"Dracula père et fils"(1979)d/Edouard Molinaro

Though I'd often read about about tonight's review in reference books and vintage horror mags, I'd never gotten the opportunity to actually see it for myself until excitedly stumbling upon a tattered 1982 Columbia Home Video vhs copy for sale at an outlet in Delaware, setting me back a couple of bucks back in the nineties.That something like eighteen minutes had been excised from the pan n' scan print and it having been excruciatingly dubbed for laughs didn't really have any bearing against my desire to see the film, the last big screen portrayal of Dracula(referred to only as "The Count" here) by iconic cult legend, Christopher Lee, nor did my unfamiliarity with the movie's other star, Bernard Menez, who, it turns out, had an earlier go at blending horror and comedy with a Hammer co-star, in 1974's obscure Tendre Dracula, alongside Peter Cushing playing the Count himself for the only time in his long career.Appearing alongside Lee and Menez here are the Breillat sisters, Marie-Hélène and Catherine, the former being the wife of director Molinaro, while the latter was a controversial writer/director in her own right, helming the sex-charged Une Vraie Jeune Fille(reviewed here) among others.To say whatever it was they set out to accomplish with the film was thoroughly depredated with an embarrassingly unfunny-as-fuck dub by nose candy-fiends from Dekaub Ave, failing miserably at recreating dated celebrity voices(The multilingual Lee, for example, delivered his lines in English, then provided his unmistakable booming voice for the French and English dubs, which the video version avoids altogether somehow) oblique storyline, and extensive incoherent guillotine cuts, might just be the understatement of the fucking year.The result is a horror-comedy that's painful to sit through and flatter than Audrey Hepburn's A cups, unaugmented by a fistful of Kleenex.Until I finally see an uncut French print of the film, I'm forced to say this: Dracula and Son, tu débites que des conneries sale éspece de grosse je-sais-pas-quoi.If that's not very funny to you French-tongued Woprophiles, then it's a perfect description, really.Onwards.

It stands to reason that Dracula's French offspring(Bernard Menez) might indeed sound like Tennessee Tuxedo...
After a cartoon intro that wouldn't look out of place as a Schoolhouse Rock episode, we turn to the year 1784 in eastern Romania, where a lady of breeding(Marie-Hélène Breillat) travelling by coach as driven by two cossack-types with Brooklyn yiddish accents(all together now, ha...ha...ha...)is whisked away from her stranded ride by the emissary to the Prince of Darkness, Juan Miguel Roberto Jose Fidel Martinez del Morto(aka/"Jim"), to the Count(Christopher Lee)'s castle, where she marvels at his organ(the musical instrument)while screwing in his coffin and becomes his bride, bearing him a male heir who gets rocked to sleep in a mini-coffin by his vampiric nanny, Brunhilda.Dracula's bride is transformed into smoldering cinders by the rays of daylight when she overdoes her first night out breaking in her new fangs, leaving the Count to deal with his mischievous son(he bowls a human skull into his mother's urn and drinks blood between transfusions while locking his nanny out of the castle as the sun rises) on his own.One hundred and twenty years go by without Victor(Bernard Menez) claiming a victim, obviously due to his lesser stature, false moustache, or perhaps its because he sounds exactly like Maxwell Smart.Over time, Dracula's castle is turned into the People's House of Pleasure and Proletariat Dancehall.With their parlour crawling with dancing Romanian pinkos, Dracula and Son make for Paris on a ship in the coffins of two French sailors, unaware the men are to be buried at sea.On the shores of a beach near Paris, Victor gets kicked in the face after a particularly humorless exchange with a gaggle of ruffians beating the piss out of each other, while his father turns up in a fishing net aboard the Cucaracha, and after hearing the Mexican fisherman exclaiming, "Mira! Mira!" wonders,"Fools!Don't they know vampires can't be seen in mirrors?".I'm gonna give you a minute to change yer piss-pants now...

I don't know about its effect on vampires, but I sure find it repugnant enough.
After a whole laughless bit with Victor trying to find shelter from the sun while avoiding the swishy advances of a French homo who ends up about to get fag bashed by two old Jaques-types, we see the Count bite the neck of a blow up doll.Victor gets a job in a hospital morgue and robs blood banks for sustainance(yaaawn), then his father gets mistaken for Christopher Lee(!) while stalking a victim earning himself the lead role in a low budget horror movie called 'Blood of the Vampire'.He bites a chatty co-star and fools her into opening the door during daylight hours to stop her incessant yapping.He and Victor are reunited at the airport among a small group of paparazzi who goad over the Count's Gucci coffin-bag.The duo go coffin-shopping for Victor and he dreams of being his father on the movie set, repeating takes of the same sequence over and over doing dated celebrity voice impressions like W.C. Fields and Jimmy Cagney.Meanwhile his father spots the reincarnation of his lost love in the beautiful young Nicole(also Marie-Hélène Breillat), who's seemingly only interested in using his likeness for a toothpaste advertisement(yaaaaaaaawn), but after the lame gag-laden game spit by young Victor, she runs to the Count to prove her love to him.A jealous Victor continually cock blocks his old man until the Count throws his alarm clock out the window and goes to Nicole's pad.Victor chucks his old man's designer coffin-bag out the window and when he agrees to do the toothpaste commercial, he's shamed on set by the Count, causing Victor to pack up and split.Young Dracula manages to bed Nicole while posing as his father and discovers he can travel during sunlight hours and has regained his reflection.Nicole draws open an early morning curtain while Victor and the Count argue about his new humanity and the old vampire is reduced to ashes.Five years later, we see young Dracula and Nicole have raised a pair of children as they discover their young son has some pretty sharp eye teeth.Yeah, it's finally over.Roll credits.

Sir Chris's grill says it all here, doesn't it?
I shouldn't like to think about how many times I've actually sat all the way through this fetid sac du merde, due to the many copies I've ripped for buddies in years passed, but whatever the number is, it's too fucking many.In fact, any individuals hurt by my penchant for occasional meanspiritedness and cruelty can point to my viewing this movie as the starting line for my antisocial behavior, no doubt.I can only recommend this to Christopher Lee completists and those few champions of unfunny comedies(I'm usually among their number, just not here.), and even those will be visibly disappointed by their viewing experience, I'd wager.Until a definitive uncut French language print turns up in a Vichy bunker-turned-coffee shop someday, it's just one wop on the scale for Dracula, and his son, considerably less.Avoid like a Yes album.

Can't blame him, I'd be biting that neck myself.

"Spider Baby or, The Maddest Story Ever Told"(1968)d/Jack Hill

"Screams and moans and bats and bones, teenage monsters in haunted homes. The ghost on the stair, a vampire's bite.Better beware, there's a full moon tonight!" as crooned by horror icon Lon Chaney, Jr. during the title sequence of tonight's review is but a mere hint at the lunacy in store for viewers who sit down to this cult classic, as directed by the man responsible for such jazzy numbers as 1966's Blood Bath and Mondo Keyhole, as well as later grindhouse black-taculars like Coffy(1973) and Foxy Brown(1974), the one and only Jack Hill.Shot for just over sixty grand in twelve days at the Smith Estate in Los Angeles four years earlier(the original producer went belly up somewhere along the line), Baby boasts of a stellar cast comprised of a drip-dry Chaney, Jr.(a rarity if you pay any mind to the old stories), Carol Ohmart, soap opera regular Quinn Redeker, bug-eyed comedian Mantan Moreland, and cult fave Sid Haig in an early turn, among others.Don't let the black and white film stock fool you, woprophiles, this one's crazier'n droppin' blotter acid in Manhattan on Halloween with Gary Busey chaperoning over you.For serious.Interestingly enough, the film was 'rediscovered' in recent years, spawning a modest three year tour as a musical(!) whose soundtrack was the last project recorded at the late, great Buck Owens' Bakersfield recording studio.An independent remake of the film was planned in ought-seven, but never seems to have gotten off the drawing board(you know how I feel about remakes in the first place, so yeah, good!).I think I first got turned on to this one as a surprisingly entertaining mid-week shot in the dark back in the VHS rental days, though I definitely frowned upon the keeping of mutant relatives in the cellar.Mine lived directly across from me...Ba dum bump.

Girls out there who play "Spider", give yourselves +2.
Living in a bedraggled estate on the end of town are the three adult progeny of the Merrye family, the sole bloodline cursed with a genetic disorder that causes one to mentally and socially regress rapidly down the evolutionary ladder the older they get, as evidenced by the cellar full of inbred cannibalistic mutants sentenced to darkness and shadows, that the children call aunts, uncles, and cousins.The Merryes make the Addams Family look like the fucking Patridges, is what I'm saying here.There's Virginia(Jill Banner), who's sixteen going on six, nicknamed 'Spider Baby' for her affinity to eat bugs and tie people up like a spider's prey with ropes and slash and stab them repeatedly with two sharpened kitchen knives.Whenever she plays 'spider', some sorry son of a bitch meets his maker.Elizabeth(Beverly Washburn) displays a child-like innocence side-by-side with tartareous brutality while her mute brother Ralph(Sid Haig) uses the dumb waiter for transportation and is a sexually aggressive baldheaded moron(I've heard one or two brawds describe me the same way, no worries).The siblings, who's dead father's remains are kept upstairs in a bedroom(Virginia gives him goodnight kisses!) are looked after by the oafish Bruno(Lon Chaney, Jr.), a chauffer/chaperone who vainly tries to keep their madness to a minimum.One day, Bruno returns from his errands to find the slumped body of a black messenger(Mantan Moreland)suspended in the window, Virginia's latest 'spider' playmate.He chastises the unhinged teen like a toddler in the sandbox before relating the news of the impending arrival of two distant relatives claiming to be the rightful heirs to the Merrye legacy.You know, I'll just bet that some hilariously disturbing hijinks are about to ensue...

Tocar!Tocar!Quien es? Tiny fucked a stump.
Peter(Quinn Redeker) and Emily(Carol Ohmart) arrive at the mansion, with a lawyer(Karl Schanzer) and his assistant(Mary Mitchel) in tow, to assess the property, insistant on staying, despite Bruno's best warnings about the family's dangerous mental illness, convinced the siblings' lunacy is merely an act to drive them away.Shoulda listened to the big goon while you had the chance, folks.After sitting down to a delectable dinner of mushrooms(only the non-poisonous variety, handpicked, of course), spiders, bugs, and grass(!), with the main course provided by Ralph, who killed a local stray cat just for the occasion(!!), Emily does her best to maintain a cool exterior unmarred by the contents of her stomach, while Peter incredibly puts forth compliments on the delicious meal(!!!).Everything really goes to Hades in a handbasin when Bruno leaves the 'kids' to their own devices so that he can run an errand.Really, Bruno?The dead messenger's disembodied ear in a matchbox kept by Spider Baby wasn't screaming "Watch these psychopathic lunatics like a hawk!"?The girls murder the lawyer, dumping his corpse in the cellar to be devoured by their even further deranged relatives, while Emily shows off her figure in a black neglige, which sets off Ralph, who's been peeptomming her, to chase then make shithouse rat-crazy love to her(!), bringing her own case of Merrye's to the surface and causing her to go homicidally nympho in the process.Bruno returns home to find the bloody aftermath with cellar-dwelling relatives running free, and realizing the family's terrible secret will now go public, his control of the siblings forever lost.He sets off some dynamite and blows the entire estate, himself and all crazy Merryes included, to kingdom come, with only Peter managing to escape the blast.As at the outset, he smugly relates his horrible tale to the camera, boasting that the mental illness known as Merrye's Syndrome was never seen again thereafter, though his daughter, who more than resembles Virginia, is seen lovingly admiring a spider in its web.A question mark appears on the end title card.

"It isn't nice to hate." quips the caretaker, Bruno(Lon Chaney, Jr.).
It's pretty rare that a film with a mordant storyline successfully handles it with such humorous delight and twisted flair, but tonight's review is surely one of them.Even the more gruesome moments are executed with an off-camera class, probably adding to the deliria abound in the movie.Chaney, Jr. is genuinely warm and likable as Bruno, giving the best performance of the latter half of his film career, I'd argue.The pixie-esque Jill Banner was tragically killed in a car accident by a drunk driver in 1982 at the tender age of 35 while developing scripts for Marlon Brando.I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit knowing Redeker spent long years portraying Rex Sterling on Young and the Restless, but it is what it is.Ohmart you'll likely remember as Vincent Price's treacherous wife in 'House on Haunted Hill'(1959), but she had a long running career on television, as well, also appearing in 1974's Spectre of Edgar Allan Poe.Haig, long a cult celebrity and familiar antagonistic face in b-movies and television, has been in damn near everything and has no less than five new movies in production at the time of this writing.Well, shit the bed!Spider Baby stands as a cult classic of the ages, and optimum viewing for genre fans as All Hallow's Eve draws ever nearer.On the scale, three solid Wops and a strong recommendation.

Would aaaaaaand...would.Yes.

"Lo squartatore di New York"(1982)d/Lucio Fulci

It gives me great pleasure to painstakingly peruse through one of my fave Fulci flicks of all-time for you here, tonight, a deliciously bleak and violently misogynistic giallo, oft-shrouded in a swirling vortex of conservative controversy over its frank portrayals of violence against women.I shouldn't have to mention this, but such aggression towards chicks is only cool during zesty boudoir roleplay between two consenting deviate adults.Don't kill anybody.Now that we've gotten that outta the way, back to tonight's review.Papa Lucio also co-wrote the De Angelis production, known internationally as "New York Ripper"(as opposed to the Pennsylvanian variety), with Dardano Sacchetti and two others, hiring the late maestro Francesco De Masi to handle the soundtrack duties, while Rosario Prestopino, Franco Di Girolamo, and Maurizio Trani tackled the uber-graphic splatter effects abound in the film.To dress his grim stage this time around, Fulci enlisted the talents of Jack Hedley and Howard Ross, as well as familiar Italian names like Andrea Occhipinti, Alexandra Delli Colli, Zora Kerova, and Daniela Doria, while saving cameos for director Michele Soavi and himself, as always(this time he's the chief of police).Fulci's seedy vision was set upon almost immediately by censors' razor blades worldwide, with an uncut version still unavailable in puritanical Dear Old Blighty(even Blue Underground's bluray and Shameless Films releases have at least thirty-two of the nastiest seconds excised from their respective prints).In being a giallo that sinks unflinchingly lower into perversity than most others of its ilk, Ripper also stands as a cinematic record for all-time of the grittily glorious Forty-Deuce in midtown Manhattan, its porn parlours and grindhouse theaters now a mere memory for those who may have trudged its dirty sidewalks regularly(ahem)during the era.Don't judge me, you dicks...

Must be a cadav-rador retriever.Sorry, kids.
At the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, an old man's dog fetches the disembodied, decaying hand of a murdered hooker instead of the stick he threw, leading Lt. Williams(Jack Hedley) to interrogate the ex-streetwalker's busybodied landlady, who claims she eavesdropped on a phone conversation a week earlier between the whore and one of her johns, who spoke like a duck.Meanwhile, a young bicyclist(Cinzia De Ponti) looking to vandalize the car of an angry motorist aboard the Staten Island Ferry, instead bumps into a mysterious stranger who quacks like a duck as he guts her like so much human tilapia with his trusty switchblade, leaving her eviscerated body in the vehicle for authorities to discover on the other side.After catching heat from the chief(Lucio Fulci) for leaking the threat of a serial killer to the newsmedia, Williams is informed that someone sounding like a duck called and asked to speak with him.Williams enlists the services of Columbia University's own leading psychotherapist, Dr. Davis(Paolo Malco), to help profile the brutal woman-hating murderer on the loose in the Big Apple.That night, a raincoated well-to-do New Yorker(Alexandra Delli Colli) watches a live sex show while tape recording the lovemaking sounds of the couple on stage, while in turn being watched by an eight-fingered undesirable(Howard Ross) who's sitting in the same row.Backstage, the female performer(Zora Kerova) takes a broken bottle from a quacking assailant to her vagina, and is slit open long ways, to her abdomen.Yiiikes.Williams is awoken from the arms of a prostitute named Kitty(Daniela Doria) by a phone call from the quacking ripper himself, confessing that he's struck again.Elsewhere, Dr. Lodge(Laurence Welles) approves of his wife's latest tape recording, settling in to listen to it, as she takes advantage of their open living arrangements to be goaded and sexually harrassed by young hispanics who big toe her pantiless pussy at a bar in a bad neighborhood.

Quack!Quack!Quack!Quack!He broke a bottle and stabbed up her crack.
On the subway, Fay Majors(Almanta Keller) struggles to avoid the creepy advances of the same eight-digit creep from the stroke parlour, only to be attacked by the titular fiend in a dark alleyway, getting her arms and leg slashed in the process.Her boyfriend Peter(David Bunch) is surprised to hear that she imagined him to be the switchblade bearer in her groggy delusions when he visits her in the hospital the next day.Lodge's wife has taken up with the pervert with the incomplete mitt for some hotel room-based sadistic sex when she overhears a radio deejay talking to the 'New York Ripper' while describing the scumbag who's fallen asleep and left her tied to the bed(!).She manages to free herself and slip out unnoticed, only to be gutted by the real killer for her troubles.Williams and company are sure this porn-addicted Greek lowlife is their man, despite Davis' reservations that he doesn't fit the highly intelligent profile that he's built for the Ripper-at-large.Williams receives another phone call from the killer, who boasts that he's about to dedicate a murder to the lieutenant.The police trace the call to a remote phone booth where a two-way radio has been strategically placed, as the Ripper takes a razor blade to Williams' frequent trick, Kitty, splitting her nipples and midsection open before bifurcating her open eyeball with it(!!).Williams arrives just in time to find her mutilated body, but too late for the killer.When the eight-fingered pervert turns up eight days dead, a victim of suicide by suffocation, the authorities deduce that he couldn't have been the killer, since Kitty bought the farm only four days ago.We're then introduced to Suzy, Fay's boyfriend's daughter from a previous marriage, who suffers from a rare bone malady that has caused doctors to amputate her left arm and right leg.The cops speed to Fay and Peter's place, where duck-like phone calls are received and overheard.Fay slashes her beau with a kitchen knife, causing him to start quacking maniacally(ah-HA!), but before he can add her to his growing list of victims, Williams blows most of his grillpiece away with a well-placed bullet.In the ambulance, Davis explains Peter's underlying hatred for promiscuous women, since his ailing daughter would never be able to grow up and enjoy such freedoms herself.From the hospital bed, a tearful Suzy calls out for her daddy to answer the phone...

Waxing or laser removal might be a less painful option.Just sayin'.
I can still remember my next-door neighbor showing up at my patio door with a freshly rented Vidmark pan n' scan VHS tape, and the two of us heartily laughing it up at the quacking, in between gasps at the visceral midsection jabs dearest Lucio took at his audience in delivering radical blame to the very genre medium he happened to be working in here.Ripper is by no means a very nice movie, but it is extremely well-made(perhaps too well) and a neccessary evil for collectors of such savage cinema.Ignore the film's many nay-sayers and detractors, lacking the hindsight to see where Fulci was going with this one, and check it out for yourselves.You'll probably like it nearly as much as I do.On the scale, New York Ripper earns three vividly gory B.W.s, truly a one of a kind film as realized by a master of exploitative cinema.Highly recommended.

"La violenza è arte italiana!"