Peter Cushing is one of my favorite actors. For one thing, I have yet to see him in anything where I felt he gave less than his best efforts, regardless of budget or quality of the material. Also, regardless of the character he plays, there’s always an element beneath it all of a kindly grandfather. In everything I have read about him, he is described as not only a gentleman, but a gentle man.
Which made it all the more shocking to see him in the soft-porn tripe that is 1974’s Tender Dracula. Mind you, he isn’t in any of the pornier moments, but it is still weird to see if in a film with this much nudity and sexualized material.
He plays an actor famous for his horror films. When he decides he is done with the genre, an outraged producer sends two inept writers (Bernard Menez and Stephane Shandor) and two alleged actresses (Miou-Miou and Nathalie Courval) to the actor’s gothic castle to help change his mind.
A running gag, though not a funny one, is whether or not Cushing is a vampire. When he first greets them, at least, he is in a full Dracula getup. I found that odd, as he supposedly no longer wants to make horror films. It would appear his wife (Alida Valli), at least, has some sort of supernatural powers as we watch her disappear in an early scene. At least both of these actors appear to be having a good time. For Cushing, I suspect it was more the high level of professionalism he set for himself. For Valli, who would later play a kind of dominatrix in Suspiria, I suspect she liked some of the naughtier aspects of this production.
And this is a very naughty picture, though in a manner similar to how Benny Hill would have been if they been allowed to do full-on nudity. I do not have a problem with porn, not even with that silly “Skinemax” fare, but I am annoyed by the childish, winking approach to sexuality here. Judging from the giggling inanity here, I wondered if anybody behind-the-scenes had actually had sex before.
Miou-Miou and Courval spend a lot of time in varying extents of undress, not a second of which is actually titillating. They are both even completely naked when singing a deeply horrible duet along to music that is on the soundtrack. That the song is apparently meant to be awful does not make this scene any more amusing.
That seemingly meta moment foreshadows a deeply awful series of endings, each of them wackier and more annoying than the one preceding it. At one point, the crew of the film we are watching all stop what they are doing, so to have a big orgy we see through the perspective of some of the movie’s characters as they watch through a keyhole.
That image is a pretty apt metaphor for the unfortunately meta Tender Dracula. Here is a film that wants to be porn but is too shy to actually cross that line, with everything at least one step removed. It should have worked as a comedy, at least, but its immature and/or baffling attempts at humor all fail spectacularly. It’s the first movie I have seen Peter Cushing in where, even if he still didn’t phone in his performance, I would have understood if he had chosen to do so.
Dir: Pierre Grunstein
Starring Peter Cushing, Alida Valli, Miou-Miou
Watched as part of the Severin blu-ray box set Cushing Curiosities