Ramshackle even by Jesús Franco’s standards, La Fille de Dracula implies a quickie replica of his own Vampyros Lesbos (1970) without any of the flair and little of the thematic impact. The video instead gives the sense of having been filmed on the run from police and then edited with a hacksaw. The hardly understandable storey opens with a voice over sonorously reminding us of the relationship between an ominous old coastal castle and Count Dracula, who previously tormented the neighbourhood but who has now become legend. Franco had already toyed with the Dracula and Carmilla mystique several times in the early ‘70s, with his El Conde Dracula (1970), Vampyros Lesbos, Dracula Contra Frankenstein (1971), and more, but there’s no apparent relationship between any of these versions; they’re more like a succession of rough draughts in various states of completion. This film proper opens with a scenario in which a young lady (Eduarda Pimenta) in a neighbouring home strips down to take a bath while being watched on by a mystery intruder, and is eventually fatally assaulted. Her corpse will subsequently be found on the beach. Meanwhile, Louisa (Britt Nichols) comes in the castle of the Karlstein dynasty, along with her cousins Karine (Anne Libert) and Max (Daniel White) to visit the dying Karlstein matriarch (Carmen Carbonell) (Carmen Carbonell). Louisa is the one picked by the Countess as her confidant, to be breathlessly told to about the castle’s – and the family’s – horrible secret: the clan is descended from Count Dracula (Howard Vernon), who is put to rest in a hidden room in the castle. Louisa walks down the basement due to the key the Countess provided her, and discovers the vampire in his coffin, still breathing, although decrepit and presumably immobilised. Louisa and Karine, after a momentarily crackling flirtation, eventually become lovers. Meanwhile, a police investigator, Ptuschko (Alberto Dalbés), and enthusiastic reporter Charlie (Fernando Bilbao), investigate the killing of the girl on the beach, and another vampire slaying when a nightclub dancer is raped by a black-suited lurker. Max becomes the prime suspect since the perpetrator was observed running with a cane in hand, just as Max uses.
La Fille de Dracula is a quintessential example of the sort of film that diffused Franco’s real gifts through the sheer pressure of meeting the voracious grindhouse market on amazingly small budgets and limited shooting schedules, without even a producer of Harry Alan Towers’ stature to lend the production solidity. Franco’s auteurist peccadilloes, apart from roaring hot sex scenes, gruesome yet artificial violence, and willfully, playfully illogical narratives, are repeatedly employed: the coastal landscapes, the dead woman found on the beach, the extended sexy nightclub scene that invites a warping of the boundary between performance and life, and the naturalistic surrealism that suggests a version of the Dogme rules of only using what you find on the location. But the outcome gives the feeling of merely having been part-finished, and then quickly cobbled together to simply get it into cinemas. The initial strike, for instance, makes no sense since later it’s revealed that Dracula is immobile, and it appears he doesn’t lay claim to Louisa as his descendant until she finds him, leaving who conducted that first attack entirely ambiguous. There’s no indication of the broken time Franco exploited so successfully in Venus in Furs and Vampyros Lesbos either to excuse it.
The picture finds fleeting equilibrium whenever Franco himself, amusingly, appears on screen: portraying Max’s eccentric pal Cyril Jefferson, Franco represents an ignorant academic who simultaneously acts as the resident sponge of occult wisdom and harbinger of otherworldly evil. He’s also married to local innkeeper Ana Kramer (Yelena Samarina) whose affair with Max he appears to have partially acquiesced to, and there’s an unusually poignant moment late in the film when this pair reunite. Likewise Britton and Libert’s early moments together hint at something quite unique for the time: a serious lesbian relationship at the core of a movie storey. Even though it’s largely a pretext for plenty of skin scenes, Franco’s interest in examining the psyche and sexuality via the prism of mythology means that even the most mercenary of his films, at least amongst those I’ve seen, are still empathetically involved with his subjects. The clan name of Karlstein bears clear tribute to the Karnsteins of Carmilla. There’s the potential for something truly interesting in the obviously symbolic key that Countess Karnstein gives Louisa, an act which leads to both her nascent affair with a woman and also the uncovering of a dreadful secret relating to her own schizoid identity: anyone thinking Mulholland Drive yet?
Likewise there’s a nascent conceptual anticipation which extends to the outskirts of what Dario Argento and other giallo filmmakers would later play with on more intricate levels: the self-conscious game with watching, as in that opening and in subsequent scenes, in which the object of the camera’s ogling gaze is conflated with the secreted killer whose eyes fill the frame, being this time clearly feminine. The opening sequence is significantly similar to the conclusion of De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980). (1980). But the film keeps jerking about in such an ungainly fashion – in one scene the girls are tender young lovers, in the next Louisa is slapping Karine in the face for letting Charlie talk to her like a brute dominatrix, and Louisa’s constantly baring her fangs to her unperturbed amour – that the romance and the alternating identities never stand a chance of gaining force within the incoherent scene structuring. I waited for the revelation that the black-suited attacker was Louisa, clear given the build and visible femininity of the figure as well as the logic of the narrative and the symbolism of Louisa’s straddling the “masculine” and “feminine” roles as the “daughter of Dracula.” But this looks to be one of those essential linking moments which was never filmed for whatever reason.
The real climax is so hurried and desultory that gives the sense Franco had run out of money and wanted to deliver a moment that would conclude the plot as fast as possible. Vernon’s Dracula is shown amusingly clothed in the full Halloween Dracula costume, replete with bow-tie, but only ever able to sit up and hiss. Vernon may have regarded this as the simplest pay-check he had got in his life. That La Fille de Dracula was created, or at least finished, at all appears largely inspired by the two extended sex scenes between Louisa and Karine, which adhere just to the close side of pornography and yet are remarkably intense for soft-core stuff. The clumsy, unpleasant cinematography continually shoving zoom views into the actresses’ crotches is truly a huge turn-off. But one of those scenes is also the brightest flare of Franco’s talent in the film, as he cuts between their initial mutual seduction and Max, with his limp nicely translating as a coded impotence, thundering away on his piano, providing the swelling, oversized romantic score to the young ladies’ erotic crescendo. Whilst much of the film has a barely organic, flimsy texture, the pity is Franco nonetheless offers up fragments of weird and moody beauty, like Max emerging from the police station in the drear morning, turning up his collar and depressingly making his way into oblivion, or one of the potential victims Louisa lures for Dracula taking a time out for a cigarette before the expected bedroom games, blowing blue smoke with indolent anticipation. These are hints Franco intended to shoot a serious film here, but the odds were against him.