Despite having a couple of years of Japanese language instruction, I have retained extremely little of it today. With that, I am always pleasantly surprised by how many words in my limited vocabulary I recognized in 1971’s Lake of Dracula. Simple things like “daijobu” (I’m OK) or “wakarimashta” (I understood). This might be a good film for one to practice their Japanese comprehension, like a person learning Spanish and looking for a program called Sitcom for Sixth-Grade Spanish Students.
Lake is the second film on Arrow’s Bloodthirsty Trilogy boxed set of gothic vampire films. The previous film, The Vampire Doll, did not have Dracula in it. This one obviously rectifies that omission. Alas, it is, to its detriment, a more conventional production.
Admittedly, it opens in a fairly odd manner which left me confused for a while. A young girl on the beach chases her small dog named Leo through a rocky tunnel, where there is a gothic mansion set in woods on the other side. The terrain has changed so drastically that this tunnel might as well be a portal to another world. In the house, the girl sees Dracula, but is actually scared away by one of his victims which had been seated at a piano.
What is confusing is we transition to an adult woman played by Midori Fujita with a larger dog also named Leo. Is this the adult version of the girl from the preceding sequence? Was what we saw a flashback? Was it a dream? If these are possibly two different characters, why do they each think a word usually associated with felines would make an appropriate name for a dog?
It will turn out it is a suppressed memory from her childhood, and she will recall more about this first encounter with Dracula as he begins menacing the town she now lives in. Typical of most versions of the tale, he has his coffin shipped to this new location. The guy who receives the coffin is baffled as to why he has received this. I guess he was never a member of the Coffin of the Month club. If you don’t return each month’s automatic shipment within a certain time, those charges add up quickly.
The guy who received the coffin was in the previous film and will also be in the next, and final, one in this trilogy of films whose worlds do not overlap, yet it feels less like you’re somehow watching sequels and really just more of the same. And that guy isn’t the only one who will make multiple appearances through the series. I can’t prove anything, but I have a suspicion all three films were shot around the same time, with some actors filming all their parts in a short span of time.
The plot isn’t distinctive enough from other Dracula pictures to bother covering the plot in detail. He goes around draining young women of most of their blood and then will come back around and finish the job the next night. I’ve always found it odd ol’ Drac doesn’t either empty that human juice box in one go or at least let the victims build back up enough so as to be a sufficient meal later. His approach is like eating your seed corn.
I should probably talk about the characters some, though there is little substance to any of them. In addition to Fujita, there’s Choei Takahashi as a doctor she’s crushing on and Sanae Emi as her sister, and who is trying to steal that doctor from under her. Shin Kishida, as the vampire, is the real star. He isn’t exactly Christopher Lee, but it is a solid performance.
As far as the filmmaking fundamentals are concerned, those are also solid, but there are some curious aspects I’m still puzzling over. For instance, there is a driving montage where the characters are driving to a single location, yet the shots alternate between the vehicle going to the left and to the right of the screen, leaving one with the impression they are driving back and forth from different locations.
A couple of deaths are also peculiar, such as Drac’s henchman, who is simply alive in one shot and then dead the next, with no clarification as to what killed them. My money is on high cholesterol, but we need to be told these things. Then there was the guy who delivered the coffin, who is later found dead a great distance away. If the coffin containing the vampire was dropped off in one location, how did Drac kill that delivery guy who is found what appears to be at least a hundred miles away? All I know is, it still is probably not the worst thing most Amazon drivers have experienced.
The strangest deaths in Lake of Dracula involve characters taking a fall off a railing, something which will also happen in the last film in the trilogy. One of these is a victim of the Count, who accidentally tumbles over a railing that I swear would take an effort to toss oneself over. It is a moment which is somehow completely unexpected and deeply stupid at the same time. In the end, Drac will die in a similar manner, with circumstances that make it even less probable than the earlier scene, as I suspect the way a railing impales his chest couldn’t work, similar to how one wouldn’t be able to impale a tomato on a pencil standing on end. Still, I would take the weirdness here over many conventional films I have seen.
Dir: Michio Yamamoto
Starring Choei Takahaski, Sanae Emi, Midori Fujita
Watched on Arrow Video’s blu-ray box set The Bloodthirsty Trilogy