Daughter of Dracula (La Fille de Dracula, 1972)

Ramshackle even by Jesús Franco’s standards, La Fille de Dracula suggests a quickie remake of his own Vampyros Lesbos (1970) without any of the style and little of the thematic resonance. The film instead gives the impression of having been shot on the run from police and then edited with a hacksaw. The barely comprehensible plot commences with a voiceover sonorously informing us of the link between an eerie old seaside castle and Count Dracula, who once terrorised the region but who has since 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 drafts in various states of completion. This film proper commences with a sequence in which a young woman (Eduarda Pimenta) in a nearby house strips down to take a bath whilst being spied on by a mysterious intruder, and is then fatally attacked. Her body will later be discovered on the beach. Meanwhile, Louisa (Britt Nichols) arrives at the castle of the Karlstein clan, along with her cousins Karine (Anne Libert) and Max (Daniel White) to attend the dying Karlstein matriarch (Carmen Carbonell). Louisa is the one chosen by the Countess as her confidant, to be breathlessly informed to about the castle’s - and the family's - terrible secret: the clan is descended from Count Dracula (Howard Vernon), who is laid to rest in a hidden chamber in the castle. Louisa ventures into the basement thanks to the key the Countess gave her, and finds the vampire in his coffin, still living, if decrepit and seemingly paralysed. Louisa and Karine, after a briefly crackling flirtation, then become lovers. Meanwhile, a police inspector, Ptuschko (Alberto Dalbés), and energetic reporter Charlie (Fernando Bilbao), investigate the death of the girl on the beach, and another vampiric slaying when a nightclub stripper is assaulted by a black-suited lurker. Max becomes the chief suspect because the killer was glimpsed fleeing with a cane in hand, such 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 wilfully, 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 result gives the impression of only having been part-finished, and then hurriedly patched together to simply get it into theatres. The opening attack, for instance, makes no sense because later it’s revealed that Dracula is immobile, and it seems he doesn’t lay claim to Louisa as his descendent until she finds him, rendering who committed that first attack utterly opaque. There’s no hint of the fractured time Franco employed so well in Venus in Furs and Vampyros Lesbos either to justify it.

The film finds momentary balance whenever Franco himself, amusingly, is on screen: playing Max’s eccentric friend Cyril Jefferson, Franco embodies an obtuse intellectual who also serves as the resident sponge of arcane lore and harbinger of supernatural evil. He’s also married to local innkeeper Ana Kramer (Yelena Samarina) whose affair with Max he seems to have partly acquiesced to, and there’s an oddly affecting scene late in the film when this couple reconcile. Likewise Britton and Libert’s early scenes together hint at something relatively peculiar for the time: a serious lesbian romance at the centre of a cinematic narrative. Even if it’s chiefly a pretext for lots of skin scenes, Franco’s interest in exploring the psyche and sexuality through the lens of mythology means that even the most mercenary of his films, at least amongst those I’ve seen, feel nonetheless empathetically engaged with his subjects. The clan name of Karlstein pays obvious homage 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 scene is noticeably similar to the climax of De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (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 assailant was Louisa, obvious considering the build and evident femininity of the figure as well as the logic of the story and the meaning of Louisa’s straddling the "masculine" and "feminine" roles as the "daughter of Dracula." But this seems to be one of those vital connective moments which was never shot for whatever reason.

The actual finale is so rushed and desultory it gives the impression Franco had run out of money and needed to provide a scene that would cap the story as swiftly as possible. Vernon’s Dracula is seen amusingly clad in the full Halloween Dracula costume, complete with bow-tie, yet only ever managing to sit up and hiss. Vernon may have remembered this as the easiest pay-check he ever earned in his life. That La Fille de Dracula was made, or at least completed, at all seems chiefly motivated by the two long sex scenes between Louisa and Karine, which stick just to the near side of pornography and yet are surprisingly impassioned for soft-core fare. The ungainly, obnoxious cinematography constantly jamming zoom shots into the actresses’ crotches is actually a serious 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 depressedly 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 signs Franco wanted to make a real film here, but the odds were against him.