Your Daily Dracula – Héctor Cantolla, Bracula Condemor II (1997)
This is a follow-up to Aqui llega Condemor, el Pecador de la Pradera (1996), a spaghetti Western spoof starring unexportable Spanish comedy legend/acquired taste Chiquito de la Calzada (Gregorio Fernandez). It opens in a stagecoach with aristocratic French idiot Condemor (de la Calzada) and his often-abused servant sidekick Lucas (Bigote Arrocet) tying up leftover plot from the first film. Then, the dimwits set sail for Europe on a ship that happens to be transporting the earth-filled coffin of Count Dracula and which naturally gets wrecked in a storm … on the shores of somewhere, Condemor is mistaken for the king of the vampires (aka Brácula) by disciples and conveyed to the castle of a vampire Baron (Javivi) and Baroness (Nadiuska) who are in the business of toadying to him.
Part of the plot is lifted from director-writer Álvaro Sáenz de Heredia’s earlier horror spoof Aqui huele a muerto … (ipues yo no he sido!) (1990) but it feels a lot more like a wholesale borrowing from Dance of the Vampires as a castle full of vampires are duped by the obvious idiots until the real Dracula (Héctor Cantolla) shows up in a bad mood to expose the imposter. Early on, the vampires snack on live frogs as an appetiser, but virginal Lucia (Carla Hidalgo) is brought in to be a main course sacrifice – her devoted fiancé Arnaldo (Rubén Galves) turns up disguised as a Templar-type minion to do vampire-slaying duty. The big set-piece, reprised under the end credits, has de la Calzeda and the whole company perform a hectic vampire-themed patter number to the tune of the matador song from Carmen.
De Heredia later had another stab at vampire comedy with La Venganza de Ira Vamp, in which de la Calzeda also appears. White-haired Cantolla just snarls as an easily-bested Dracula – he was better known for providing the Castilian Spanish voices of leading men in dubbed releases (he’s the voice of Snake Plissken, Mad Max, Colonel Kilgore and multiple performances from .Burt Reynolds, Chuck Norris, Stacy Keach and Arnold Schwarzenegger).
Cantolla also provided the Spanish voice of Christopher Lee in the early 1980s TV broadcast of the 1958 DRACULA. This soundtrack has served as the standard peninsular Spanish-language option for this film since then (the dubbing of the Spanish theatrical premiere having been lost). José Guardiola, the mayor in Klimovsky’s VAMPIRES’ NIGHT ORGY, did the voice of Peter Cushing.
Cantolla also dubbed the David Hess of HOUSE ON THE EDGE OF THE PARK. Juan Logar, who directed AUTOPSY (not the Crispino film of that title), was cast in the John Morghen roie.
Posted by Ismael Fernández | June 22, 2021, 12:14 am