Blood of Dracula’s Castle (1969)/Cinderella 2000(1977)
Al Adamson was a creator of many grindhouse horror films in the 60’s and 70’s. He is not super well known for such work like, say, Ed Wood. I’ve seen two films by him that are both very different but both incredibly bad films that would make an incredible double feature of crap if you’re into bad movie nights and such.
There was a lot of weird ass soft-core floating around in the 70's, puppet porno (Let My Puppets Come, baby!), porno musicals, porno cartoons. I've sort of wanted to review Once Upon a Girl on here, at some point- that’s cartoon porn. There was a bunch of porno based on fairy tales spawned by Bud Townsend's Alice in Wonderland. Before Charles Band directed Ghoulies (films Cinderella and Fairy Tales from the 70's are now difficult to find). I reviewed a bunch of that stuff for this site, Let My Puppets Come, The Beast. The Geek is one about Bigfoot made number 1 for my worst films ever list when I was writing for www.pollystaffle.com back when I lived in Las Vegas. Cinderella 2000 is another one of those weird ass soft-core films from the 70's.
Cinderella 2000 is a soft-core film of sorts (it would likely only be R by today’s standards) with disco musical song and dance numbers based on the story of Cinderella set in a super cheesy sci-fi future where computers decide who can have sex, and lawbreakers are hit with a shrinking ray. There's a robot the looks kind of like a penis that does a little disco dance number. How bad are we talking? We're talking Cinderella's homosexual fairy godfather (get it? He's a fairy!) comes out of a flying saucer and people in huge bunny masks start copulating and worse prancing around to disco. The plot is the plot of Cinderella, except that there's this thing about the society without sex and the happy ending is that Cinderella gets the dictator to lift the sexual ban by giving him a blowjob that cures his impotency.
I suppose these oddly themed porno flicks from the 70's the puppet porn and the cartoon porn, the fairy tale pornos, Cinderella 2000 have a kind of value in being relics, in being part of cinema history. There might also be artistic value in the perversion of them. A lot of these films like that I've viewed have made me fairly uncomfortable, Let My Puppets Come did, The Beast did, and things in film or other arts that make us uncomfortable have struck a raw nerve, they have hit on an issue by transgressing against something in our taboo structure. Maybe not as much so as The Beast, Let My Puppets Come, or The Geek, but I did find this film made me a little bit uncomfortable. It’s a relic of kind of creepy 70's jerk off material. There's a disco-dancing robot whose head looks like a penis in it. You know how disco kind of has a little bit of a sexually perverted edge to it? That's Cinderella 2000 for you, freaky freak disco culture's overlap with some of the soft-core porno of the time, which got into some very odd themes.
That film is probably a work of genius compared to his earlier film The Blood of Dracula’s Castle from 1969. That film is kind of lame even for a low budget grindhouse film of the period. If you’ve ever seen The Dunwhich Horror from the same era by Roger Corman, that’s a vastly superior film. The Blood of Dracula’s Castle is pretty stupid even for its period. This guy inherits this castle were Count Dracula’s been hanging out in Southern California brings his girlfriend with him. You could more or less guess the plot from there, except that they have a weird serial killer friend named Johnny and a butler that goes on and on about the moon god Luna. Sorry, no blow jobs in this one. The Blood of Dracula’s Castle actually comes on the same DVD in a Grindhouse collection with the film Blood Mania which is vastly superior.
No comments:
Post a Comment