Dracula Sucks

The biggest stars of American pornography's golden age take on Bram Stoker's classic tale with uninhibited enthusiasm. Before the cursed vampire finds himself in the arms of the fair Mina, he encounters countless lusty encounters and absurd attempts at humor.

Director Phillip Marshak admired classic horror films with Bela Lugosi and wanted to make a new adaptation of Dracula. Judging by how his pornographic variation on Stoker's novel turned out, he approached his idols with considerable camp detachment, sly exaggeration, and creative distraction. The result combines the undisguised obstacles of a budget-limited production, grandiose ambitions, and star-studded casting - but also entirely random crude jokes and alienating details that no one on set or in the editing room questioned, starting with the fact that the lead actor was left with a full beard.

This loosely modernized variation of the classic story is set in an unspecified era around the 1930s, judging at least by the costumes, which don't stay on the actors for very long anyway. The setting is confined to Dr. Seward's sanatorium for the mentally ill, where all the other characters from the novel gather - but the thin line of sanity separating the patients and staff from their unbridled surrender to primal urges soon begins to disappear, and not only because of the arrival of a new neighbor, Count Dracula.

Director Phillip Marshak and his son Darryl Marshak - who would later become an agent shaping the careers of stars like Hilary Swank, Leonardo DiCaprio, William Shatner, and David Bowie - approached Stoker's source material with crude licentiousness and bold cheekiness. They portrayed the novel's modest characters as desperate bundles of psychosexual anxieties and uncontrollable perverted desires, while at the same time intending to create a groundbreaking work of pornography - which was reflected primarily in the casting. Dracula Sucks thus functions as a catalog of the brightest stars of the porn chic era: Jamie Gillis, Annette Haven, Serena, Kay Parker, John Leslie, Seka, John Holmes, and Paul Thomas.