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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Bit of ..., December 7, 2002
"Dracula the Dirty Old Man", which is probably the worst film I've seen since "Saving Private Ryan", gets only 1 star. A lame looking vampire who can turn himself into a rubber bat stuck on the end of a stick lures a reporter to his cave and magically turns him into a werewolf (a cheap rubber mask that looks more like a rat than a wolf). He then sends the wererat out to kidnap women. The same basic sequence gets repeated several times: the wererat locates a woman, kills any boyfriend who gets in the way, then before he can even perform his duties, the vampire just teleports the woman to his cave, leaving the viewer to wonder why he went to the trouble of creating a wererat in the first place. The vampire then molests and kills his newest female aquisition. Repeat 3 or 4 times, until the vampire gets interested in the reporter's girlfriend. This leads to a fight between the two.The filmmakers obviously realized how terrible the film was, so they badly dubbed all but two brief scenes with "comic" dialogue in phoney accents. So now instead of just being boring, the film becomes truly offensive, treating such subjects as rape as humourous. Not worth the few chuckles you get from the bad f/x. This film deserves to become lost. The short extras are just boring and unfunny. The 4 stars is for "Guess What Happened...". Filmed largely at the famous Magic Castle, this early 1970s wonder is about Dracula after he's transformed himself into a swinging geek called "Count Adrian" in order to escape the communists, and now runs a theme restaurant in LA with some kooky sidekicks. He's actually the good guy in this, and the villain is his new love's ex-boyfriend, an egomaniacal TV actor ("You can't defeat me! I have my own TV series!"). The battle between Count Adrian and another vampire with very bad facial skin for supreme control of the restaurant is one of the funniest things I've ever seen, although I think its supposed to be one of the film's more serious moments. So only one good film and a few decent trailers on this one. Just try to pretend "Dirty Old Man" isn't on the same disc.
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8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I worked with Christopher Lee... You're no Christopher Lee, October 28, 2003
So we pop in Dracula the Dirty Old Man, hoping for nothing more than your basic ball of cheese: Bad accents, stupid plotlines, cheap sets, you get the drill. At first blush, all appears normal: Our `head vampire' looks more like Jim Rome with a nylon wig from the seasonal aisle of Walgreen's, women are conveniently disrobing in front of their windows, and the location scout takes full advantage of Dad's office lobby and Mom's backyard. But after 15 minutes or so -- depending on how slow you are on the uptake -- you start to sense "something weird" going on. Sure, you expect the plot to be loopy, and so it makes sense for the narrator to ramble a bit. But when our voice-over man starts to sound like he's taking a page from Crow T Robot ("I gingerly closed the car door... Whoops! I just caught two people in the act, sorry guys!"), you just have to ask -- que pasa?? Here's the deal: As is the case with many lower-than-low-budget flops, the sound on DDOM was rendered useless during the making of the film. (Possible causes include excessive wind noise, flubbed lines, or a potent curse invoked by the gods of good taste.) Natch, all the dialogue has to be dubbed in after the fact. Typically, this process creates your basic Godzilla lip-reading misadventures, along with some leaden Doris Wishman-style line readings. But DDOM is anything but your typical film. You see, for reasons known only to director William Edwards, co-producer Clifton Bowen, and select members of the Trilateral Commission, the filmmakers decided to scrap whatever existing dialogue they had and opt for deranged self-parody. I'm guessing they took a look at the less-than-imposing polyester "bat" (at least I think it's supposed to be a bat) and realized the finished results weren't going to impress anyone either way. As a result, your Alucard ("Dracula spelled backwards," the credits helpfully point out) delivers all his lines in the manner of a down-on-his-luck Jackie Mason. "Oy, vaddami gonn do, I gotta bite dis neck ova hea, ay, vell, it's a livink," that kind of thing. Adding to the goofiness quotient is the fact that our number-one neck biter here looks no more Jewish than he does Vampiric -- he's played by some guy named Vince Kelly who apparently never worked again. The casting couch giveth, and the casting couch taketh away... Equally odd are the ramblings from "Irving Jackalman," the reporter whom Alucard somehow turns into a sex-crazed werewolf. (Vampire, werewolf, same difference, right? I'm surprised the Mummy didn't put in an appearance.) Typical is his dramatic transformation outside a drive-in concession stand, where we see him bend over in apparent pain at the lycanthropic process. That's right, we've all been there. But do we hear him growl and howl in inhuman agony? Nope -- we get to hear him complain that his dinner was off! The plot? Our two antiheroes "meet cute," round up some women, sex `em up in a cave, rest for a spell on a furniture pad from U-Haul, and then let petty jealousy come between them, prompting a fight to the death. The lone survivor turns to the most-recent victim of the rampage and engages in an equally improbable Bat Cave Booty Call. That's right, it's a remake of Sabrina. The other entry on this too-fine DVD, Guess What Ever Happened to Baby Jane Dracula (or whatever), features a less-than-imposing 98-pound weakling `Count Adrian,' apparently played by a busboy on his night off from the Olive Garden. The film also features bad lighting, a Dracula theme restaurant, a caged gorilla, a heroine bogged down by her four-foot wig, a fifth Monkee who sells his soul to the devil, a guy who looks like Matthew McConaughey's dad, and an improbable voodoo/Santeria/lizard-eating ceremony straight from the ravings of David Icke. You do the math.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Jaw-droppingly bad vampire movies from Something Weird, March 26, 2005
If you want to accuse the wacky people at Something Weird of scrapping the bottom of the barrel to put together these collections of exploitation films, then this DVD could well be exhibit #1. The theme here are vampire Counts, none of whom are ever really named Dracula, and the best thing ends up being the trailers for other movies that you should have seen instead.
"Dracula (The Dirty Old Man)" is, as near as I can tell, a bad vampire movie that was then dubbed to make it even worse. Count Alucard (the title explain what it means backwards in case you are really, really stupid) wakes up in his coffin in a cave and creates a Jackal-man (Billy Whitton) who will bring him young women. This sounds basically okay, right? But the dubbing has the vampire doing shtick like he was a borscht-belt comedian. The vampire ties up his victims, strips them naked, fondles their breasts and then bites them there like there is a major artery there or something. The jackal-thing wears a head that looks more like an angry teddy bear than a werewolf and he likes to rape some of the victims. In fact, while the women end up nude except for high heels, the men keep their clothes on. The high point of this film (and I cannot believe I am saying this) is when one of the men at least pretends he is unzipping his pants. There is one scene that does not appear to be dubbed, and I have seen some evidence that it was shot later and thrown into the film, which would actually make sense. Maybe if you turn the sound off on this one it is not as bad, because the juxtaposition of sound and images is just too weird, even with the vampire bat on a stick for laughs (2 stars, but the entertainment value might be higher).
"Guess What Happened to Count Dracula" stars Des Roberts as Count Adrian, who opens up a nightclub named Dracula's Castle with his ghoul friends so that he can put the bite on young ladies. Angelica (Claudia Barron) catches his eye and the Count intends to make her his bride. This is a boring movie and when I tell you there is nothing to see her, versus seeing everything in "Dracula, Dirty Old Man," take me at my word. There was a point when I thought it was ripping off "Rosemary's Baby," but not enough to care, and then I thought maybe it was being inspired by "Behind the Green Door," but that did not pan out either. You will enjoy this Something Weird DVD a lot more if you skip this one. I sat through it so you did not have to (1 star, 0 entertainment value).
As always the extras on this Something Weird discs are better than the movies, although that has never been as true as it is with this one (actually, it is true by default before you even get to the special features). "Dracula and the Dirty Old Witch" has a member of the Dracula family (Marc Brock) trying to become the happiest member of his family in 400 years, often to the music of Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition." I thought this one was going for campy S&M, but it turns out it is just setting up a lame punch line (1 star).
"Sex and the Single Vampire" is a 27-minute 1970 short with the legendary John Holmes as Count Spatula (and also as Bella Donna). Finding no fresh blood in his refrigerator, the Count finds a group of trespassers have broken into his home to engage in soft-core sex. Holmes does some wretched comedy bits before he puts the bite on a naked man (one of those scenes you can live without seeing, especially with the inserts of a gas pump ringing up almost a dollar in gas) and lets the women worship at his body, so to speak. The most interesting aspect of this film is how they avoid it becoming a hardcore film. But it begins with bad jokes and ends with a bad joke, and is still ten times better than "Guess What Happened to Count Dracula" (2 stars).
The "Blood-Soaked Trailers" become the best part of this DVD and include "Bloodsuckers" with Peter Cushing, "The Body Beneath," "Caged Virgins," "Daughters of Darkness," the "true" story of Countess Elizabeth Bathory in "The Legend of Blood Castle," "A Taste of Blood," "The Vampire and the Ballerina," and the stage and screen scream combo "Vampire's Coffin" and "The Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy" (presented in "Hypnoscope" you know "it could only be shown at midnight"). One thing to remember here is that these are old school trailers, when an R-rated movie could have an R-rated trailer. Actually you can rent most of these films, except for "Caged Virgins," "The Vampire and the Ballerina," and "Vampire's Coffin," and only the first one would be considered a loss given the trailer (4 stars). Note: "Daughters of Darkness" ("Le Rouge aux Lèvres") is also about Elizabeth Bathory but set in contemporary times, so I guess those blood baths really worked.
There is also a Gallery of Exploitation Art with Radio-Spot Rarities where every five seconds you see another add as we go through dozens of exploitation films representing box sex and horror (including several films devoted to documenting the birth of actual babies), while listening to choice radio ads touting similar films. Of course the print ads are considerably more lurid.
I do not think any of the four vampire films on this DVD are so bad that they come close to being good. You can only laugh at this stuff so long before you just want to turn it off. That being said, be sure to join us next Saturday when we try to have better success with a couple of horror films, "The Beast that Killed Women" and "The Monster of Camp Sunshine." Then again, I understand they both take place at nudist camps.
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