Your Daily Dracula – La Fille de Dracula (1972)

Howard Vernon, La Fille de Dracula (1972)

Minimal even by Jesus Franco’s standards, this feels like an offcut from the other vampire/gothic/monster movies he was making in the early 1960s, often with Howard Vernon as Dracula or some variant thereof.  The effect is dreamlike or somnolent, depending on the viewer’s mood.  It includes one of the most Francoian of all shots: the camera pulls back from the bloody neck of a naked female corpse to take in her whole body, then needlessly zooms towards her pubic hair.  A few glum souls loiter in the shadow of a castle where Dracula used to live (a location in Portugal).  The Count is still lying in the basement, grinning through fangs, but never seems to rise (one victim is tossed into his coffin) and is finally done away with non-traditionally by a stake through the forehead.  Most of the film concerns tourist Karine (Anne Libert) and recent heiress Luisa Karlstein (Britt Nichols) being drawn together, having a softcore affair and the latter – unsurprisingly, the title character – biting her lover, whereupon they both fade out of the film.  The remainder deals with vampire hunting janitor Cyril Jefferson (Franco himself) having an odd discussion with a woman about why they should stay together and put an end to the Count.