DRACULA BLOWS HIS COOL

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS. YOU ARE WATCHING THIS FOR THE PLOT, RIGHT?

Let's be honest here: vampires are rubbish screen monsters. The lore is so set in stone that they can't vary from it very much, and if they do then they're not really vampires anyway. And unlike zombies, say, the worst they can do is bite your neck: they don't disembowel you with their bare hands and eat your bowels in front of you as you die. Over the years they've been reimagined as sexually magnetic creatures, whether in Christopher Lee's Draculas, the Twilight Saga, or The Lost Boys, rather than foul "creatures of the night". Where's the downside in being an immortal vampire when you look fabulous? Where's the ugliness? Where's the horror? Sign me up for that!

When vampires don't bite, they suck, and they don't suck much feebler than Dracula Blows His Cool, a German softcore horror comedy in which Dracula's descendants are regular humans (not sure how that works), and are now planning to convert the castle's torture dungeon into a swinging disco full of topless dancers, unaware that Drac is still alive and coming out of his coffin every night to drink blood helpfully provided by Boris. There is also the matter of the local moralists opposed to this Den Of Iniquity - as well they might given the amount of sex going on.

It's part farce (Dracula and his modern descendant are constantly mistaken for each other), part softcore bonkfest (the BBFC gave it an 18 without cuts) and almost entirely bloodless. And I might not have the most keenly developed sense of humour in the world, but it's also deadeningly unfunny, doing nothing to dispel the German reputation for comedy over the years. (The opening reel has a massively overextended bit of hilarity about a four-foot phallus.) Frankly this is a film that's at its mediocre best as a basic nudie film with lots of boobs and bums, and in all truth if that's the only level on which the film can be even tolerable, never mind any good, it's really not worth bothering with. Making his first film under a pseudonym, the director is actually the late Carl Schenkel, who went on to do a couple of silly but stylish horror movies, Knight Moves and Exquisite Tenderness.

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Don't say you weren't warned: