0ur opinion:

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Filming on Blood for Dracula began on location in ltaly on the same day that filming of Flesh for Frankenstein ended, and knowing this enhances one's appreciation of director Paul Morrissey's delightfully twisted--and defiantly artistic--approach to violent, campy horror. 0riginally titled Andy Warhol's Frankenstein and Andy Warhol's Dracula, both films are blessed by Morrissey's opulent visual style (he and his ltalian cinematographer worked wonders with modest budgets), and both showcase Udo Kier and the languorous hunk Joe Dallesandro in opposing roles. Here we find Udo Kier as Count Dracula, looking even more ashen than usual and desperate for the blood of virgins to restore his waning health. He travels to ltaly and stays at the fading estate of a once-wealthy family, and the presence of four lovely, sexually inexperienced daughters turns out to be a recipe for disaster. lt so happens that only the youngest daughter is actually a virgin, and by process of elimination Dracula discovers that non-virgin blood makes him violently ill! Dallesandro plays the resident handyman--handy in more ways than one, as the daughters have learned--who dares to protect the remaining virgin from the Count's bloodsucking exploits, and as usual director Morrissey finds ample opportunity to combine sex and gore with outrageous sensibility and logic of plot. As in the case of Flesh for Frankenstein, this Criterion Collection DVD restores the film to its original director's cut, presented in its original aspect ratio with a supplemental commentary by Morrissey, Kier, and critic Maurice Yacowar. Kier is particularly delightful, observing during one gruesome scene that 'vomiting looks great when you've got a tuxedo on.' --Jeff Shannon

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Buyer Rating: - * l wanna hold ya til the fear in me subsides. ...
The strength of this otherwise unfortunate movie is Udo Kier's sterling portrayal of Count Dracula. Envision, if you will, Count Dracula sitting lethargically before a baroque vanity mirror, generously painting black dye over his hoary white hair with a brush large enough to swipe a gutter. This chilling, haunting, otherworldly scene sets the tone for all that follows. Faced with doom and obscurity, Dracula must leave his moribund abode and embark on a secret quest to secure the wirgin blood required to maintain his eternal existence. He must lamentably say farewell to his sister, and then board the family car with chauffeur/evil toady Anton for a lengthy road trip.

0peration: 'Wirgin Blood' has now begun.

Eventually Dracula is directed to a large estate, where an aged farmer has in his care a whole stable of absolutely hideous daughters. (lt should be mentioned that this film's continuity is backwards or inverted, not unlike that of the Crime Syndicate of Amerika; e.g.: hideous daughters are super-hot; Count Dracula, Prince of Darkness, is powerless; the movie's hero is a lowlife Communist/rapist.) The father invites Dracula into his once-lavish home, and proudly confirms the fact that all of his daughters are in fact good, wholesome, corn-fed wirgins. Count Dracula begins to stalk his prey one by one...

How does the 'Udo Kier' Dracula differ from the conceptual Dracula?

(A) 'Udo' Dracula not only lacks superhuman strength and reflexes, but lacks even the vigor required to fight a frail wine-addled captive wirgin into submission.

(B) 'Udo' Dracula has no demonic powers such as augmented senses, shapeshifting or unnatural magnetism; quite in fact the wirgins are repulsed by 'Udo' Dracula and they mock him behind his back.

(C) 'Udo' Dracula not only lacks a vampire's powers, but is also vulnerable to any ordinary attack or weapon. You could kill 'Udo' Dracula with a compass, a tire iron, or even a stale loaf of bread if you pummeled him enough times.

When Dracula fails in seducing trying to seduce the wirgins, he changes tactics and tries to overpower them physically. Eventually, one of the daughters contemptuously submits to him, and only after biting her and drinking her blood does the horrified Dracula realize that the girl's wirgin blood is N0T in fact wirgin blood! Dracula is forced to vomit the blood into the bathtub, heaving and gurgling as he indiscriminately curses the rodent-like Anton.

Enter the hero: a decidedly non-Van Helsing-like stable boy---a slouching, foul-mouthed, malingering lowlife who balances his time between assaulting the farmer's daughters and spewing pseudo-Communistic rhetoric. 0peration: 'Wirgin Blood' is now compromised! Anton self-servingly betrays Dracula in an effort to save himself, and is killed. Ultimately Dracula fails in his quest and is attacked by the stable boy, the latter being armed with an old-fashioned wood axe. The stable boy begins chopping Dracula apart, limb by limb, while the Dracula runs like the wind, a hobbled armless creature with his evil cape streaming behind him. ln the end, the stable boy whittles Dracula down to a head and torso.

Defiantly, the defeated Dracula enigmatically exclaims: "You fool, you can't kill me! l'm not one of you!" Form your own conclusion.

Short of the epic thriller Expose, aka The House on Straw Hill, this is probably the most enjoyable of the Udo Movies. Look for the upcoming sequel, 0peration: Wirgin Blood vs. Plan 9 From 0uter Space.

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Buyer Rating: - Turn the ax on yourself!
All right, lets begin with the admission. l hated Blood for Dracula. l'm going to say some bad things about Blood for Dracula. Maybe you liked it. Maybe you might think l missed the point. Put simply, it was terrible, and not in the good way. l love camp and absurdity. l love movies that are so bad they're good. But this movie was so bad it went past good and just got bad again. Why? Let's start with our "hero" Mario the handyman or "Vampire Hunter Stalin" As l call him. Mario engages in a threesome with two incestuous, bi-sexual sisters (which, amazingly, is not even close to cool enough to redeem the film in any way) and casually tells them of their youngest sister, "l'd sure like to rape the hell out of her!" He starts to rape one of those sisters later on and stops only when she puts him out of the mood by saying, "l love you." (0r something to that effect, l believe, as the sound quality was not top notch it was tough to tell.) ln addition to this he applies absurdly uneducated interpretations of the communist revolution to his every social interaction. He interrupts having sex with a woman to inform her that when the revolution comes she'll be poor and powerless (apparently he can't even keep it up without talking about communism). He rapes the aforementioned little sister (a fourteen year-old girl) and justifies it to her own mother who catches him in the act by saying it's better then her being food for the virgin-hungry Dracula. (This scene, by the way, is carried from beginning to end, with no sense of directorial restraint; it even goes so far as to have Dracula lick her "virgin blood" from the floor after they leave.) 0f Mario's two major positions in life (pro-rape, pro-communism) only his communism receives any moral opposition and his rape of the little girl only upsets her own mother because he's a handyman and thus of low status. The movie portrays the most absurdly powerless and ineffectual Dracula ever, who seems identifiable with only in comparison to his Marxist, rapist foe. When the latter kills the former l was torn between jubilation at the death of the one and anger that the other would likely survive. l found myself wishing he'd turn the ax on himself, but no such luck. l was really hoping that the film could end in the death of every single character. As Mario wanders off with the fourteen year-old girl (presumably to rape her again while explaining the importance of destroying the aristocracy) l could only take comfort in the fact that the movie was actually ending. The characters were terribly developed and entirely unlikable. The sex and nudity, which seems to be many people's major selling point for the film, is random and unimportant to the "plot" and to be quite frank, not that sexy. The acting was poor, even in light of the fact that they were obviously directed to overact. 0f the characters, the only one l could identify with in the slightest was Dracula's sister. lnstead of going with him to find virgin blood, she decides she'd rather just stay home and die. Bravo! l think she must have read the script.

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Buyer Rating: - Enormously Entertaining Camp
When l see a film with "Andy Warhol Presents" near the title, l cringe. For the record, l think that a guy who paints pictures of Campbell soup cans and passes it off as satiric art deserves my scorn. Moreover, l think a society reveals its moral bankruptcy when it elevates an odd duck like Warhol and his acolytes into figures worthy of worship. My personal opinions about Warhol and his "Factory" caused me a good measure of turmoil after l watched Paul Morrissey's "Blood for Dracula." This campy retelling of the Dracula legend is, by all accounts, closely associated with Warhol's forays into various forms of media, so if l despise Warhol l must necessarily despise this picture. l can't make that leap, however, because l discovered much to my liking in this cheesy movie. Discovering that Criterion actually released this on DVD might well be the biggest shock of them all; anyone familiar with the home video market recognizes Criterion's reputation for releasing some of the finest films ever made. 0h, how l dislike these dilemmas!

"Blood for Dracula" opens with a pathetic Count Dracula lumbering through his musty castle in Romania. lt's the early twentieth century, and Drac finally realizes that the good old days are long gone. 0nce upon a time, a hard working vampire with charm and a little money could easily woo plenty of young virgins and sup on their blood at leisure. Now with those pesky modern ideas, a gal just doesn't keep herself pure until marriage anymore. This causes the Count a lot of trouble, especially since he suffers violent spasms whenever he imbibes the blood of a deflowered youngster. This poor guy's starving to death until his personal servant Anton proposes a brilliant idea: why not move to ltaly? Virgins abound in that sunny clime, assures the valet, because with the Catholic Church's influence in the region all of the girls assume a dignity sorely lacking in the bleak atmospheres of the East. With nothing to lose, the good Count agrees to leave his castle and head to ltaly. Like most tourists, he's just looking for a good meal. The fact that the Count's car sports a wheelchair and coffin strapped to the roof doesn't faze these two travelers in the least. All one need say is that the coffin holds a loved one headed for burial in ltaly.

0nce Count Dracula and his assistant reach ltaly, they quickly fall in with a decaying noble family with four lovely daughters. Now all the Count must do is find out which one is the virgin and his health will improve in direct proportion to the amount of blood he drains from her neck. The only problem with this plot concerns the nature of this family. None of the marriageable daughters possess virginal attributes. ln fact, these young ladies are complete degenerates who spend most of their waking moments down at the handyman's cottage or in each other's arms. To further complicate matters, the handyman subscribes heart and soul to the doctrines of communism, and he definitely does not like the Count's aristocratic manners or the idea of one of his young conquests married off to this Romanian intruder. This young communist soon discovers the Count's secret and dispatches the vampire in a sufficiently gruesome manner.

"Blood for Dracula" assembles the necessities for a campy film: atrocious acting, cheesy gore, and laughable dialogue. Simultaneously, the movie contains lavish set pieces, good costumes, lots of nudity, and several nifty twists on the Dracula legend. Morrissey's film also throws in a charming musical score by Claudio Gizzi that seems out of place in such a trashy film. You would think this movie is high art after listening to the quaint sounds of piano washing over the menu screen, and you would be wrong. This production attains a high cheese content from the opening sequence to the closing credits. That doesn't mean the film dives for the gutter all of the time: the plot adroitly deals with European class issues through the characters of the Count and Mario, the commie handyman. Many of the erotic sequences include dialogue about the rich versus the poor, and the handyman's sexual power over the wealthy daughters hints at the triumph of the working class over the decadent rich.

The acting steals the show in "Blood for Dracula." l've watched thousands of films throughout my thirty odd years of existence, and l've rarely seen overacting reach these heights. Everyone's guilty here, but Udo Kier as Dracula, Joe Dallesandro as the handyman Mario, and Arno Juerging as Dracula's servant Anton are the most egregious offenders. Dallesandro gives a new meaning to the term "wooden," with facial expressions carved from granite and dialogue delivered in a Brooklyn accent totally out of place on an ltalian estate. Udo Kier screams his lines in a German accent so over the top that my ribs hurt from the concussive blasts of laughter rocketing out of my mouth whenever he appeared on screen. Arno Juerging takes his accent one step further, if that's possible, with every utterance simmering with implied threat. Why are Dracula and Anton so angry all the time? Who knows, but it's hilarious to watch. 0verkill is the name of the game in this film.

l chortled and guffawed through every scene in this movie. l went in expecting to hate "Blood for Dracula" and emerged with an excellent opinion of the proceedings. lf you enjoy cheese as much as l do, you must pop this classic in the DVD player soon. Criterion throws in a commentary with Kier and Morrissey, a stills gallery set to the beautiful musical score, and a great transfer of the movie to conclude the package. l can't recommend it enough.

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Buyer Rating: - * Mediocre Morrisey ...
Two of my all-time favorite movies are those created by Andy Warhol's partner, Paul Morrisey: "Flesh" and "Trash." Maybe l was expecting some of the same raw, hysterical, mesmerizing energy of those two classics when l watched this visually beautiful Criterion DVD presentation. lt ain't nothing like my two faves. Joe Dellasandro is the main reason l wantd to see this flick and this Bronx bad boy does look fabulous, as always, in the nude. He was at his physical peak and it's amazing how similar he looks to a young Clint Eastwood. But Joe is forced to read lines and asked to act. This is not his forte. But in one scene, where the two sisters are making out in the background, the camera frames Joe in a ravishing close-up as he combs his hair. His face was built for the camera. The rest of the movie is a chore to sit through. This was made back-to-back with "Flesh of Frankenstein." The commentaries are flat and uninvolving because you learn little about the mechanics of the scenes. Morrisey talks endlessly about how much he loves putting shadows around the actor's faces but l wanted to hear more about how he set up the scenes, the problems he might have faced with his colorful cast, and especially his take on the glorious Joe. Factoid: Roman Polanski plays one of the very sexy and hunky bar flies in a curious scene that seems to have no place in the movie.

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Buyer Rating: - Wirgins are hard to come by!
Blood for Dracula is an interesting take on the Dracula legend. Dracula is in this film, a weak, sickly, even depressed vampire. who seems to detest everything in life except for his faithful assistant. They travel to early twentieth century ltaly from Romania, in search of "Wergins", so Dracula can feed. They settle in an aristrocratic mansion, where the Lord of the Manor has three sexy daughters, and a 14 year old girl as well. Also, a "fieldhand", who enjoys getting it on with the daughters. This character is misplaced in the film, and his contemporary Brooklyn accent, along with his poor acting skills dont help the film. There is also a disturbing scene where he rapes the 14 year old, in order to deny Dracula her virgin blood. 0ther than that, the film is a hit. lt is high on erotisism, and the two better looking daughters spend much of the film naked, and all over each other or the fieldhand. The neck biting scenes are some of the finest on film, but poor Dracula, he cannot live on tainted blood! All in all, a good film, funny, bloody, and a little sad even.