Week Three (Oct 11-17): Things That Go "Hump" in the Night: Sex and Horror, Soft and Hard (Oct 11)
We kick off a week that takes a walk on the very naughty side in horror's red light district with a fitfully perverse adaptation of an immortal horror classic. One can only imagine if Mary Shelley was around to witness her tale of the modern Prometheus being told in this manner, removing all traces of tragedy and suspense, replacing them with heaps of gore, plenty of sexual taboos being broken, and a whole hell of a lot of irony to create one of the more unique adaptations of her story. I'll be trying something a little bit different with the format of the reviews this week, as the sexual component to all of these films is something to explore in a little bit different of a write-up as I try to parse out the important questions related to the melding of such elements to find out just how successful they are or aren't. Without further ado...
How far does the film push the line?: For some, the most important question of all! Here though, it's important to establish how much sex there is, and despite this film's X-rating at the time of its release, this would certainly qualify as much, much more of a softcore experience overall. True, full frontal nudity does figure into the film, and in an always welcome gesture, equal opportunity full frontal at that, and that darn Baron sure has some strange proclivities when his own sexual frustration finally bursts out and onto and, in the film's most absurd moment, into the body of his female zombie, but no one is going to mistake this for something to get them hot and bothered beyond referencing taboos like incest quite frequently, with the Baron and the Lady being unhappily married siblings with children. Surprisingly, though, it is quite a gory film instead, with plenty of guts being spilled all over the place that leads to some memorable moments that make one wish that a 3D version of the film was readily available to give them the full effect. A very moist film, but not for the reasons you would expect from the rating.
Could this film have worked without the sex?: It's tempting to shut down that conversation right here and now and say "duh" outright, given the title of the film, but it's a little more nuanced than that. Well, OK, it's very much little of "a little," but regardless, there is an attempt here to dress down the sexual repression of the era that it depicts, playing into the class warfare of the Frankensteins as they thumb their nose at the thought of ever having to consort with common folk, while also depending on them to satisfy their own needs, sexual and otherw--... OK, pretty much just sexual. Not a particularly original idea by that point in time, but one that does at least give the film a semblance of a framework to justify the use of sex in order to play into its themes.
Does the film play at all?: Writer/director Paul Morrisey finds himself with his two feet in very different places for what I think he was going for here. On the one foot, there is that sense of ironic detachment of a period piece being filtered through a modern lens, one that pokes fun at the preconceptions of those societies. A particularly inspired story decision manifests in the source of the Baron's final piece of his body puzzle, the head of a young farmer who he mistakenly assumes is a stud with an insatiable sexual appetite for women, only to not realize that Sacha is considerably more interested in his friend, an otherwise oblivious Nicholas. There's also the cheekiness of the Baron's experiments being less about mastering life and death and more about ushering in a new era for the world, as he strives to bring about a master race assembled from the perfect specimens, which of course happen to be very white and very blonde. It's fertile stuff for a lot of amusement that can be intriguing with how it all ties together by its gore-soaked ending.
The other foot seems to be focused much more on its star, Joe Dellasandro, the counterculture icon of male sexuality and very much the stud of Andy Warhol's stable of regular players. Though Warhol had little to do with this film, the subtext and plain old text of just how everyone in this film sees the character of Nicholas is hard to ignore, as man and woman alike find themselves a little bothered when looking at his impressive visage, both for reasons they come out with right away or with some very repressed ones instead. Everyone is deeply horny for Nicholas, which is not hard to imagine with how gorgeous a man Dellasandro was in his prime, and you get all of him hanging out here, front and back, to join in on all those fantasies the Frankensteins can't help but dream up in their sick heads.
But even with those feet planted where there at, getting them to combine successfully is another matter altogether, which Morrisey finds middling success at best in capturing. The revisionist elements to the story are very much window-dressing, often coming across as clumsily implemented as it can't find a good balance between the inherent comedy and finding its place in the period trappings. The modern sensibility feels too detached, really, especially with the efforts here to try and replicate classic horror films in terms of their framing and atmosphere that doesn't do much of a service to any of those elements.
Young Frankenstein, this ain't. There's also the tricky problem that for as handsome and desirable Joe Dellasandro is from a visual standpoint, his performance here is so goddamned
awful that it beggars belief that anyone would be interested in him once he opens his mouth and delivers his lines with all the panache of a high school news presenter. It makes the desire fall all the more flat, though in Dellasandro's defense, he's hardly the only guilty party in terms of wondering how anyone missed how poor their performance was, as Monique van Vooren as the Baroness matches him for every limp blow in terms of making you pray for the film to get back to what works.
And what works should come as no surprise, as the real star is Udo Kier as the good Baron. Though still relatively early on his career, his manic camp gesturing is in full effect here, chewing into the lines with tremendous zeal and capably picking up where Peter Lorre left off in terms of bug-eyed intensity, as the Baron's frustration and desperation begins manifesting itself in more and more campy ways, making the line readings all the more delicious and the gesticulating all the more exciting as he carries the film on his back whenever he's able. "To know life, Otto, one must first fuck death in the gallbladder" isn't just the kind of line you long for Kier to utter, or setting up his own incredible demise as it turns out, but exactly the kind of camp magic that the rest of the film should have aspired to, instead of feeling like long, tedious stretches whenever he's not on the screen.
Thankfully, the film does eventually reach that point in its incredible finale, in which the deaths get steadily more and more ridiculous, the pontificating of the final moments for each soon-to-die character reaching sublimity, and a hell of a sting in the tail to cap everything off to ensure it ends with the kind of mean-spirited charm it had buried deep down all along that recalls a similar ending in
Twitch of the Death Nerve. Before then, it is a challenging film to recommend outright for anyone that wants to do more than look at how handsome Dellasandro is, with and without clothes, before it switches back to Kier for more mad scientist shenanigans, though the bountifully gory deaths can serve as a nice breather for both. I'm not entirely sure that Morrisey knew quite what he wanted to make here, but when it does work, it does possess a lot of value with just how fun it can be when it wants to be. That doesn't mean it still isn't a very long 95 minutes, but at least one can rest easy knowing the last 10 do make it mostly worthwhile.
17/38
Another trip to the world of literary horror from The Factory, and the one that scarcely needed another heavily sexualized interpretation!
How far does the film push the line?: Compared to
Flesh for Frankenstein, the sex here is a bit more straightforward and lacking in kink, but it nevertheless doesn't cross the line into anything more than softcore. That being said, it is certainly got quite the eager cast of actors willing to go naked in this, as one certainly isn't left with much of an imagination afterward for any of the women who participate, along with more beefcake shots of Joe Dellasandro, often sweating profusely to show of his incredible figure... stay focused, man! Incidentally, there is one thing that the film touches upon and doesn't really elaborate upon that our, umm, hero of sorts certainly likes his sex rough and with as little consent as possible, indulging in those ideas that reaches its apex in the climax (no joke there) as he somehow manages to defend his choice to rape someone as saving her from the evil of Dracula. Definitely all kinds of yikes there, which is saying something about a film that has Roman Polanski cameo in it!
Could this film have worked without the sex?: Yeah, probably. Not that there really isn't a inherently good reason to see folks like Dellasandro or Stefania Casini in various states of undressing as a result of them being ridiculously attractive human beings that take pride in how good they look, but the sex scenes we do get here are honestly kinda boring in terms of their staging, which makes them drag the pacing of the film down when they do show up. There are bits of character development for Mario, the character Dellasandro plays, in them, but you kinda get the point about him being a pretty terrible person after he slaps the first of the sisters. Strangely, for a decade that is not lacking in hot vampire sex action, this one has to rank close to the bottom in terms of interest as far as that stuff is concerned.
Does the film play at all?: Beginning immediately after completing
Flesh for Frankenstein, this film does bear a little more sophistication and intrigue in its scenario that seem like a direct result of lessons learned on the making of the previous film. For starters, it opens rather beautifully with Udo Kier's Dracula in extreme close-up, applying makeup and hair dye in an effort to look presentable in what must be his dying days, his trademark air of dread-soaked sex appeal almost completely drained from him. Indeed, Dracula is dying and not loving it, as he quickly lays his sister to rest in a somber moment that makes one wonder if Paul Morrisey and company might be taking this one a little more seriously. Even the setup of getting Dracula to Italy, in the hopes of finding a virgin bride after his reputation in Romania became far too well known for folks to not take up proper arms and protection against him, tracks from a logistical standpoint that doesn't at all suggest tomfoolery is afoot.
And then we get to the next scene, introducing us to the sisters he will be eventually trying to court in his vampiric ways, with two of them quickly disrobing as an act of naughty defiance against their stuffy mother who just doesn't know what to do with her daughters. At this point, it becomes clear that tragedy is going right out the window and while it doesn't veer into outright farce, it is nevertheless a silly concoction of old traditions colliding violently against new enlightenment, which generally doesn't amount to much more than the hired help tending to the willing daughters and their "needs" when ruin seems all but guaranteed to come to their family otherwise. The class warfare elements from Frankenstein return here, though if one was not sure about how well they were implemented there, they certainly will have to think twice about their own commitment to Marxist philosophies when they hear Joe Dellasandro sleepily trying to espouse their values pre- and post-coitus for any sister within earshot. He does thankfully have a somewhat reduced presence here compared to the previous film, but if that sentence I just typed acts as a deterrent in any way from this film, believe me when I say that it's exactly as bad as you think it is in that regard.
Even with the chattiness, though, it's impossible not to go right back to Udo Kier yet again. His Dracula is camp perfection when it matters the most, with Kier giving an incredible physical performance as the deteriorating Count as he hits hunger pangs and rejects impure blood with a gusto that frankly recalls Jim Carrey at his most manic, literally throwing his body into the floor and bed alike, and onto the side of bathtubs as he takes his acting to heights far beyond the reach of even the oldest of entities in this universe. There's projectile blood vomiting, and then there's
projectile blood vomiting, of which Kier occupies quite readily the latter. The atmosphere here is very willing and ready for someone like Kier to commit 1000% as he does here, and he still manages to give another 100% for good measure for a jolly good time.
It's a film of indelible moments, not in the least of which was convincing one of masters of Italian Neorealist movement like Vittorio de Sica to sign on as the family's patriarch to give this film some sorely needed yet deeply undeserved respectability, even as his daughters start exhibiting stranger and stranger behavior to the rest of the family while beginning to get a little closer to each other in increasingly incestuous ways. That's why it's surprisingly easy to believe that no one noticed earlier about the Count's arrival immediately preceding the calamity that follows, since it is entirely believable that everyone really is this stupid. The more fun vibe this has throughout reaches its apex in a tremendous final 15 minutes, which kicks off with the increasingly lesbian sisters checking to see if their youngest sister is still a virgin (or wergin, as Kier so lovingly pronounces it as), then spiraling into the aforementioned rape justification which then somehow turns into one of the most jaw-dropping moments of depravity of Udo Kier's career that is just ridiculous enough to work, setting up the dismemberment-happy finale and an ending so perversely wrong that it earns every inch of it in the process.
I do wonder about the film that the opening suggested if it had actually transpired as I imagine it could have, as it could have been a really interesting spin on the legend of Dracula that could have brought back a lot of real menace while charting a new course through the tragedy of a life that should have ended long, long ago. But I am also not stupid enough to want that instead of this mad and entertaining thrill ride instead, which doesn't so much push upon the limits of good taste as it projectile vomits it into the next county over for a deliriously trashy time with the Count. It says a lot about how much I wanted this to push past the boring sex scenes to get to the next deviant delight that it has in store for the viewer, and even if the pokey pacing can spoil a bit of the fun, it's not enough to deter from the film's strengths. Part of you will feel bad for Dracula being so close to getting what he wanted in the end, but you will know deep down that he's exactly where he needed to be all along: dismembered, staked, and with his new lover thrust upon him, but leaving one hell of a corpse in his wake.
18/38
