locals who accused him of using his patients' own blood in his experiments. On cue, a wheel from the coach falls off and disappears into a nearby forest while one of the startled horses accidentally kills the coachman. The one possible place for refuge turns out to be, of course, Dr. Kargos' old clinic, which is now the home of a friendly young doctor, Dr. Marlow (Paul Naschy), who claims to be there to set up a new practice. That Marlow's "new practice" seems to be out in the middle of nowhere with no potential patients around, and that Marlow only seems to be around at night, doesn't stop our intrepid gang of people traveling for...some reason or another from accepting his offer of hospitality until a new coach can be arranged.

Of course, the women don't become any wiser even after they stumble across the journal of Dr. Van Helsing, which Dracula...er, Dr. Marlow, of course, seems to keep around as a souvenir. The journal claims that every time Dracula is killed he will simply be resurrected by the time of the next generation. Worse, when Dracula finds a virgin who falls in love with him without Dracula's usual sketchy hypnosis tricks, his daughter Radma (?!) will be resurrected and they'll both (for some reason) become all-powerful. Now that we've set all that up, it's time for all the characters to be vampirized in quick succession, but not before Marlow, who is apparently also taken with Senta's assets, sleeps with her, only to be disappointed when he finds out post-coitus that she wasn't a virgin after all. After a mass lesbian vampire orgy of biting with Senta as the centerpiece, the only one left un-undead is Karen, whom Dracula apparently settles for since the busty one wasn't the key to godhood after all. After saving Karen from one of his vampire minions (for the Lord of the Undead Dracula seems to have a hard time dealing with his own), Dracula, still pretending to be Marlow, manages to seduce her and discovers that, yes, there was a virgin in the lot after all.

Believe it or not, it's at this point where the plot truly gets weird. Dracula finally gets around to revealing his true identity to Karen and declares, speaking telepathically (!) and in the third person (!!) all the while, that she is the one he was meant to fall in love with (it's really a shame the English title for the film wasn't Dracula's Great Love: Karen). As a first date, Dracula tortures a girl Karen's vampirized friends have abducted from a nearly country home and takes some of Karen's blood in order to revive Radma, who changes from a skeleton to a Scandinavian model after the ritual. Things go as planned but suddenly, before Radma can awaken, Dracula suddenly changes his mind and states that Radma will have to wait for a full resurrection. Why? Because "for the first time the love of a mortal has changed the destiny of Dracula", of course! Also Dracula worries over the possibility that the not-fully-revived Radma will be subjected to the "evil stares of men", so naturally he seals the coffin and has it chucked into a river. I guess it's a rather extreme example of being the overprotective father of a woman. From there the movie coasts along with occasional shots of Dracula and Karen's former friends terrorizing countryfolk and Dracula allowing Karen's friends to be wiped out by sunlight, just because, until Dracula asks Karen if she'd agree to be a vampire. Karen refuses - or more accurately just whines, "I can't!" - so Dracula stakes himself to death (!!!), leaving behind a grieving Karen.

If from my summary the entire plot seems thrown together and barely coherent at parts, then, well, I've done my job. Still, it's really the film's one saving grace besides the presence of Paul Naschy. After all, one of the reasons I - and I suspect many other people - love b-movies and obscure cinema is that they're free of the conventions and requisites that often plague big-budget films or even "respectable" indies. There's a wild sort of unpredictability to them that simply doesn't exist for a lot of films that win mainstream recognition, and that's definitely true for Count Dracula's Great Love. Try as you might, I don't think you can find another Dracula film quite like this one, at least not where Dracula has an omnipotent daughter who doesn't even affect the plot in any tangible way and where a broken-hearted Count commits suicide. It's like a story some high schooler sketched out in their Algebra notebook, which, yes, I consider a good thing.

And, if that doesn't grab you gay women or straight men out there, let me add that I think this film has some of the most transparent excuses for showing off cleavage this side of Russ Meyer's filmography, unless women really are in the habit of bouncing up and down mindlessly while they're naked in a swimming pool.