Dracula and Son (1976)

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Don't listen to the negative reviews

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

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)!

Contains SpoilersThe original running time is a bit unclear, several sources give 110 min. The version I got to see (not the American one) is 94 min but shows no obvious holes/cuts.This is in my opinion one of the few successful comedic takes on the Dracula myth (please note that the name 'Dracula' doesn't occur anywhere in the film, Lee is just 'The Count' and plays his part totally straight(he actually protested against the the title)).Start of Spoilers Starting quite like a standard Hammer film it quickly turns a strange way resulting in the Count being responsible for a baby. After several time jumps (signified by the turning of a book's pages) passing through mischievous childhood and shy young adulthood Ferdinand and his father are literally driven away by hammer and sickle and find themselves in France (son) and England (father). Lee turns horror actor(!), Menez becomes an exploited night-watchman. Reunited at last both are interested in a young woman who tries to engage Lee for a toothpaste commercial. Now the film turns pure slapstick until only one remains standing. Jump to the next generation and some new toothing problems. End of SpoilersInterestingly there are only few overt gags, most of the time the film is quite realistic (how do you make a living when sunlight kills you and your diet is unconventional?). The different solutions for the coffin problem are ingenious. The comedy results primarily from people's reaction to our couple first hiding less than successfully their true nature and then openly declaring it ('That is my traveling coffin!'). Look out early in the film for the author of a book about vampires!If possible watch the French language version (subtitled if necessary).

Count Dracula had a son, by the name of Ferdinand. He's a shy and a good nature young man, not very happy to be a vampire. He don't want to bite people because he don't want to hurt them. So he bites rats and cats. His father becomes a movie star - playing, of course, a vampire - and fells in love with a young woman who reminds him his wife. But Ferdinand's in love with the girl too and don't want his father to bite the woman. Fun story of black humour, with great Christopher Lee making fun of his famous role of Dracula. But images are a little bit too dark and sometimes there's dull moments. Watch for funny lines like: Ferndinand, finish your blood and go to bed. Or : Ferdinand, don't play bowling with your mothers ashes. Good bloody fun could have been better, but it's pleasant to watch,