Dracula and Son (1976)

Another French vampire comedy from the seventies, the Christopher Lee starring Dracula and Son (1976) does have a link with 1974's Peter Cushing led Tender Dracula in the form of Bernard Menez, who appears in both.  While in the earlier film he is a supporting role as one of the two hapless writers who end up as guests at Cushing's castle, here he has the co-starring role, playing the 'Son' part of the title.  Dracula and Son is a far more straightforward parody of the vampire genre than Tender Dracula, lacking the surrealism of the latter.  The plot is simple - Lee's vampire count, (never named specifically as being Count Dracula, but close enough to make no difference), finally has a son after his marriage to a non-vampire woman (who he vampirises once she has given him a child), but to the Count's disappointment, his offspring doesn't actually enjoy being one of the undead, refusing to bite living humans to get blood.  Indeed, he grows up to be a shy, socially awkward, young man.  When, in the twentieth century, they find themselves effectively evicted from their ancestral Romanian home after it is taken over by the communist government, they decide to seek a new home abroad, but find themselves inadvertently buried at sea after co-opting the coffins of two dead French sailors.  While the Count washes up in the UK, his son is picked up by a French trawler and ends up in France, living amongst other illegal immigrants and trying to eke out a living as an undocumented worker, working as a nightwatchman.  The Count, meanwhile, finds himself accidentally becoming a film star who specialises in playing vampires.  When a new production brings him to France, father and son are reunited, but fall out over a woman - an advertising executive whose firm wants the Count to advertise a toothpaste brand.   Each tries to destroy the other in an escalating battle over the girl.

Dracula and Son opens like a Hammer film, with a lengthy prologue set in the nineteenth century in which a group of travellers in a stagecoach fall afoul of vampires as they travel through a spooky forest after dark.  Unfortunately, though these scenes are well staged, the nineteenth century interlude simply goes on for too long, chronicling Lee's seduction of a girl kidnapped from the carriage and the birth of their son, robbing the film of its early impetus.  A whole sub-plot involving a young man who was also a passenger on the coach and who encounters the vampirised girl years later, ultimately adds little to the plot, either, turning out to be a contrivance by which the mother can be eliminated from the narrative.  The film's main plot finally starts when the action flashes forward to the then present day and the two main characters are propelled, reluctantly, into the modern world.  Much of the humour of this section of the film revolves around the tribulations of characters who, in their own time and homeland, were feared members of the aristocracy, who find themselves much reduced in stature when robbed of their natural environment and resources.  While the son adapts somewhat more easily to his new life, he still finds himself constantly having to make excuses to his friends as to why he doesn't eat regular food and is never active during daylight hours.  His father finds life in London, at first, at least, to be something of a trial, forced to wander the streets by night looking for random victims, none of whom have the slightest fear of him, having no idea of who or what he is.  Once he becomes a movie star and effectively a member of the modern aristocracy - a celebrity - the film shifts to trying to explore how a traditional vampire might live in contemporary times.  His desire to have a coffin in his hotel room, or work only after dark, for instance, are indulged as simply being the sort of eccentricities that celebrities are prone to.  Visual gags, such as he and one of his vampirised female stars having their coffins side-by-side on a double bed, for instance, abound.

The film's final act, as father and son vampires battle over a girl, moves the narrative into farce, with the various failed attempts of the pair to eliminate each other: coffins are thrown out of hotel windows, clocks are changed to try and give the impression that it is still night and cause an accidental exposure to sunlight, for instance.  Much of it is mildly amusing, but never likely to provoke hilarty.  It's always difficult to fully assess foreign language films on the basis of an English dub, but doubly so when the film is a comedy,  Certainly in the case of Dracula and Son, one suspects that, as is often the case, much of the subtelities of the humour translates into English only fitfully.  (That said, I was at least able to see a dubbed version of the full movie, rather than the original US release version, which was heavily cut and dubbed with 'comedic' voices following a different script).  Despite these problems of translation, the film is actually very well mounted and, particularly in the opening scenes, quite atmospheric.  The central idea, of trying to imagine how a traditional Gothic-style vampire might exist in the modern world is a good one, (and was explored by a number of 'straight' horror films of the era, most notably the Count Yorga series), ripe with comic potential.  But Dracula and Son, while creating some enjoyable imagery and plot developments with regard to this concept, never really manages to develop them sufficiently to be entirely satisfying.  Nevertheless, Dracula and Son, even in English, is a well produced and sometimes amusing film, with decent performances from its leads - Lee plays his entire role completely deadpan, as if he was playing Dracula in a Hammer movie, lending the character a degree of dignity, even as the situation turns farcical -  and is well directed by comedy specialist Eduard Molinaro, who, a couple of years later, had a major international hit with La Cage aux Folles (1978).  It's not Love at First Bite (1979) or Young Frankenstein (1974) in terms of horror comedies, but Dracula and Son, thankfully, isn't Old Dracula (1974) either, delivering a gentle, low-key comedy of vampirism, with satirical asides on the nature of celebrity and the treatment of illegal immigrants, instead.