Count Dracula's Great Love (1973)
Spanish horror king Paul Naschy stars in this interesting variation of the Dracula myth. The vampire legend is given some unusual twists here, and the plot goes in some unexpected ways, so I won't give away too much. Of course, there's a lot of familiar Eurogothic stuff here as well. A spooky old building, with women wandering around in their nightgowns. (Despite the fact that this clearly takes place in the 19th century, by the daytime costumes, these are very 20th century nightgowns.) A cat jumping out to scare one of the women. There is also a lot which is silly. Vampires whose faces are dead white with heavy makeup, but whose bodies are tanned. Dracula narrating scenes with an echo effect in his voice.
The setup involves a couple of guys carrying a large crate to the spooky old building, said to be an abandoned sanitarium. (It seems the previous doctor in charge of the place was a little too fond of draining his patients' blood for his experiments, so he was hung in a riot. I was never clear if this was Dracula in another incarnation, or somebody else. In either case, this backstory would make a decent film on its own.) The two guys decide to open the crate to see if there is anything to steal. To their surprise, but not the viewer's, it holds a coffin. Inside the coffin they find a skeleton with long blonde hair. After shutting it up they decide to wander around looking for something else to grab. One gets killed in typical vampire fashion, but, surprisingly, the other one gets killed by an ax in the head. Hilariously, a scene of the axed guy falling down a flight of stairs is repeated over and over in slow motion under the opening credits.
Cut to a horse-drawn coach making its way somewhere. Inside are one young man, our presumed hero, and four young women, our presumed "brides." There's also the coachman. Well, a wheel falls off, the coachman gets kicked in the head by a horse and dies, and our five tourists are forced to walk to the nearby spooky old building, newly inhabited by the doctor (Naschy) who just bought the place, for help.
I'll stop the plot summary here, even though our movie has really just started, because it doesn't always go the way you expect (although sometimes it does.) You'll probably figure out who the doctor is -- hell, he's played by Paul Naschy -- but you may not predict what happens to the hero, nor exactly what roles the various brides will play in the strange events to follow. The opening scene, with the two crooks and the blonde skeleton, turns out to be relevant. Dracula's motives turn out to be unusual.
There are some very nicely filmed scenes. There is some really bad dubbing. There's a fair amount of sleaze -- lots of topless scenes for the brides, and some girl-on-girl bloodsucking scenes played for eroticism (as well as some heterosexual ones) -- but nothing too extreme. There are some vampire-vs-vampire fight scenes of interest. All in all, decent entertainment for fans of this genre.
