DRACULA'S WIDOW (1988)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*

Somehow I don't think it speaks well of the talents of Christopher ("nephew of Francis Ford") Coppola that his first film, both as director and co-writer, seems the only one in the repertoire that most film-fans are likely to recognize. All the more pity then, that this late-eighties anticipation of RENFIELD is such a slog.

The biggest problem WIDOW displays is that the script has no idea what its titular character wants to accomplish. The beginning of Coppola's film slightly evokes that of ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN. In both cases crates containing a monster, or monsters, are shipped to the U.S., and in both cases these stratagems don't stand up to much logical scrutiny. But once the action of the A&C film begins, the script quickly establishes Dracula's intentions and resources.

Not only does the viewer not know why the coffin of Vanessa, Wife of Dracula  (Sylvia Kristel) ends up being delivered to a Hollywood wax museum, there's never a clue about the vampire-woman's goals. She seems not to know how she ended up being sent to Hollywood, but her shipping to America seems to have come about by accident, given that the script establishes that the original Van Helsing slew her husband about two generations ago. Once she awakens, she takes control of the museum-owner Raymond (Lenny von Dohlen) with a bite and informs him that he's now her slave and must renounce his girlfriend Jenny (who has the mostly coincidental surname of Harker). Vanessa-- who despite her antiquity is always clad in a skirt-suit that conveys a contemporary appearance-- at first wants to return to Romania to be with her lord. Informed that he's dead, she wants vengeance on Dracula's slayer, and by an amazing coincidence, Van Helsing's elderly grandson just happens to live in L.A. Vanessa gets her vengeance, but all the scenes relevant to that subplot probably don't amount to twenty minutes.

Vanessa does feed on male victims at night, and in one puzzling incident, she drags Raymond to a satanic club, and despite the reverence shown her by the Satanists, she transforms into a beast-woman with a raddled face and claws them all to death. Naturally the Hollywood cops investigate the various murders, and one sympathetic officer eventually believes Raymond's wild story of a vampire mistress. Van Helsing, before he's killed, does inform Raymond that he can only be free of his thralldom if he kills the one who vampirized him, which leads to an unsurprising and unexciting conclusion.

In theory, Raymond's plight ought to move viewers, but both the script and Von Dohlen's flat acting generate only tedium. Frankly, even the most derivative FRIDAY THE 13TH knock-off usually does a better job of creating empathy for both inevitable and possible victims. As Vanessa, Kristel has almost nothing to do but to stalk about menacingly, holding her hands in clawlike posture even when she's not in full monster-form. Her rampages are the closest thing WIDOW has to a high point, since the budget did allow for some quality gore, and even a decent prosthetic for a sort of "were-bat" creature. But it's a weird, strangely dispassionate film, which can't even muster a sense of irony that Raymond, a devotee of vampire movies and owner of a wax museum, has been forced to experience the reality of monsters.