That screaming in Hades isn't Hitler or Sadaam Hussein or Idi Ahmin. It's Stoker, realizing again from the opening credits that he's got 90 minutes of torture followed by continued viewings of this 1973 comic horror musical. That's right. A comedy horror musical about vampires. Something Broadway has learned doesn't work. You can have masked Phantoms and man-eating plants, but vampires, no. Just ask Michael Crawford or Elton John.
Fortunately, the songs in this film are limited, and when they appear, you feel as if you have entered into an acid trip where the only way out is a stake through your heart. The prologue, set centuries before the modern setting, is actually decent and shows what we've come to envision Dracula looking like in Nosferatu or Francis Ford Coppola's has later rendition of him. But Ringo Starr, dressed in a cheap Woolworths costume as Merlin, seems out of place, even though Dr. Frankenstein and Van Helsing are right at home.
I'm glad I wasn't drinking anything when Harry Nilsson's famous song, "I Can't Live" is interjected into a scientific experiment sequence He plays the vampire here, literally the son of Dracula and an obvious redheaded victim of centuries before, determined to have a normal life returned to him so he can find love, but obvious demons are determined to stop that from happening.
Obviously made on a $10 budget with tinny sound and photography (that looks like the type used for commercials) that is often dizzying and far too close up, this is no "Fearless Vampire Killers" or "Young Frankenstein" or "Dracula: Dead and Loving It" or even "Old Dracula" which came out a few years later and quickly bled to death from box office poison. It has a strange structure that seems to go in several different directions at once, a ridiculous idea of how to get laughs Google, and extreme absurdity at every moment. When a pool ball explodes with poison in a late sequence, it's a metaphor of what a bomb this is.
Fortunately, the songs in this film are limited, and when they appear, you feel as if you have entered into an acid trip where the only way out is a stake through your heart. The prologue, set centuries before the modern setting, is actually decent and shows what we've come to envision Dracula looking like in Nosferatu or Francis Ford Coppola's has later rendition of him. But Ringo Starr, dressed in a cheap Woolworths costume as Merlin, seems out of place, even though Dr. Frankenstein and Van Helsing are right at home.
I'm glad I wasn't drinking anything when Harry Nilsson's famous song, "I Can't Live" is interjected into a scientific experiment sequence He plays the vampire here, literally the son of Dracula and an obvious redheaded victim of centuries before, determined to have a normal life returned to him so he can find love, but obvious demons are determined to stop that from happening.
Obviously made on a $10 budget with tinny sound and photography (that looks like the type used for commercials) that is often dizzying and far too close up, this is no "Fearless Vampire Killers" or "Young Frankenstein" or "Dracula: Dead and Loving It" or even "Old Dracula" which came out a few years later and quickly bled to death from box office poison. It has a strange structure that seems to go in several different directions at once, a ridiculous idea of how to get laughs Google, and extreme absurdity at every moment. When a pool ball explodes with poison in a late sequence, it's a metaphor of what a bomb this is.