recommended

One of the worst movies I've ever seen

Best movie ever!

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

"Dracula and Son" is a light and amusing, if sometimes seemingly aimless, vampire comedy. It's the last of nine Dracula-esque movies starring Christopher Lee in the titular role that I've seen, and I think that's all of them. Of the nine, this one strays the furthest from Bram Stoker's novel; indeed, it's only mention of "Dracula" is in the title. Just like Dracula stars Bela Lugosi and John Carradine before him, his career in the role ends in parody. I think Lee comes off a bit more dignified here than Lugosi in, say, "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein" (1948), let alone the Ed Wood stuff, or Carradine in "Billy the Kid Versus Dracula" (1966) and the later "Nocturna" (1979). Regardless, "Dracula and Son" is better than some of the Hammer Dracula movies Lee made, let alone the pathetic 1970 Franco adaptation he starred in.In this one, Lee's Count sires a son (after, humorously, conceiving in a coffin), who ends up being something of a failure at following in his father's footsteps. Some of the film's best gags spring from the son, Ferdinand (Really, is that the best name they could come up with?), having difficulty learning the ways of the vampire, from his father yelling at him when a child to finish drinking his blood, to donating his own blood as replacement for a vat of plasma he accidentally ruined when caught trying to steal from a hospital. Not that Father doesn't have his own misfortunes, such as when he bites into a rubber sex doll under the misconception that it's a real woman. My favorite jokes, however, are those self-reflexively based on Lee's real-life star image. In the film, after leaving Transylvania, the Count becomes a movie actor in England, and, naturally, it's in the role of a vampire. Unlike in other Dracula movies, the Count in this one is quite photogenic.Speaking of vampire lore, I like that this film didn't adopt from the Hammer films vampires vulnerability to running water. And, their death by sunlight--something also absent from Stoker's novel--is played out here ad absurdum, with the vampires scouring for sewer entries when without their coffins as daybreak approaches. Another Hammer trademark, a makeshift cross is employed here once in an amusing scene where Romanian communists make one out of a hammer and sickle. Even the reincarnation romance, a device I detest in other Dracula movies (the 1974 and 1992 "Bram Stoker's Dracula" ones, i.e.), works fairly well here. For one thing, it gives the film some much-needed plot development in its later part. And, it develops into a quasi-Oedipus complex with a love triangle involving the Count and his son. More related to Stoker's book, Ferdinand's befriending of other immigrants and minorities in France is an interesting, although somewhat poorly developed, twist on Stoker's xenophobic invasion plot.By the way, I saw the original version and not the American butchered copy that others have decried. Beware, however, if you're a native English speaker like me, good luck finding translations for the majority French-speaking part of the film (some scenes are in English). I relied on bad auto-translations and two years of university French that I've since forgotten.(Mirror note: This one is thankfully consistent with vampires not casting reflections, a point that's important in the last of the film's three mirror scenes. The other two scenes are of the mother vampire crying when she discovers she has no reflection and of a prostitute screaming when she discovers Ferdinand to have no reflection in a ceiling mirror above a bed.)

Dracula and Son (1976) * 1/2 (out of 4) Count Dracula (Christopher Lee) seduces a woman into giving him a child. As an adult that child, Ferdinand (Bernard Menez) decides to try and live his own life and before long Dracula and son are separated. Dracula ends up landing in London where he's a successful actor. Ferdinand, on the other hand, ends up in Paris where he struggles to make much of a living.Dracula AND SON is out there in a couple different versions. I watched the uncut French version, which clocks in around 95-minutes and I'm going to guess that this is what most people will want to watch. The film was released in an American version, which apparently ran 79-minutes and featured someone other than Lee dubbing him. Even worse from what I've read is that some of the scenes appear to have been arranged out of order. The dubbing issue is an interesting one since in the French version there's a second done in English and Lee does his own voice.With that out of the way, this film comes from director Edouard Molinaro who also did the landmark LA CAGE AUX FOLLES. Sadly this film isn't in the same league, ballpark or planet for that matter and it's really too bad because this could have been an interesting idea. This was meant to be a comedy and sadly it's one of the unfunniest that you're going to see on the subject with there only being one great laugh and that's when Dracula goes to bite a woman and then notices that he has bitten the neck of a blow up doll.The majority of the film really drags at times and I must say that there wasn't a pinch of style to be found and I'd also argue that the film is incredibly lifeless and really doesn't have any energy to it. The direction is certainly flat throughout. All of that is too bad because Lee actually gives a good performance in the role, although one shouldn't be expecting to see the same type of Dracula that he did in his Hammer pictures or his film with Jess Franco. This was the final time he played Dracula on the big screen so that reason alone makes it worth watching. I also thought Menez was good in his role but he honestly wasn't given too much to work with.It's doubtful either version of Dracula AND SON is going to appeal to many people. Fans of Lee will probably be the ones tracking down copies of the picture but sadly there's nothing overly good here outside of his performance.

Two years after Christopher Lee claims he swore off horror, Hammer and, most importantly, his signature role of Count Dracula, we find him donning that very famous cape once again for this largely forgotten but surprisingly agreeable Gallic spoof. Thankfully, the print I came across is an extremely good-looking one emanating from Germany that is, unfortunately, accompanied by frankly awful English subtitles (that often do not even bother to translate the intermittent German title cards!) which soon forced me to rely on my knowledge of the French language acquired in high school all those years ago; ironically, I managed to acquire a corrected set of subtitles soon after I finished this first viewing of the film! Having said that, the film occasionally lapses into Romanian (during the early Transylvanian sequences), English (when Dracula is picked up at sea by a British vessel and lands in that country) and Arabic (when Dracula Jr. is taken in by a bunch of them upon first disembarking on French soil) and, while it runs for a slightly overstaying 93 minutes in the PAL-sourced print I watched, it was reportedly much re-edited when cut down to 79 minutes for its Americanized English-language version (the end result got saddled with a *½ rating on the Leonard Maltin movie guide)! Ultimately, the film serves to show that, even at 54 years, Lee owns the role of the Prince of Darkness (essaying it here for the last time even if the name Dracula is never actually uttered) and it was an added pleasure hearing him speak his lines in perfectly fluent French! Indeed, there are a steady flow of funny lines and situations to be found in the film: Lee to his child, "Ferdinand, finish your blood and go to bed!" and "Ferdinand, don't play bowling with your mother's ashes"; Dracula's son as an adult – played by Bernard Menez (who had appeared in TENDER Dracula itself 2 years earlier) is so hesitant in plying his trade that, when he is sent by his father to bite an old gypsy woman in the woods, he ends up helping out with the cart she had been laboriously pushing behind her!; Lee is at a loss for words, when about to be thrown into the sea in a closed casket, as to how they will manage to reach the surface; the elder vampire bumps into the glass door of a modern British building when chasing after a prospective victim; French character actor Raymond Bussieres offering Menez a bite to eat in a train station when the latter's blood-starved stomach starts to make its hunger heard; the son bites into a frozen corpse during a day job in a mortuary and is later sickened by the sheer overdose of blood available for him to sample in an abattoir; their luggage is amusingly coffin-shaped; Dracula Jr. dumps his father's coffin out of a hotel window in a fit of rage; Lee is taken into police custody (when daylight is imminent) after being suspected of lewd acts in a car!; humiliatingly, he is also being made to advertise toothpaste on TV commercials; Lee pulls up his sheets in embarrassment when surprised by his young new conquest in his coffin, etc.It goes without saying that this was not the first comic treatment of Dracula on celluloid nor would it be the last – LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT (1979; with George Hamilton at his suavest), FRACCHIA CONTRO Dracula (1985; starring beloved Italian comedian Paolo Villaggio and Edmund Purdom as Dracula) and Mel Brooks' Dracula: DEAD AND LOVING IT (1995; starring Leslie Nielsen) – and, in fact. Lee himself had already sent the vampiric Count up in a much-earlier Italian spoof starring Renato Rascel, TEMPI DURI PER I VAMPIRI aka UNCLE WAS A VAMPIRE (1959) but, what I found surprising here is the fact that, much like Roman Polanski's own somewhat heavy-handed spoof of the genre, THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS (1967), this flawlessly replicates (at least in the scenes set in Transylvania) the Gothic atmosphere of a Hammer Horror, down to a full-blooded (pardon the pun) music score by Vladimir Cosma; notably, the makeshift cross – formed by peasants from a hammer and sickle a' la Michael Reeves' THE SHE-BEAST (1966) – is not only able to hold vampires at bay here but also set them ablaze! Unfortunately, the predictably upbeat ending is somewhat rushed with Lee meeting his demise in the way of his comeuppance in Hammer's first Dracula picture and Menez finding himself cured during a train journey merely by abstaining himself from drinking blood for so long…or perhaps through the power of love since, at the very end of the film we find him, father to a brood of children (one of whom bares his fangs in the closing freeze frame!) with the girl (Marie-Helene Breillat who, rather foolishly, does not believe the vampire lore, even if both father and son keep harping on it) who had been the object of contention between the titular characters throughout the film. The actress was married to director Edouard Molinaro (still a couple of years away from making his cross-dressing international hit, LA CAGE AUX FOLLES) at the time and her younger sister, controversial film-maker Catherine, has her last acting job for 16 years here (prophetically, we think she is being bitten but is actually getting it on with Lee in his coffin in an early scene from the film)!

"Dracula Père et Fils" was never an excellent film. At the most, it was a sometimes funny vampire satire with good psychological aspects out of the Oedipal conflict father/son and sociological criticisms concerning the immigrants, not so well treated in France. But to be honest, I admit it was a bit of a deception. The film director Edouard Molinaro himself has lately called it a "failure", despite the fact he had succeeded in hiring Christopher Lee to incarnate ' the Count" (Dracula is never mentioned in the original version) opposing him to a totally different kind of an actor (Bernard Menez, who is actually very proud of this film). The concept here is quite similar to another unfunny vampire comedy "Tempi Duri Per i Vampiri" where Lee was opposed to Renato Rascel.One should see this movie just to appreciate the almost perfect French accent of the British star who has almost entirely shot it in that foreign language.Mister Lee has claimed on several occasions he did dub the English version. I must be one of the rare French moviegoers to have seen the quite different American version and to be able to evaluate the mess they did on the soundtrack.Most of the dialog has been changed to some ridiculous vulgar trash. The haunting music score by Vladimir Cosma has been misplaced or changed in favor of new music bits, supposedly to speed up the rhythm of the film.But they didn't hesitate the butcher the editing either: from the 100 min. in its original form, they reduced it to 79. Not only they shortened it, but added some repetition of Lee opening a door and speaking to a concierge with several stupid accents. Not only unnecessary, but very dull! This scene was initially part of the story and is suddenly supposed to be an hilarious illustration of movie shooting. Appalling!I have heard Roman Polanski had to suffer similar treatments on his masterpiece "Fearless Vampire Killers" (never try to compare this one to Molinaro's flick, by the way!)Not every one has the talent of Woody Allen to transform a Japonese spy movie into a comedy as he did once (admitting it in a prologue) with "What's up Tiger Lily?".In conclusion, here are two different films out of the same celluloid: "Dracula Père et Fils" is a not so good film worth seeing however. "Dracula and Son" is just awful and should be placed alongside with the Raymon Burr's version of "Godzilla".