DAUGHTER OF DRACULA (1972)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*

One of the oddest things about the monster-film Jess Franco did before this one-- i.e, DRACULA, PRISONER OF FRANKENSTEIN-- is that this monster-mash lacks the nudity that the director had been injecting into his films since about 1969. PRISONER only has a few moments of sleazy imagery, but it almost seems like Franco might have had some notion of "working clean" on that project, even cleaner than the Paul Naschy films with which Franco's monster-flicks might have competed.

However, in the same year, and with some of the same cast and crew, Franco went back to the vampire well once more, but with large dollops of softcore lesbian sex, much like 1970's NIGHTMARES COME AT NIGHT.  That said, the structure of DAUGHTER OF DRACULA has a stronger resemblance to 1965's DIABOLICAL DOCTOR Z. DAUGHTER, like DOCTOR, sets up the main monster's reasons for preying on victims, and then just lets the monster do his or her thing while interpolating various conversational scenes about confused officials trying to decide what to do. Then just both films just kind of wind down, as one or more of the good guys invade the monster's lair and finish him/her off.

The opening actually shows some promise. A young woman named Luisa (Britt Nichols) arrives at her family's mansion just as her aged mother is close to death. The mother bestows a key on Luisa and tells her that her heritage as a member of the Karlstein family she must know that her ancestors were vampires, and that the ancient Karlstein castle contains one such vampire, Count Dracula himself. (The "Karlstein" name is probably a shout-out to the "Karnsteins" of Sheridan LeFanu's novel CARMILLA, a literary "ancestor" to Stoker's DRACULA, though Franco may have changed the name to avoid litigation from Hammer, who were in the midst of their own "Karnstein trilogy.")

The scene between Luisa and her mother is fairly affecting for a Franco film, until one realizes that Luisa's mother has given her absolutely no warning about the perils of seeking out your vampire ancestor. Not that Luisa seems like the brightest bulb herself. She duly uses the key to let herself into the castle, and into the burial vault of Dracula (Howard Vernon). Despite the fact that actor Vernon is not seen to move from his coffin in the scene, somehow he gets his distant descendant into his power and makes her into a bloodsucker too, at which point she more or less becomes the starring monster of the movie. (Vernon also barely moved around in DRACULA PRISONER OF FRANKENSTEIN, leading me to wonder if he'd injured his back or something.)

Anyway, once Luisa has become the de facto "daughter of Dracula," she seduces and dominates her hot cousin Karine (Anne Libert), and their girl-on-girl gyrations eat up most of the film's running time. 

To add the illusion of action, there's also a psycho killing people in town, but though I suppose this too was some minion of Dracula, I don't remember that the film ever identifies who the killer is. Various characters stand around reciting dialogue to give the illusion of drama-- a police inspector, a reporter, the modern-day Count Karlstein, the owner of a "no-tell-hotel," and a Karlstein servant named Jefferson (played by Franco himself) who utters a lot of pseudo-poetic verbiage about the undead. None of it adds up to anything, and though one of the characters destroys Dracula in the end it's not clear that Luisa's vampiric career is ended.

The most I can say for Franco's photography here is that he seems at least as interested in actor's faces as in the butts and bushes of the actresses, even though his customers probably only cared about the latter.