a review of 德古拉的女儿

HOOPTOBER, NIGHT EIGHTEEN + 2019 CULT MOVIE CHALLENGE WEEK 42: Shock Theater Week Dracula's Daughter accomplishes the feat of being a direct sequel to Bela Lugosi's Dracula while also being kind of a weird/obscure "deep cut" in the Universal monster mythos. Other vampire movies/literature have mined certain aspects of DD (queer subtext, the approach to vampire/thrall dynamics) for decades. But it's very much in the shadow of the original to the point that I was barely aware that there even were mainline sequels to Dracula, prior to the Frankenstein/Wolfman/Abbott & Costello crossover movies, before I picked up the Dracula legacy boxed set. Prof. Van Helsing is the only returning character in this one, but he spends most of the movie trying to beat the rap for killing Dracula in the previous film. So the hero of this one ends up being a boorish police psychologist working for Scotland Yard, who spends most of the movie mercilessly negging his secretary in what was (given the year) probably intended as an attempt at screwball romantic chemistry. The rest of his screen time is spent being alternately seduced and weirded out by Countess Zaleska, the titular daughter of Dracula. For her part, Gloria Holden manages to hold her own as Zaleska, but it must be said that Bela Lugosi is a tough act to follow, especially when the script asks her to give her own reading of the classic line "I do not drink...*wine*." The movie also strips her character of basically all of the supernatural mystique of the Dracula legend, rendering her as little more than a standard noir femme fatale with an incidental thirst for blood. At times, the film feels like more of a postmodern deconstruction of the vampire genre (a la Anne Rice) than a literal direct sequel to the best known vampire movie of all time, which makes it a strange watch over 80 years later.