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"Ou lorsque j'abandonne aux morsures mon buste..." Jesús Franco kicks off with a couple of woozy flurries, which one is the dream? Candelabra and live mannequin on a mirrored nightclub stage, then vaginal kites and scorpions with erect stingers, in both the same gorgeous vulturette (Soledad Miranda). The blonde businesswoman (Ewa Strömberg) solemnly recounts these reveries ("More than once I've reached orgasm") to her psychiatrist, who doodles on his notepad and prescribes a new lover. She's invited to the Anatolian island by the Countess, not Dracula's Daughter but his heiress, after sunbathing and wine comes the bite. "The queen of the night will bear you in her black wings." Stoker and Le Fanu for Franco's Sapphic concert, where Van Helsing is an old Universal Studios memory (dryly essayed by Dennis Price) and the director is his own Ygor, seeking love through torture. A very liquid cinematic surface, reality and illusion and living and undead and straight and lesbian as perpetually collapsing and expanding states. Renfield is a buxom sanatorium inmate (Heidrun Kussin) who figures in a characteristic blur of chintz and magic: She's alone in her cell, a veil is draped over the lenses à la Sternberg and suddenly there's her vampiric mistress, the camera zooms in for a naked embrace and out to find her solitary again. "Powers from unknown depths" set to jazzy organs and sitars, plus for good measure the Godard electronic voice. Miranda drifts through it all like smoke, lithe and humid and strikingly like Moreau as her Countess grows anemic and the beguiler turns beguiled. (Delphine Seyrig in Daughters of Darkness might be an elegant older sister.) With Andrés Monales, Paul Muller, and Michael Berling.
--- Fernando F. Croce |