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Cinema/TV, Dracula, Film Notes

Your Daily Dracula – Carlos González as Professor Werner Amadeus Von Dracula, ¡Vampiros en la Habana! (Vampires in Havana) (1985).

Your Daily Dracula – Carlos González as Professor Werner Amadeus Von Dracula, ¡Vampiros en la Habana! (Vampires in Havana) (1985)

This colourful, inventive cartoon is similar in plot if not setting to Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat (1989).

In 1933, two rival vampire groups converge in Havana to squabble over Professor Von Dracula’s invention ‘vampisol’, a cream which enables vampires to emerge in daylight.  A group of European aristocrats want a monopoly on the formula, while a brasher bunch of Chicago gangsters wish it suppressed because they have a lucrative trade in underground ‘beaches’ where vampires can experience simulated sunlight.  The hero is Dracula’s nephew Pepe (Detlef Bierstedt), who has been raised on vampisol and doesn’t even know he’s a vampire, having passed his time joining the struggle to overthrow the Machado regime by singing subversive songs in public.

The film is packed with amusing gags and ideas: a revolver which fires wooden stakes, a werewolf harassed by street mongrels, a pack of bloodsuckers seen cheering the villain of a vampire movie, and an amusingly prim heroine who refuses to enter a motel with a man even during a life-or-death chase.  Finally, Pepe sings a song that reveals the vampisol formula over an international vampire radio hook-up, changing the undead way of life forever.  With some good-natured politics (the villains are all national caricatures, the hero is a cheery revolutionary) and light-hearted spoofing of the melodramatic excesses of the hispanic vampire, this is very likeable.

Directed and written by Juan Padrón.

First published in The Aurum Encyclopedia: Horror.

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