Yûrei yashiki no kyôfu: Chi wo sû ningyô (1970)

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Siskoid
Japan does Hammer Horror in The Vampire Doll, subtitled (or really supertitled) The Legacy of Dracula, and indeed, it's sort of a riff on the Dracula story, but I think people have made more of that than actually winds up on the screen. The look, with its spooky old European house and Igor-like caretaker really could have come out of Hammer Studios, but once your vampire is a young woman who refuses to die after a car crash and kills people with a knife, well, no matter how many Harker stand-ins you send at her, it's not REALLY the same story. And that purposeful Euro-style is, I think, more to the film's detriment than benefit because aside from an early flight of directorial fancy - of which nothing comes - it looks like dozens of other, pacier films. It's hard to judge it for what it didn't want to be, but while the Japanese location and its cultural touchstones create a different "Dracula" story, it's just not different enough (ending twists not withstanding). Starts off pretty well, but gets lost in the weeds. 6 months 1 week ago