[Luzmila Frisancho]

Originally Posted by Andrés Verdú

Now that IS spooky! Out of all the Hammer series, I think the best Dracula films were the first two (Dracula and Dracula: Prince of Darkness). The subsequent ones seemed to grow progressively worse, although Mr Lee is always able to give an impressive performance, in spite of being hampered by such poor scripts. Jesús Franco's film starts off promisingly enough, but sadly the quality wanes after the first 30 minutes or so. Still, at least the physical portrayal of Dracula remains faithful to the book (i.e. as an old man with white moustache growing younger). An interesting "companion piece" to this is Cuadecuc Vampir (Pere Portabella) which was made at the same time as El Conde Drácula and is a kind of surreal "behind the scenes" look at the shooting of Franco's film, or, more precisely, an attempt at a self-reflexive view of the art of cinematography. Well worth a look if you can find it. I'm in the middle of watching the documentary "In Search of Dracula" and it's very interesting so far. Anyway, take care everyone:

Warmest regards,

Andrés

Note: I subsequently came across a webpage which discusses Cuadecuc Vampir. I should point out, however, that the text is written in Spanish, although the page does contain a couple of nice stills from the film itself, for those of you who might be interested in seeing them. Moreover, there is a small video clip lasting just over 5 mins which includes footage from the film. Here is the link: [url=http://www.adn.es/cultura/20080730/NWS-1403-cine-pere-portabella-vampir-cuadecuc.html]Cultura y Ocio - As (For some reason the link does not seem to copy into the post properly, therefore I would suggest cutting and pasting it into the address bar in order to access it).

Voy a ver si me sale colocar el enlace con la información:
http://www.adn.es/cultura/20080730/N...-cuadecuc.html
espero que se pueda ver la web.