Your Daily Dracula – Altan Günbay as Kazikli Voyvoda (The Impaling Voivode)/Vladimir Tepes, Kara Boga (The Black Bull) (1974)
Several Turkish swashbuckling action pictures – Malkoçoglu – Krallara Karsi (1967) Kara Murat: Fatih’in Fedaisi (1972) – feature cartoony versions of Vlad Tepes as a bad guy, the way Robin Hood movies use King John as a convenient pantomime villain. This is unusual in throwing in some references to vampirism in order to make its Vlad at least a semi-Dracula … at one point, he seems to be dead but his gurning hunchbacked minion gives him blood to drink and he’s okay again … his outfit includes a red-lined black cape … and he is finally done away with by having a stake driven through his chest to pin him to the ground and then being decapitated. It’s a fairly simple set-up, with hero type guy Kara Boga (Behçet Nacar) – the sort of fellow he takes umbrage when local louts lift up a barmaid’s skirts while she’s trying to serve them and whips the pack of thugs in a fist fight which pretty much wrecks the tavern – realising that the Impaling Voivoide has his father in a dungeon, looking more like the Monty Python ‘It’s’ man than a forgotten prisoner in Dickens or Dumas, and setting out to rescue him … incidentally tackling dozens of black-hooded Vlad minions who are on the rampage in nearby villages, firing arrows into women and children, but somehow doing very little to save anyone. This being a 1974 film, our hero (who sports a pretty natty purple blouse) also sleeps with Vlad’s enslaved (and dagger-wielding) girlfriend (Yona Yücel). It’s pretty much non-stop chases and brawls and swordfights, like a sped-up 1940s serial in blotchy pastel. A confusing touch is that early onb we meet a character who looks a lot like historical portraits of Vlad the Impaler, but he’s someone else. Günbay’s Vlad is bald and bearded like Ming the Merciless – Dracula is bald in Dracula in Istanbul, so maybe that’s a Turkish thing – and plainly relishes every rotten mean nasty thing he does to innocent villagers. So it serves him right that he gets staked in the end. Directed by Yavuz Figenli.
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