Mama Dracula

What a bomb! Another example of how trying too hard to be camp just doesn't work. If you can imagine a bunch of stoners trying to make "The Three Stooges meet Countess Dracula" and loading it with bare-breasted women you may get an idea of what this is like. Unfortunately the many pairs of boobs make it unfit for 5-10 year old boys who would otherwise be the best audience for this. One pair of boobs just right for the little boys would be the idiot twin sons of the Countess who do a rather intriguing mirroring-each-other pantomime, getting out of bed and starting their morning ablutions. But mostly they're just two stooges in black capes and bad "Transylwanian" accents.

Louise Fletcher manages to glide over this morass, ever elegant and charismatic. Watching her shine so magnificently over the ordure that is the rest of it is rather amazing to see, and the fashion show in the last 15 minutes has some fun costumes. Maria Schneider just looks like she's waiting to get paid. One hopes that she and Ms. Fletcher were getting plenty. Given the production values, either their pay ate up the entire budget, or they were blackmailed into this disaster.

This may rival "Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter" for worst vampflick ever, but at least "JC" was clearly an amateur production. There is no excuse for this abysmal waste of time.

And no, it is not even Ed-Wood-so-bad-it's-good. Ed Wood, bless his soul, took his work seriously enough to give it a quirky charm. Even "Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter" was compellingly weird in its gawd-awfulness. I like quirky bad movies, but this was just pointlessly vacuous.

Poor, poor Louise... I'm sure she's done her best to forget this trainwreck, and so shall I!

Louise Fletcher is Mama Dracula. Actually Elizabeth Bathory the long ago wicked queen who bathed in the blood of virgins to remain young. Here she's re-imagined as a vampire in modern day trying to deal with the dwindling number of virgins.

Its strange off beat films like this that kill many an award winning actor's and actress's career. Nominally a comedy this is a strange little film that is humorous but never laugh out loud funny. The plot careens along in odd directions and can be somewhat disjointed. Its the type of movie you watch and wonder why anyone thought to make since its neither good nor bad, it just sort of is. Clearly there was something in in the mix that made Ms Fletcher take the role, though it might have been only money.

Frankly this is a hard film to describe. worse its a hard film to remember, partly doing to its disjointed nature and partly due to the the film not being worth remembering. Is it worth seeing? not if you have to search it out. If it falls in your lap, I ran across it as part of a multi movie set, it might be worth trying, assuming you have something else to go to if it doesn't catch your fancy.

When I initially heard about Mama Dracula and read the premise I immediately thought of the Carry On films. I expected a camp Carry On Screaming knock off set around Countess Elizabeth Bathory. Truth be told that's what it tries to be but sadly lacks the talented cast, the charm and the humour that was essential to the Carry On movies success.

Featuring a terrible generic story line, viciously annoying characters, jokes that fall flat and some dire dialogue this is everything I'd hoped it wouldn't be.

I get the impression the vampire twins were supposed to be the true stars who steal each scene but truth is the movie dropped in my opinion every time they appeared as they offered little beyond face palms & cringe inducing moments.

If you seek horror, keep looking. If you seek comedy, you won't find any here. If you seek something that quite frankly isn't far off deserving a place in IMDb's bottom list, you've found what you're looking for.

This is the question one must ask himself while watching this... how can I put it? Infamous? Dull? Stupid? Below the waist? Anyway, tremendously trashy movie.

I don't know what went on in both Boris Szulzinger (director, also writer) or in Pierre Sterckx and Marc-Henri Wajnberg (also writers), when they decided to put this project in motion.

Probably, since this was made a few years later than "The Rocky Horror Picture Show", they must have thought that another such attempt would be worthwhile, but seeing that the former was a kind of a Musical Fantasy movie, and not indeed just yet another comedy, one must ask on what basis they started doing it.

Just four years earlier "Dracula and Son", starring the otherwise great Christopher Lee, and even six years earlier "Old Dracula", starring David Niven bombed totally at the box office and although in the meanwhile they might have joined the ranks of other so called "cult movies" (only heaven knows why), "Mama Dracula" doesn't seem to be part of them.

In fact I just found it due to my music score research, which is the only worthy thing in it, just because it was composed by none other than Roy Budd.

And since Roy Budd had been known to have composed some of the best scores for movies like "Get Carter", "The Black Windmill", "The Wild Geese I & II" and indeed for "Who Dares Wins" (Aka "The Final Option"), I assumed that even this effort was made for a worthy film.

Alas, how wrong I was.

And besides, there was already a much better depiction of the source material based on Countess Elizabeth Bathory made in 1971 by none other than Hammer Films which starred Ingrid Pitt in the main role as "Countess Dracula". Although that was indeed a horror movie.

So, again, why had they to waste money in something like this?

My answer to my preceding question on why Louise Fletcher did accept the role has only two possibilities: one, she needed the money; two. She was handed a better script to start with, only to be embroiled and trapped under contract, while the authors did shamelessly re-write it during filming.

Something that even happened to great actors such as Malcolm McDowell and Peter O'Toole while working on the infamous "Caligula" movie.

In any case, story or no story logic, this project had no real bearing nor did it have a real final goal. It was just made for the fun(?) of it.

Probably just to have the director's and writer's names written on the billboards in the hope of notoriety and fame.

And Louise Fletcher, in her usual professional way does what she was supposed to do: act in it, but one can easily see that she was only doing it by the numbers, with no real enthusiasm.

It is only for her presence in it that I gave it an uplifting three stars, because were it just for the movie alone, I wouldn't even have considered to pick one to start with, that bad of an experience (at least for yours truly) it was.

Instead of having been entertained, I was utterly embarrassed for all the performers in it, who I believe and hope, have finally found more worthy projects to work on since then.

So, what is my final judgment on "Mama Dracula"?

Simply put? Forget it, it does not exist, but should you want to be educated on how not to ever film something like this, this would probably be one of the finest examples among others.

And would I recommend it? Are you kidding me?

Why experience something so abysmally idiotic and painful?

Decidedly off-beat, farcial, incomprehensible story about Countess Dracula(an Elizabeth Bathory type that keeps young bathing in the blood of young, female virgins - or as she says "wirgins")and her two vampire sons who run a clothing story called Vamp and have enlisted the aid of a young, American professor of blood. While there is no denying that the film is really going for your funny bone rather than your jugular, much of the humour is hit and miss(mostly miss) akin to a nurse with poor eyesight trying to find a vein with a needle. Academy Award winning actress Louise Fletcher plays Mama Dracula with subtle humour, grace, and charm and looks quite stunning in much of the fashion, but she has virtually nothing to work with in this Belgian horror comedy that relies more on two vampire son boobs for much of the film's motivation. The Wajnberg brothers, Marc-Henri and Alexander, are two strange men indeed. They look quite ridiculous, act even more so, and, despite such elementary things as gaping and running about like two school children much of the time, have glimpses of talent. There is one scene with them doing a pantomime which I rather liked, but the story, the rest of the actors, the less than inspiring direction make this film a far more arduous thing to sit through. Much of the failure of the film must be squarely put on the shoulders of director Boris Szulzinger and his adolescent prowess at showing virtually nothing resembling horror. We see a quite impressive castle with impressive sets, but maybe total three shots of any blood at all - all nothing more than a prick-size bleed. No one is bit on stage so to speak. There are lots of girls showing us their breasts but no action otherwise. The humour is pretty stale stuff too. I like a good horror parody...OK, this is nothing like a good horror parody...but Mama Dracula just doesn't mange to do what a good horror parody does: blend comedy and horror together so as to create something that could be labeled as both legitimately. this film has only Dracula in the title and some scenarios that revolve around the concept of a bloodsucker - beyond that it is nothing more than a mild European sex comedy. Poor Louise Fletcher - she really does and did deserve more than this.