Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Touches You

hyped garbage

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

"Dracula and Son" is a light and amusing, if sometimes seemingly aimless, vampire comedy. It's the last of nine Dracula-esque movies starring Christopher Lee in the titular role that I've seen, and I think that's all of them. Of the nine, this one strays the furthest from Bram Stoker's novel; indeed, it's only mention of "Dracula" is in the title. Just like Dracula stars Bela Lugosi and John Carradine before him, his career in the role ends in parody. I think Lee comes off a bit more dignified here than Lugosi in, say, "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein" (1948), let alone the Ed Wood stuff, or Carradine in "Billy the Kid Versus Dracula" (1966) and the later "Nocturna" (1979). Regardless, "Dracula and Son" is better than some of the Hammer Dracula movies Lee made, let alone the pathetic 1970 Franco adaptation he starred in.In this one, Lee's Count sires a son (after, humorously, conceiving in a coffin), who ends up being something of a failure at following in his father's footsteps. Some of the film's best gags spring from the son, Ferdinand (Really, is that the best name they could come up with?), having difficulty learning the ways of the vampire, from his father yelling at him when a child to finish drinking his blood, to donating his own blood as replacement for a vat of plasma he accidentally ruined when caught trying to steal from a hospital. Not that Father doesn't have his own misfortunes, such as when he bites into a rubber sex doll under the misconception that it's a real woman. My favorite jokes, however, are those self-reflexively based on Lee's real-life star image. In the film, after leaving Transylvania, the Count becomes a movie actor in England, and, naturally, it's in the role of a vampire. Unlike in other Dracula movies, the Count in this one is quite photogenic.Speaking of vampire lore, I like that this film didn't adopt from the Hammer films vampires vulnerability to running water. And, their death by sunlight--something also absent from Stoker's novel--is played out here ad absurdum, with the vampires scouring for sewer entries when without their coffins as daybreak approaches. Another Hammer trademark, a makeshift cross is employed here once in an amusing scene where Romanian communists make one out of a hammer and sickle. Even the reincarnation romance, a device I detest in other Dracula movies (the 1974 and 1992 "Bram Stoker's Dracula" ones, i.e.), works fairly well here. For one thing, it gives the film some much-needed plot development in its later part. And, it develops into a quasi-Oedipus complex with a love triangle involving the Count and his son. More related to Stoker's book, Ferdinand's befriending of other immigrants and minorities in France is an interesting, although somewhat poorly developed, twist on Stoker's xenophobic invasion plot.By the way, I saw the original version and not the American butchered copy that others have decried. Beware, however, if you're a native English speaker like me, good luck finding translations for the majority French-speaking part of the film (some scenes are in English). I relied on bad auto-translations and two years of university French that I've since forgotten.(Mirror note: This one is thankfully consistent with vampires not casting reflections, a point that's important in the last of the film's three mirror scenes. The other two scenes are of the mother vampire crying when she discovers she has no reflection and of a prostitute screaming when she discovers Ferdinand to have no reflection in a ceiling mirror above a bed.)

Two years after Christopher Lee claims he swore off horror, Hammer and, most importantly, his signature role of Count Dracula, we find him donning that very famous cape once again for this largely forgotten but surprisingly agreeable Gallic spoof. Thankfully, the print I came across is an extremely good-looking one emanating from Germany that is, unfortunately, accompanied by frankly awful English subtitles (that often do not even bother to translate the intermittent German title cards!) which soon forced me to rely on my knowledge of the French language acquired in high school all those years ago; ironically, I managed to acquire a corrected set of subtitles soon after I finished this first viewing of the film! Having said that, the film occasionally lapses into Romanian (during the early Transylvanian sequences), English (when Dracula is picked up at sea by a British vessel and lands in that country) and Arabic (when Dracula Jr. is taken in by a bunch of them upon first disembarking on French soil) and, while it runs for a slightly overstaying 93 minutes in the PAL-sourced print I watched, it was reportedly much re-edited when cut down to 79 minutes for its Americanized English-language version (the end result got saddled with a *½ rating on the Leonard Maltin movie guide)! Ultimately, the film serves to show that, even at 54 years, Lee owns the role of the Prince of Darkness (essaying it here for the last time even if the name Dracula is never actually uttered) and it was an added pleasure hearing him speak his lines in perfectly fluent French! Indeed, there are a steady flow of funny lines and situations to be found in the film: Lee to his child, "Ferdinand, finish your blood and go to bed!" and "Ferdinand, don't play bowling with your mother's ashes"; Dracula's son as an adult – played by Bernard Menez (who had appeared in TENDER Dracula itself 2 years earlier) is so hesitant in plying his trade that, when he is sent by his father to bite an old gypsy woman in the woods, he ends up helping out with the cart she had been laboriously pushing behind her!; Lee is at a loss for words, when about to be thrown into the sea in a closed casket, as to how they will manage to reach the surface; the elder vampire bumps into the glass door of a modern British building when chasing after a prospective victim; French character actor Raymond Bussieres offering Menez a bite to eat in a train station when the latter's blood-starved stomach starts to make its hunger heard; the son bites into a frozen corpse during a day job in a mortuary and is later sickened by the sheer overdose of blood available for him to sample in an abattoir; their luggage is amusingly coffin-shaped; Dracula Jr. dumps his father's coffin out of a hotel window in a fit of rage; Lee is taken into police custody (when daylight is imminent) after being suspected of lewd acts in a car!; humiliatingly, he is also being made to advertise toothpaste on TV commercials; Lee pulls up his sheets in embarrassment when surprised by his young new conquest in his coffin, etc.It goes without saying that this was not the first comic treatment of Dracula on celluloid nor would it be the last – LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT (1979; with George Hamilton at his suavest), FRACCHIA CONTRO Dracula (1985; starring beloved Italian comedian Paolo Villaggio and Edmund Purdom as Dracula) and Mel Brooks' Dracula: DEAD AND LOVING IT (1995; starring Leslie Nielsen) – and, in fact. Lee himself had already sent the vampiric Count up in a much-earlier Italian spoof starring Renato Rascel, TEMPI DURI PER I VAMPIRI aka UNCLE WAS A VAMPIRE (1959) but, what I found surprising here is the fact that, much like Roman Polanski's own somewhat heavy-handed spoof of the genre, THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS (1967), this flawlessly replicates (at least in the scenes set in Transylvania) the Gothic atmosphere of a Hammer Horror, down to a full-blooded (pardon the pun) music score by Vladimir Cosma; notably, the makeshift cross – formed by peasants from a hammer and sickle a' la Michael Reeves' THE SHE-BEAST (1966) – is not only able to hold vampires at bay here but also set them ablaze! Unfortunately, the predictably upbeat ending is somewhat rushed with Lee meeting his demise in the way of his comeuppance in Hammer's first Dracula picture and Menez finding himself cured during a train journey merely by abstaining himself from drinking blood for so long…or perhaps through the power of love since, at the very end of the film we find him, father to a brood of children (one of whom bares his fangs in the closing freeze frame!) with the girl (Marie-Helene Breillat who, rather foolishly, does not believe the vampire lore, even if both father and son keep harping on it) who had been the object of contention between the titular characters throughout the film. The actress was married to director Edouard Molinaro (still a couple of years away from making his cross-dressing international hit, LA CAGE AUX FOLLES) at the time and her younger sister, controversial film-maker Catherine, has her last acting job for 16 years here (prophetically, we think she is being bitten but is actually getting it on with Lee in his coffin in an early scene from the film)!

Under most circumstances I award films that can't be appraised honestly a neutral 5/10 score, and there are many reasons for doing so. Extensive cuts, abominable presentations, impenetrable dubbing, re-editing by distributors who were too clueless to just leave the movie alone, and content that is too oblique for traditional critical appraisal."Dracula & Son" has all of that going wrong to begin with, and then some. Currently the film only exists -- as far as I know -- in an abominable, unfunny, disheartening 78 minute fullscreen hack-job recycled from a Columbia Pictures Home Video release from 1982. I adore Christopher Lee and have a thing for bizarre, offbeat, low budget European genre films. To say this movie sucks misses the point, however, that what we are seeing in the 78 minute English print is NOT the movie that was originally made in 1976. Until that turns up, this will have to do. Ugh.History tells us that the film was shot in France and Yugoslavia in French with the multi- lingual Christopher Lee first speaking his lines in English on camera which he sportingly dubbed into French himself for the original 96 minute version. For whatever reason, Columbia Pictures (who picked up the movie for distribution in Britain & America) then had a voice actor re-dub Lee's voice back into English all over again when they finally got around to releasing it in the new world in 1979.Not only that, but as seen in this English print everybody's voices have been re-dubbed by what sounds like American voice actors who liked to do tons of cocaine, thought they were unbearably funny, and got a kick out of "Young Frankenstein", with lots of dork-rod Brooklyn accents for Dracula, his nebbish son (Bernard Menez, looking confused most of the time), their fetching French love interest (sexy Marie-Hélène Breillat), and everybody else in the movie ... all of whom are obviously French, and do not look like they grew up on Flatbush Avenue. Just watching the movie for the first time is an extremely painful experience, and it's only after multiple forced screenings that some of the gags have started to become even mildly amusing.A bit more research, however, reveals some interesting information: "Dracula & Son" is in fact Christopher Lee's final performance as Count Dracula to date. The film's basic story was apparently adapted from a novel of the same name. And this was the 2nd horror/comedy vehicle for it's co-star, Bernard Menez, for whom this was a 2nd try at mixing vampire thrills with a sex/comedy twist and starring a former Hammer Films bigwig after 1974's even more obscure "Tendre Dracula", with Peter Cushing in his only screen appearance as the Count. Which is a better film because they had less to work with, had to push themselves, and came up with more, where it seems with "Dracula & Son" they had more money, more access to locations & talents, and less disciplined results.So I am not sure what to say about this movie. It's impossible to really judge it based upon what's left to see now after 30 years of neglect & abuse. How about this: You should probably make a point to see it for yourself, and if you find yourself not disliking it too intensely, be pleased. Hopefully someone will restore this to it's complete length, there's no way to really assess the film as it exists now. But something just tells me that even then it would still suck.3/10

Possibly the worst dubbed film I have ever seen, miserable acting to boot makes this one of Lee's worst Vampire attempts. Skip this film in English, maybe the original language version redeems. Catch Love at First bite for a better attempt at satire. good luck.