So it's finally come to this. The most notorious title in Severin's CUSHING CURIOSITIES Blu-ray box set is the 1974 French film TENDER DRACULA, also known as LA GRANDE TROUILLE.
TENDER DRACULA is known among Peter Cushing fans for being the strangest, and possibly the worst, movie in the actor's entire career. I had tried watching this film on YouTube a couple times, and I either fell asleep or gave up completely on it. Did finally watching it all the way through in a restored and remastered version cause me to rethink my thoughts about it? No....as a matter of fact it just made me wonder even more why it was made in the first place.
The film's set-up (I hesitate to define anything in this story as an actual plot) involves two screenwriters (Bernard Menez and Stephane Shandor) and two young women (Miou-Miou and and Nathalie Courval) traveling to the castle of a horror actor named MacGregor (Peter Cushing) in order to convince him to keep working in the genre that made him famous. What happens next is totally inexplicable, as a series of bizarre incidents occurs.
Nothing in this movie makes any sense, even if you accept the excuse that it's French. MacGregor keeps making statements about "the death of horror", yet he dresses like the Bela Lugosi version of Dracula, he every so often sports fangs, and he lives in a spooky old castle with a torture chamber. MacGregor's wife (Alida Valli) acts even weirder than he does, and most of the four visitors are supposedly killed and brought back to life. The two women even break into song at various times.
Along with some gore effects, there's also a lot of nudity in TENDER DRACULA, but it appears to exist just as a way to get the audience's attention. I assume that all the eccentric stuff in this film is supposed to "mean" something, and I'm not sophisticated enough to understand it--personally I find it to be meaningless.
The biggest mystery about TENDER DRACULA is why Peter Cushing agreed to be in it in the first place. You could say that he must have been intrigued by the script--but was there even a script to begin with?? Cushing looks great in his Lugosi-like getup, but for some reason he shouts a lot of his dialogue, and he gives some very (for him) broad reactions to what is going on around him. For all the Cushing fans who wished that the actor had been able to really do something different--you can't get any more different than this.
Severin has presented this film in the best manner possible. Both picture and sound quality are excellent (the movie is in a 1.66:1 aspect ratio). What this proves is that the movie isn't technically bad--most of the shooting locations and sets are atmospheric. If anything, this makes the film even more disappointing--something much more better could have been made out of the resources at hand.
There is an English and a French voice track available on this Blu-ray. The English track features the actual voices of Peter Cushing and Alida Valli, while the rest of the cast gets some mediocre overdubs. I haven't listened to the French dialogue track yet. Would the French track help the movie make more sense? I doubt it.
The extras include two short interviews with director Pierre Grunstein and actor Bernard Menez. Both men spend more time talking about their personal careers than TENDER DRACULA, and if you're hoping they will somehow explain what the movie is about, they don't. (Bernard Menez, by the way, co-starred with Christopher Lee in another French horror farce, DRACULA AND SON--which means he can always say he acted with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.)
There's also a new audio commentary with Jonathan Rigby and Kevin Lyons. The two men get way more enjoyment out of TENDER DRACULA than the average person would, and Rigby gets to show off his facility with the French language. An original trailer for the film is also included. (This disc is Region A.)
Is TENDER DRACULA the worst film Peter Cushing acted in? I haven't seen HITLER'S SON, or A TOUCH OF THE SUN, so at this present moment I can't fully say that it is--but it's definitely one of the worst. Some might defend it as a unique European erotic fantasy, but I just see it as a project that was ridiculous just for the sake of being ridiculous. Does it deserve to be given the high-class treatment on home video that was provided by Severin? I never thought TENDER DRACULA would ever get any type of decent home video release at all, and I give credit to Severin for not taking the easy route and just re-releasing one of Cushing's better known Hammer or Amicus titles. Every major Peter Cushing fan should at least see TENDER DRACULA at least once, that way they can truly declare, "Yes, it really is that bad."
Bloodsuckers is the worst
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