Your Daily Dracula – Dracula’s Widow (1988)

Sylvie Kristel as Vanessa, Dracula’s Widow (1988)

This is an old-fashioned vampire movie, more in tune with the late sixties and early seventies than the style-conscious mid-to-late eighties.

As in Blacula (1972), an antique coffin from Dracula’s castle is imported to modern Los Angeles – it contains his widow Vanessa (Sylvie Kristel).  She bites Raymond (Lenny von Dohlen), impressionable proprietor of the Hollywood House of Wax, and makes him her slave while she predates singles-bar lounge lizards and devil-worshipping gangs, taking time out to avenge herself of a dotty descendant of Van Helsing (Stefan Schnabel).  Kristel makes a stylish impression in severe suits but is a flavourless menace, alternating between whining fool and hissing monster in tacky Nosferatu make-up, coyly refraining from bringing to the role the sexual enthusiasm of her Emmanuelle image.

Directed by Christopher Coppola, who came to the vampire film after his brother Nicolas Cage made Vampires Kiss but before his uncle Francis Ford Coppola made Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Extract from The Aurum Film Encyclopedia: Horror, edited by Phil Hardy.