Popular reviews

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  Review by pd187 ★★★★ 1

  a director is a vampire, capturing the essence of life to escape death itself. i dream of dracula

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  Review by Armando Maggi ★★★★½ 2

  This is an awesome cinematic experience, one of those extremely rare occasions in which you realize that cinema can be something you couldn't possibly expect.

  An easy, and inaccurate, way of synthesizing this film is to say that it is a black-and-white documentary shot during the making of a vampire movie, Jesus Franco's Count Dracula, starring Christopher Lee in the role of the famous undead. Shot in Spain in 1970 during the last phase of Franco's dictatorship, Cuadecuc Vampir (caudecuc meaning "worm's tail" and the unexposed footage at the end of film reels) recalls classics such Dreyer's Vampyr and Nosferatu.

  So, it is a film made during the shooting of another film, which is based on the Bram Stoker's famous…

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  Review by Jerry McGlothlin ★★★½ 15

  Deconstruction of a deconstruction of artifice. The story out[within]side a story, capturing, in marbled traces, dim remnants like smoke trails. Behind each entrance or exit lies that which is left to linger—loose whits preserved in mesial monochrome. Gossamery passages, interred transience; a corporeal creeping withered by time, yet forever embalmed. Inside one layer damned to swift disassembly is embedded another that reveals all its precious secrets.

  Immortalization spits in the face of apotheosis.

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★★ 1

  Disrupting a Franco regime.

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  Review by Disgustipated ★★★★½ 2

  It is almost as though a movie director has taken one of his kids on set and given him a camera to go play with while the growns up go about making a real movie.

  Except in this case the kid is an exceptionally talented experimental film-maker with a nose for creepy atmospherics, experimental filmic flourishes and meta-cinematic inserts, all used to great effect to create an indelible experience that will imprint itself on your amygala in an inexplicable way that a more conventional film can not.

  Imagine if "the making of" documentary for a horror movie was a darkly foreboding silent horror movie, which has taken on a remakable life of its own. Probably one of the more interesting credits for Christopher Lee and his final scene in the film is a fitting send off. I dare you to check this one out.

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  Review by Darren Carver-Balsiger ★★★★½ 2

  Cuadecuc, vampir is an exercise in editing and cinematic form. It's an art gallery movie, something which exists only to showcase its art, yet it stands out as one of the watchable films of its kind. It is a film constructed from leftovers, shot alongside Jesús Franco's Count Dracula, and made from disconnected moments and behind-the-scenes footage. This is a work of filmmaking voyeurism, a film that encroaches upon another. Yet it ends up more cinematic and potent than the film it leeches off. It is highly atmospheric, told silently but accompanied by sparse yet often booming music. It's shot in the shadows, observing the action as something to artistically cannibalise. The high contrast black and white film is rarely…

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  Review by Rafael "Parker!!" Jovine ★★★ 6

  Director Pere Portabella takes us behind the scenes of the filming of Christopher Lee’s Dracula, but with a minor detail – instead of having the actors speaking their minds on the process, the doc has no dialogue and its just a series of footages of both the film itself or a few how-to, accompanied by a few eerie images thrown in the mix. Also the way everything is shot its done in a very experimental way, which adds a nice style to the whole project that makes it pop.

  Unfortunately as to be expected by something like this, patience is key and with zero dialogue and all visuals, this is not for everyone in the slightest.

  All in all, featuring…

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  Review by Eli Hayes ★★★★½ 1

  Hoop-Tober, year three, film #11:

  I have no doubt in my mind that this at the very least partially inspired Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson & Galen Johnson's approach to the construction of the behind-the-scenes surrealist short form enigma, Bring Me the Head of Tim Horton. And, on a similar note, this would make a curious companion piece to Maddin's Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary; I may very well have to double feature them someday.

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  Review by SpaghettiNoir ★★★★

  Part experimental horror, part making-of documentary, and mostly silent film comprised of inky behind-the-scenes and B-roll 8mm footage shot during Jess Franco's Count Dracula. At a brisk 65 minutes, Cuadecuc, Vampir makes for a hypnotic and trippy adaptation of the vampire classic on it's own: disembodied hands spray cobwebs across the walls of Dracula's castle & coffin; crew members clean and reapply blood during a vampire's demise. Dug the half noise, half jazz soundtrack too.

  
  HoopTober 9: 4/31
  Christopher Lee

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  Review by Liz ★★★★½

  The shadows of Franco's vampire film burned onto high-contrast 16mm; less a making-of than an act of cinematic vampirism, stealing takes from the source production and recontextualizing them as a wholly separate take on the Stoker story. The standalone release on Second Run might just be one of the most gorgeous HD transfers I've ever seen.

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  Review by Doug Dillaman ★★★★★ 1

  Um. Holy fucking shit.

  I would find this hard to recommend to most - I can describe it by fact (a black and white film shot on the set of Jess Franco's COUNT DRACULA during filming), but that barely gets at the experience.

  The feeling of it in the watch, unpicked moment by moment, veers between a high-contrast Tourneur film, an experimental filmmaker, and a collection of behind-the-scenes footage. All of this is presented without source sound and with a highly experimental soundtrack. In whole, it felt to me like Peter Tscherkassky on cough syrup, except where his plasticity is with the medium of film, Pere Portabella's is between the "made film" and the "making of the film", as shots…

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  Review by Evan “Kaizō Haya-shill” Pincus ★★★★½

  Has just as much to offer as an eerie and cryptic metaphor casting a filmmaker (or a behind-the-scenes documentarian) as a stalker, a manipulator, a liar and a vampiric leech - falls into a lineage from Beckett’s Film with their shared accusations towards the camera-eye and playfulness with horror cinema form - as it does as a freewheeling, interrogatory, delightfully pesky and just plain fun making-of. Whatever the lab did to the film stock here is crazy, parts of this are the indisputable peak of black-or-white cinematography. From what I understand, although the credits here say otherwise, Franco’s Dracula wasn’t actually a Hammer production despite Lee‘s presence, which is a shame - calling this the best Hammer horror film would do wonders for my brand!