Blood for Dracula/Flesh for Frankenstein 3D

While the arthouse and the grindhouse are not the same, it is my firm belief that they reside on the same street. One reason I would argue this is they use much of the same raw material: the things that go bump in the dark on the edge of town, the things you don’t see while window shopping on main street. The things that live outside of what might be considered conventional or normal: the obsessive, sexual, perverse, violent, the fatalistic and the existential. Outside the city gates, after the sun goes down, this is the raw material that certain kinds of phosphene dreams are made of.

Occasionally, arthouse can feel like grindhouse. Less occasionally, grindhouse can feel like arthouse. On rare occasions, films come along that so thoroughly break down the walls between the two that the differences become nearly imperceptible. Paul Morrissey’s Flesh for Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula are two such rare occasions. Where two houses, alike in indignity, become one.

Udo Kier’s performance is the fulcrum and centerpiece of both films, and he became a star because of them. His Frankenstein is a masterclass in how repressed perversity is the funnel to unholy desires, having the deft touch to perceive in the infamous and oft played character a sexual bent towards the autoerotic and the necrophilic. He plays the black comedy at a fever pitch that, no doubt, inspired The Rocky Horror Picture Show just a few years later.

>Kier brings a similarly special touch to his portrayal of Dracula, turning in what must be the most sympathetic portrayal of Dracula ever committed to celluloid. He is a wilting flower of a forgotten era, one that is drawing to a close, as an era far less beautiful succeeds it. In his tragicomic wafery he is, if not the hero, some kind of immortal and eternal victim. He is not unlike a demimonde out of a Jean Rhys novel,  or Tess in Hardy’s Tess of d’Urbervilles: a weak-willed succubae –  spurned from indifferent lover to indifferent lover until the endless  rejection destroys  him. With him die the demons and angels of old Europe. His Dracula is a swan song to a brighter, more innocent time – and even if it wasn’t, it always seemed that way in the movies.