Your Daily Dracula – Adolfo García Grau, Los Vampiros los Prefieren Gorditos (1974)

Your Daily Dracula – Adolfo García Grau, Los Vampiros los Prefieren Gorditos (1974)

This Argentinian comedy is so obscure it doesn’t get listed in any of the standard Dracula-in-the-movies reference books, though the fact that it’s on youtube (see below) means it’s now at least accessible.  It’s a vehicle for comedian Jorge Porcel, a tubby manchild in the Lou Costello tradition; his usual Bud Abbott-type partner Alberto Olmedo has a cameo on the model of those bits Bing Crosby used to do in Bob Hope solo vehicles.  Porcel’s breakthrough was El Gordo Villanueva (1964) and the ‘gordo’ or ‘gordito’ tag (‘fat’ or ‘fatty’) cropped up on various of his vehicles – outside of Argentina, his only high profile appearance is in Brian De Palma’s Carlito’s Way.  On this evidence, he’s your basic lowbrow comic – but pretty much every country’s film/TV industry has a bunch of those.

Gilberto (Porcel) is a bellboy in a Buenos Aires hotel and gets into scrapes thanks to the farcical behaviour of the guests – an adulterous couple pursued by the woman’s rancher husband (who is rushing into the city on a horse), some pinstripe-suit mobsters in the employ of Don Corleone parody Don Gordone (Porcel in a secondary role) and a top-hatted Count Dracula (Adolfo García Grau) who arrives with a Californian blonde called Maggie Hawkins (Dorys del Valle).  I get a sense from having seen a bunch of Spanish and Mexican parody horror films that the Latin image of Dracula is based on John Carradine in the House of … films since Grau, though he doesn’t go with the moustache, tries for Carradine’s creepy, hypnotic presence (he may also have been taking cues from Carlos Villarias in the Spanish version of the 1931 Dracula).  Grau was also in the 1987 Argentine comedians-get-spooked pictures Mingo y Aníbal contra los fantasmas (Mingo and Anibal vs the Ghosts) and Mingo y Aníbal en la mansión embrujada (Mingo and Anibal in the Haunted House).

The big joke here is that Dracula is as tempted by the chubby protagonist – a typical joke has Porcel’s huge butt, covered in the green trousers of his hotel uniform, fill the entire screen – as any of the pretty ‘rubias’ in the hotel.  Though the title foregrounds the horror jokes, at least as much time is spent with the gangster stuff – and Porcel has a few scenes playing opposite himself.  A tag has all the troublemakers leave the hotel, but a new guest – the Frankenstein Monster – check in.  Directed by Gerardo Sofovich, who also co-wrote with his brother Hugo (regulars on Porcel pictures).