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Slowly agonizing the lack of pure blood, Count Dracula (Udo Kier) undertakes a trip to Italy, a country well-known for its strict education and abundance of virgins (?). Pretending to be in search of a wife, he is invited to the home of a family of ruined aristocrats who have decided to sacrifice one their girls to a marriage that will refill their coffers. Obviously, the count and the Italian aristocrats will have more than their share of surprises. Like most of Paul Morrissey's films, a shadow hovers over the true identity of the man behind the camera. If the story is that Andy Warhol required his protégé to use his as the director in order to elude the censors, Morrissey indeed seems attached to Blood for Dracula. However, it would seem that he shared the directing with Italian filmmaker Antonio Margheriti to whom we owe Cannibal Apocalypse and the twilight western spaghetti Vengeance. If Blood for Dracula undoubtedly carries Morrissey's exaggerated mark through his taste for excess and political-artistic ambitions, the overflowing gore of the climax seems to confirm the participation of a specialist of the genre: Antonio Margheriti. Contrary to the usual films of the genre, here Dracula is a weak and pathetic being who owes his survival to his servant who keeps everything under control. No hero here, since each character has a vice, which confirms the satirical aim of the picture. With its mixture of eroticism, vampirism and gore at first glance Blood for Dracula proudly displays its elements of exploitation. A taste for visual purity and a rather slow pace nevertheless sets its sights towards arthouse cinema and gives body to a satirical version of these genres. Thus it's a hybrid form for an unambiguous font: a social criticism that takes off in all directions. Class struggle, capitalism and Communism passed through Morissey's cinematic mill. More than ever, vampirism symbolizes a rampant capitalism sucking up the resources of the people. Except that this time, the vampire also attacks his own, the aristocrats, thus showing the forfeiture of a class closed in on itself—until the consanguinity—that has seen itself dispossessed. The castle is almost empty, the pieces of furniture lost in card games, while the influence of the servant Mario (gold standard of service Joe Dallesandro) is increasingly insistent with the heiresses of the family. Their virginity has since been long lost to Mario's advances. The fact that the hammer and sickle are painted in red on the wall of his room shows that the revolutionary ideal that put down the aristocracy is no less corrupted, swept up by the same artistic European cinema with communist and socialist leanings of the time. Dracula, deceived so many times by the false virgins and then sadistically finished off by Mario, shows that Morrissey has no more consideration towards the rich and capitalism than he does to lower classes and leftist ideologies. For Morrissey only art is important, which explains the little effort brought to the realism of the ensemble. A cinema purified to the extreme where acting is exaggerated and the decor minimal. An approach that often flirts with the ridiculous: thus, in Blood for Dracula, Italy seems mainly populated by blond inhabitants with German accents! Udo Kier can be fragile, perverse and grotesque at the same time while Joe Dallesandro is always also stiff. However, the presence of Vittorio de Sica and Roman Polanski in small roles stresses the importance of film. If Blood for Dracula is a satire of genres and ideologies, the film doesn't mind embracing what it criticizes. The result is a monstrous but enjoyable work.
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