PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *metaphysical*
In my review of Jess Franco's 1968 psycho-killer film SUCCUBUS, I wrote:
In the [Jess Franco] interview he claimed it was a virtue that he’d made a film that he himself didn’t understand. But viewing SUCCUBUS didn’t leave me with the impression of an artist filled with visionary fire. I might not like a lot of Godard, but there are always some ideas swirling around even in his worst films. Franco is just a con-man, dealing in phony-baloney surrealism.
I don't retract any of this, because the more I see of Franco, the more I'm convinced he had only a superficial appreciation for any of the ideas or symbolic correlations he used in his films. That said, I think the man genuinely loved film, and though he made many bad movies, he may have had the insight that most moviegoers of his time didn't respond so much to solidly crafted stories as to compelling images. It wasn't that Franco never made a movie with a strong narrative, but as he pursued his rather gypsy-like method of filmmaking, it's likely that he began pursuing a concept of film as a dream-like experience.
Roughly two years after Franco finished COUNT DRACULA, which did have at least a fairly consistent narrative, the director executed his first monster-mash. Since I don't think Franco would have done so if he didn't think this sort of recrudescent Universal formula would make money, it's possible he'd observed the dependable (albeit not spectacular) popularity of Paul Naschy's monster-films in Europe. Yet PRISONER is far looser in structure than any of the Naschy movies.
There's barely any dialogue in PRISONER, and the closest thing to a rationale for the conflict appears in an opening crawl by an author named "David Kuhne" (an alias Franco had used over the years), claiming that a great struggle will take place between the vampire lord Dracula (Howard Vernon) and Doctor Frankenstein (Dennis Price), so cosmic in nature (my words) that it will call forth other monsters "like an echo."
What we actually get is a fractured story that barely hangs together. Dracula, made up to look like the vamp from the lost silent film LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT, is apparently back in Transylvania, since he's seen attacking a local woman and then retreating to his castle. A vampire-killer, given the name "Doctor Seward" from the Stoker novel, enters the coffin in the daytime and impales Dracula with the tiniest stake ever seen. The slain vampire metamorphoses into a very small dead bat, and Seward leaves the castle. It's not clear why he doesn't leave the country as well, given that he believes Dracula to be dead. Possibly Franco wanted to keep a "straight man" protagonist around, though Seward does almost nothing else for the rest of the movie.
Enter Doctor Frankenstein, who moves into the castle and uses his mad science to both revive and enslave the vampire lord. Not that the viewer gets much sense of Dracula's reaction to these events, since in Vernon's few scenes, he merely looks fixedly into the camera and bares his prominent fangs. There are also some vampire brides hanging around, but whether they were created before or after Frankenstein's advent, I couldn't tell.
Frankenstein has a somewhat freaky looking assistant named Morpho (Luis Barboo), possibly on loan from Franco's own mad scientist Orloff. But possibly the current doctor thinks he needs more muscle power, so he creates a new Monster (Fernando Bilbao), who is seen abducting a woman from a coach. Despite the Monster's strength, though, the evil doctor has some vague plan to create an army of superhumans using not his own artificial creation, but the vampires-- not that Franco is ever explicit about the master plan.
However, that cosmic pushback is on the way, apparently from a local gypsy tribe. Unlike the gypsies of Stoker's novel, this tribe suffers from Dracula's tyranny, and the women of the tribe (hardly any men are seen) make enigmatic prophecies that beneficent forces will appear to oppose both the vampire and the mad scientist. Possibly Franco remembered the association between gypsies and The Wolf Man, for a somewhat scruffy wolf-man shows up at the castle and has a short fight with the Monster. Though the werewolf is killed by the Monster, for some reason Dracula at some point decides to rebel-- though it's hard to judge since Vernon has no actual scenes of rebellion. All one sees is a vampire woman killing Morpho, and this defiance sends Frankenstein around the bend. He slays all the vampires in their coffins and then unleashes some sort of electrical chaos from his machines that annihilates both the doctor and his Monster, leaving Seward to intone some meaningless prattle in conclusion.
The best scene in this perplexing film is probably the Monster-Wolf Man fight, which, while not even equal to the best such battles in the Naschy repertoire, at least moves this monster-mash into the realm of the combative. While I don't think Franco had any sincere love for the classic Universal monsters, one might at least argue that he had some partial recognition of their power as dream-images, and that once or twice his use of their mythic power works a good deal better than anything in Al Adamson's contemporaneous DRACULA VS. FRANKENSTEIN.
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