Count Dracula’s Great Love (originally El gran amor del conde Drácula) is a 1973 Spanish film directed by Javier Aguirre. The film is also known as Cemetery Girls (American reissue title), Dracula’s Great Love (American promotional title), Dracula’s Virgin Lovers (UK and Canadian theatrical title) and The Great Love of Count Dracula (International English title). The titular vampire is played by Spain’s most famous horror star, Paul Naschy, the stage name of Jacinto Molina, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Aguirre and Alberto S. Insúa.
Through the thick forest fog we witness a coach losing a wheel on Borgo Pass (one of the few nods to Bram Stoker‘s novel) and the five extravagantly-costumed travellers setting off on foot to find shelter for the evening. A local sanitarium is deemed suitable and they are granted a hearty welcome by the owner, Dr. Wendell Marlow (Naschy). The doctor is actually none other than Count Dracula, though it’s of no particular consequence that he goes by this name as this is pretty much the only connection to either the novel or any film with the character. The Count is desperate to resurrect his deceased daughter but can only do so with the blood of a willing virgin bride. One by one, his female guests meet grisly (not to mention breast-baring) ends until the one virgin, Karen (Haydée Politoff, of Queens of Blood) remains but an unlikely pang of moral conscience leads to a surprise conclusion.
Rural Madrid is not a particularly convincing Transylvania but the gothic stylings of Paul Naschy’s attempt to nail the role of the Count are incredibly heady, from the foggy exteriors to the lushly-decorated crumbling castle. Javier Aguirre was something of a stranger to horror films and it shows – the unnecessarily twisty plot reads more like the rules to a complicated card game, leaving cinema’s most notorious vampire with his wings clipped and, well, rather toothless. To make up for this, we are treated to a greatest hits of nudity and romping, with dashes of claret in a self-aware attempt to fulfil its horror film remit.
The quartet of bodiced lovelies is completed by Rosanna Yanni (Naschy’s Hunchback of the Morgue), Mirta Miller (Umberto Lenzi’s Eyeball) and Ingrid Garbo (Murder Mansion), though their ability to act is slightly surplus to requirements, indeed even Naschy is something of a by-stander, with no enemy as such, the characters plod around somewhat aimlessly until they fall into bed with the next man/woman. The sappy Count, when not moping around is beaten up by two far more vicious-looking vampires, their glowing, cat-like eyes a nice touch but not enough to stir huge interest.
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Many of the crew on the film had worked on 1972′s violent Western, Cut-Throats 9, including the composer of the score, Carmelo Bernaola, a workman-like but reliable and long-time collaborator of Naschy. The nudity in the film is strong for the time, pushing the bare skin barrier far harder than Hammer did, aided by the film’s numerous different cuts, different territories being treated to differing strengths of bosom screen time – this also accounts for the myriad of different titles.
Although Naschy was most well-known for his werewolf character Waldemar Daninsky, he was also famous for playing most of the movie world’s most famous monsters, from hunchbacks to The Mummy, to warlocks to Fu Manchu – yet here, as Dracula, he seems a little lost, playing the required suave role perhaps for the sake of it and completely lacking the more monster-like passion he was known for. Without the trusty director of his classic films, Leon Klimovsky, Count Dracula’s Great Love is fun as 70′s Euro-sleaze but a disappointment as a cohesive narrative. Ironically, the film was sometimes shown theatrically on a double-bill with Klimovsky’s The Vampires’ Night Orgy.
Daz Lawrence, Horrorpedia
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