Dracula (The Dirty Old Man) - Film Review
Dracula (The Dirty Old Man) [1969]
Dir. William Edwards
Reviewed by John McMinn
Dracula (The Dirty Old Man) is an atrociously dubbed horror-sex-comedy about a vampire who enslaves a werewolf and forces him to kidnap nubile young women so he can kiss them on their belly buttons and suck blood through their breasts. In other words, it's a delightful romp.
The plot, such as it is, concerns Mike, a newspaper reporter, who is sent to meet Mr. Alucard (that's Dracula spelled backwards, as the opening credits helpfully point out) at his remote desert home. The Count transforms him into a were-jackal, renames him Irving Jackalman, and dispatches him to lure sexy girls back to Dracula's lair. The rest of the film documents the duo's exploits as Jackalman abducts girls for Dracula to molest, and includes a number of extremely un-erotic sex scenes, a belly button fetish, and an unpleasant dry-hump rape that slowly evolves into necrophilia.
The film is hilarious, in spite of and because of the sleazy antics of these lecherous monsters. Dracula really is a dirty old man with a New York Jewish accent and a bad hairpiece, who occasionally transforms into the least convincing cinematic bat ever filmed. Jackalman is a horny werewolf in a mangy, rodent-like costume that any five-year-old would be embarrassed to wear on Halloween.
All of their dialogue is hilariously post-dubbed by a couple of hacky Borscht Belt comedians who sound like dimestore Jackie Masons. The Count and Jackalman are constantly muttering and making puns and neurotic non-sequiturs. Dracula berates Jackalman for bringing in too many small-breasted girls, while Jackalman kvetches about the Count not sharing his women. The opening narration is absurd and self-consciously redundant. No effort is made to sync the voices, so the lines between voice-over and dialogue become blurred, voices become indistinguishable, and there is a constant flow of yuks and goofy noises, accompanied by the vaguest, most barely-there lounge music imaginable. This film is completely resistant to MST3K-style riffing. One can only sit back and watch with bewildered amusement.
A couple of scenes standout amidst the non-stop weirdness. The first one offers a brilliant example of editing, which should be studied in film schools. In the scene, a woman and her lover, Larry, are fooling around, but Larry doesn't turn her on and he storms out angrily. We are then treated/subjected to a protracted scene of the woman undressing and rubbing her breasts. Someone enters the house and she asks, "Larry, is that you?" SMASH CUT to Jackalman going down on the woman on her couch. After several seconds of enjoying oral werewolf pleasure, the woman finally realizes that "You're not Larry!" and Jackalman mauls her. It's a sudden jolt of weirdness that is brilliant, absurd, hilarious, and boring in the way that only a vintage exploitation film can be. This sequence alone is reason enough to see the film.
The other standout scene follows Mike/Jackalman - who has abruptly returned to his human state - as he takes a date to the movies. When Mike goes to the concession stand to get snacks he transforms into Jackalman, but not before we get several diarrhea jokes, with Mike grabbing his upset stomach before realizing that he has more than indigestion. During the transformation he still finds time to make annoyed quips about wasted food as he spills his soda.
At a mere 69 minutes, Dracula (The Dirty Old Man) is both brief and interminable. Packed with monsters, naked girls, and corny jokes, it's basically the film I would've made at age 13 if I could've. Any self-respecting fan of culty trash films should see it at least once. There's nothing else like it.