(Streamed via Freevee)
Two things I learned from the title of this movie: Dracula’s 1) Married and 2) Dead. Shit. Had I known that, I would’ve sent flowers… to both the wedding and the funeral.
All kidding aside, Dracula’s Widow was the first movie directed by Christopher Coppola, who would later go on to direct the immortal classic, Deadfall. It would make a great triple feature of Late ‘80s/Early ‘90s Coppola Vampire Movies, alongside the Nicolas Cage-starring Vampire’s Kiss and Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Lenny Von Dohlen is the temperamental owner of a Hollywood wax museum who winds up receiving the remains of Dracula’s widow (Emmanulle’s Sylvia Kristel). Before long, she bites him, makes him her familiar, and goes out into the night turning her victims into hamburger. This is why you should always inspect your packages before you sign on the dotted line for them.
For a first-time feature, it’s pretty good. Coppola bathes many scenes with lots of cool colors (many sequences are lit like a giallo) and gives the whole thing a look that’s a lot artier than you might expect. Despite being the titular character, Kristel doesn’t seem to be in it a whole lot. She doesn’t really look like she’s having a lot of fun either, but at least she looks great (even in her bad wig). The biggest debit though is all the scenes with a hardboiled detective (Josef Sommer) investigating the murders, which aren’t exactly bad, it just feels like they came out of an entirely different movie.
These quibbles are relatively minor in the long run. For the most part, Dracula’s Widow is briskly paced, looks slick, and it contains lots of blood, guts, and gore. Since Kristel is “both beauty AND beast”, she not only drinks the blood of her victims, but turns into a rubber-faced monster and eats them. The highlight comes when she rips apart a bunch of Satanists during a black mass. There’s also a solid bat transformation scene near the end which puts lots of today’s CGI crap to shame.
AKA: Lady Dracula.
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