I don’t get a lot of review discs these days — and that’s fine by me, as I’m more than a little over the whole reviewing thing — so I was not expecting to find this beauty in my mailbox last week… and yet I have to cop to feeling a little bit of a warm glow around my hard Yankee heart at the sight of it, all dolled up as it is in a trim keepcase from the fine folk at Synapse Films. Part of my surprise at feeling so moved by this release is that I never rated COUNTESS DRACULA (1971) particularly high in my personal Hammer hierarchy. Sure, I liked it fine — a fact-based horror film about a Hungarian noblewoman who siphons off the blood of the local innocents to prolong her life is hard to dislike — but there were just so many other Hammer horrors that I liked better. Plus, it’s later Hammer, and minus many of the familiar stock players. No Peter Cushing, no Christopher Lee, no Barbara Shelley, no Michael Ripper, no George Woodbridge. But that’s the funny thing about age… it rewrites the past. Music or books or movies or even people that you may have written off or under-valued in your callow youth suddenly become, in your dotage, dear to you. And so I feel about COUNTESS DRACULA, which is now available in a DVD/Blu-ray combo pack from Synapse Films, who have been doing such a bang-up job lately of bringing out the latter day Hammers (VAMPIRE CIRCUS, HANDS OF THE RIPPER), long unseen by many of us, and looking hellishly fine.
As far as historical serial killers go, Erzesebet Bathory (more commonly, Elizabeth Bathory) doesn’t throw the shade of, say, Jack the Ripper or Ted Bundy but she certainly put in the hours, with a kill list that runs to three figures and possibly goes as high as 650; these murders, on which Bathory may only have signed off rather than done the actual scutwork, were committed between 1585 and 1610, the year she was put under house arrest by local officials who, though beneath the Countess in station, were obliged to uphold something like the letter of the law. Never a household name, at least in this part of the world, and denied the proper boogeywoman status that she certainly earned, Bathory has been the subject of more than a few feature films — most pointedly Jorge Grau’s excellent CEREMONIA SANGRIENTA (LEGEND OF BLOOD CASTLE, 1973), with Lucia Bose as the Countess; the erotic omnibus IMMORAL TALES (1974) with Paloma Picasso in the role; BATHORY (2008) with Anna Friel; THE COUNTESS (2009) starring Julie Delpy; and Hammer’s COUNTESS DRACULA, which starred Polish sexpot and Honorary Scream Queen Ingrid Pitt. More elliptically, Bathory has haunted/informed such less historically-minded releases as NECROPOLIS (1970) with Andy Warhol acolyte Viva as Bathory; LA NOCHE DE WALPURGIS (WEREWOLF VS. THE VAMPIRE WOMAN, 1970), in which Patty Shepard’s Bloody Countess ran afoul of Paul Naschy’s tortured lycanthrope Waldemar Daninsky; LES LEVRES ROUGE (DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS, 1971), starring Delphine Seyrig in a cougary riff on the historical figure; STAY ALIVE (2006) with Maria Kalinina as a virtual Erzesebet B., killing off players of a benighted video game; and HOSTEL: PT. II (2007), in which slinky Monika Malacova plays an affluent thrill-seeker who uses her riches to live Lizzy B-style, bathing in a shower of blood courtesy of Dawn Wiener.
We can thank the Jesuits for Bathory being remembered some four centuries after her death as a witchy blood-bather, that particular kink in the historical hose having been folded into the myth a hundred years or so after her 1614 demise. There is even talk in some circles of conspiracy, of a blood libel, with Bathory painted not in hemoglobin but as the victim of a smear campaign, but this intelligence stems mostly from the tinfoil hat brigade; the more popular and established counter-myth that she sought to prolong her lifespan by bathing in the blood of virgins is the typo that stays, in true print-the-legend tradition, and we even get sort of peripheral Bathorys as (arguable, often sympathetic) antagonists in such films as THE VELVET VAMPIRE (1971), LA NOVIA ENSANGRENTADA (THE BLOOD SPATTERED BRIDE, 1972) and FRIGHT NIGHT 2: NEW BLOOD (2013); in all of these, Bathory is an out-and-out blood-drinker and a true heir to the Dracula throne. Once the historical figure met genre, there was a lot of cross pollination, and the concept of Elizabeth Bathory as someone who is able to magically turn back the hands of time by dint of the topical application of virgin blood. The original concept for Universal’s DRACULA’S DAUGHTER (1936) had the Countess siphoning off the life essence of a cellar full of virile male prisoners, whom she chain-whipped in a feeding frenzy of Satanic proportions; the Hays Office put paid to that take on the tale and the actual film is, of course, much more discreet and yet there are some intriguing points of commonality shared by DRACULA’S DAUGHTER and COUNTESS DRACULA.
Countess Dracula stories cross streams with the many iterations of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Hammer’s COUNTESS DRACULA is no different. Masquerading as her own nubile young daughter (whom she has had abducted and squirreled away in a Mongol’s cottage), Pitt’s Elizabeth Bathory goes so deep into character that she is genuinely shocked when her beauty regime wears off and she remembers who she is, catching herself unguarded in a true “Who am I here?” moment that could have been cut right out of THE STEPFATHER (1987)… though we might also remember how Count Dracula impersonated a human being in THE RETURN OF DRACULA (1957), with which this film shares a bloodline. The need to return time and time again — and never when convenient — to the well of immortality puts COUNTESS DRACULA in the company of Oscar Wilde’s oft-filmed novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and Barre Lyndon’s play The Man in Half Moon Street, which Hammer adapted in 1959 as THE MAN WHO COULD CHEAT DEATH (blood being supplanted in that instance by pituitary extracts) while the suspense tactic of Elizabeth Bathory never knowing when biology will unmask her also ties the movie to, of all things, TOOTSIE (1982) and all of those gender reversal/body switch movies and SHAGGY DOG/TEEN WOLF sequels. All of this intertextuality is what makes COUNTESS DRACULA so fun to revisit many years after my first glimpse of it and fun to reconsider in light of its massive family tree.
COUNTESS DRACULA was not a big money-maker for Hammer and it’s not hard to see why. Though the more permissive times in which it was made permits the use of peek-a-boo nudity (Pitt’s SEVEN YEAR ITCH moment, caught by her young lover in the midst of an incarnadine whore bath), this film is surprisingly demure, swinging wide of the known facts and keeping the body count surprisingly low. Though Hungarian expatriate Peter Sasdy brought a vibe of true danger to both HANDS OF THE RIPPER and TASTE THE BLOOD OF DRACULA, he seems to be stuck in BBC classics mode here, allowing the tale to unfold in its own time (though Bathory discovers the rejuvenating properties of virgin blood 11 minutes in, she doesn’t follow up until the 30 minute mark and she only claims her third victim an hour in) and giving the proceedings an air of class and one might even say dignity. (Sasdy even seems hell bent on subverting genre expectations, kicking off the film with a seeming nod to HORROR OF DRACULA by having ostensible hero Sandor Eles ride into frame and espy Castle Countess Dracula in the distance… only to shift the story in another direction entirely.) And that’s fine, once one knows what one is in for, and I am long past any consideration of being disappointed. COUNTESS DRACULA even gives Ingrid Pitt the chance to act a bit (albeit revoiced by someone else) and her best moments, I think, are under the heavy makeup of the older Bathory, particularly in her early scenes with new lover Sandor Eles and her faithful companion and helpmeet Nigel Green (given very little to do but doing it up big) where she does not have to play the sex kitten card.
Making use of standing sets left over from ANNE OF THE THOUSAND DAYS (1969), COUNTESS DRACULA looks open and rich and, especially via this upgraded release, as if it were filmed yesterday… all of which makes it so nice to come home to. Synapse has ported over the Ingrid Pitt-Peter Sasdy-(screenwriter) Jeremy Paul audio commentary from the earlier MGM Midnight Movies release but sweetened the deal with the addition of the 10 minute featurette “Immortal Countess: The Cinematic Life of Ingrid Pitt.” Produced by Daniel Griffiths’ Ballyhoo Motion Pictures, the bonus is a pleasant testimonial to Pitt’s screen presence and features thoughtful commentary by Hammer experts Ted Newsom and Richard Klemensen, actor Mark Redfield, and Pitt biographer Robert Michael Cotter. Also included is a 2nd generation audio interview with Pitt while the actress was promoting the action film WHO DARES WINS (aka THE FINAL OPTION, 1982 — worth seeing, by the way, for boasting Pitt’s scariest character) and a stills gallery. Always up to going the extra mile for the fans, Synapse also offers a reversible insert for the keepcase, giving consumers the choice of original artwork both safe and not safe for work. Recommended.
To buy COUNTESS DRACULA directly from Synapse Films for $29.95, click here.
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