Dracula and Son (1976)

Christopher Lee, the reason Vampires have long cuspids, played Dracula one last time in this restrained and somewhat messy French comedy. Although Dracula and Son certainly has its moments, it’s a bit of a meandering mess. Watching the original version, it’s not difficult to understand why American distributors were tempted to shave a bit over twenty minutes off the original runtime — and tack on a tacky cartoon credit sequence as well. Although it did make the movie much shorter, the edits apparently did not do the film any significant favors.

Our movie opens, as many Dracula movies do, on a coach barreling through the Transylvanian countryside, racing the sunset. The driver urges the horses to do faster; the film editor assists by speeding up the framerate. The coach veers into a deep rut in the road, breaking a wheel and bringing the travel to stop. While the rest of the passengers nervously watch both the repairs and the setting sun, the beautiful young Herminie (Catherine Breillat) heads off into the woods with a handsome young man to find more entertaining ways to passing the time.

Just as the coach is repaired, another coach arrives. It has been sent by a Count Riverwitz to pick up his young fiancée Herminie and her governess. As the new coach departs, an older man clutching a large cross warns Herminie’s new friend: “They don’t belong to the House of Riverwitz. We shall never see them again."

"We shall never see them again” is a common theme in Dracula and Son, which opens up many subplots and introduce new characters even relatively late in the program, only to drop them all with nary a word. This causes the movie to lurch about, and you’re never really sure where it’s going.

For example, in pretty short order Herminie has given birth to Dracula’s son Ferdinand, turned into a vampire, then misjudges the sunrise and ends up in a giant egg-timer. A young Ferdinand murderes the governess by locking her outside the castle. And then suddenly Ferdinand is grown; an awkward young man who does not want to kill for blood but nevertheless wants to please his father.

Forced to flee Transylvania and separated when their plan to travel incognito goes awry Dracula ends up in England and Ferdinand in France. Dracula lucks his way into a lucrative film contract playing Dracula (a stretch for Christopher Lee, no doubt), but Ferdinand is living a destitute life in the mean streets of Paris.

Aha, you are thinking at this point, we are doing fish-out-of-water stories. Only for a moment or two. Now we are doing “Father-and-son reconciliation” stories.

Things take a bit of a weird turn when Nicole shows up. She wants to hire Dracula for a Pepsodent advertising campaign. Dracula wants to turn her into a vampire because she reminds him of Herminie. Ferdinand also thinks she looks a lot like Mom, who he mostly recalls from a painting in the castle.

Nicole does, in fact, very much resemble Herminie. Most Dracula movies pull this off by casting the same actress. Not Dracula and Son. Instead, they’ve cast Catherine’s sister Marie-Hélène. Despite (because of?) the fact that Nicole resembles Mom, Ferdinand is very much not down with his father turning her into a vampire. He would, however, very much like to have sex with her. This is the one goal in the film he accomplishes, with significant consequences.

There are fairly long spaces between laughs in Dracula and Son. The movie takes many detours, sometimes in aid of setting up a joke but more often than not just getting itself distracted. We establish the hell out of 17th century characters only to never see them again. Perhaps I have been conditioned by too many stories where the events of an earlier age play out again in modern times, but I really anticipated the return of many of these characters. They do not return. If you bothered to learn their names you wasted your time.

Christopher Lee is clearly having a ball, though, and that’s good to see. If you are familiar with the Hammer Draculas you will probably enjoy the movie quite a bit more than the average schmoe. The film even recreates some iconic scenes from the original Horror of Dracula. It also helps to be comfortable with the comparatively glacial pace of 1970s filmmaking; Dracula and Son seems much longer than it is, probably because there’s no convenient through-line in the story.

If Catherine Breillat’s name is ringing some bells but you don’t know why — yes, this is an acting turn from the controversial French auteur. This movie came out in 1976 and lots of people didn’t see it because it wasn’t that great. Catherine Breillat’s first film, A Real Young Girl, also came out in 1976 and people didn’t see that one either. But that was because Breillat’s film was banned most places for obscenity and was denied a theatrical run until 2000.

Dracula and Son was originally released in the United States in significantly abbreviated form. Severin released the original version in their Eurocrypt of Christopher Lee collection, although it is also available separately.

Published Sun Dec 15 2024 13:00:13 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)