Count Draculas administrator Gabor (J.J Paladino) picks Berta & Hans up from the hotel they've been staying in & takes them to the castle to reunite Berta with her Grandfather Count Dracula & her two Cousins Irina (Cristina Suriani) & Xenia (Maria Kosti). Once there the castle seems deserted, furthermore while looking at her Grandmothers coffin in the family crypt Berta finds coffins with her Garndfathers & Cousins names on them. Things begin to get nasty, Berta suffers from nightmares, the wine they are given to drink tastes horrible & looks suspiciously like blood, Hans disappears & there happens to be a mutant one-eyed web fingered kid locked up in the castle belonging to Count Dracula, he needs a child of his own to carry on the Dracula name & Berta is about to give birth...
This Spanish production was directed by Leon Klimovsky & I have to say I really liked it, a lot. La Saga de los Dracula seems to be a pretty obscure film with very little information about it on the internet, I personally think this is a bit of an injustice as there are so many crap Euro horror films out there this deserves much better, I think it might be because it doesn't have Paul Naschy in it! Anyway, the script by Emilio Martinez Lazaro & Juan Tebar is a classic Gothic Dracula tale but has enough ideas & individuality to stand out on it's own. From the superstitious locals, the castle, the caped Count Dracula, the innocents, sleeping in coffins & plenty of blood drinking. The film moves along at a nice pace & while it's far from the most exciting or action packed Dracula film it's very entertaining & has a good solid watchable story helped by decent character's & dialogue. The twist that comes towards the end also surprised me a bit as I definitely wasn't expecting it, basically La Saga de los Dracula is just a fantastically told Dracula story that I personally enjoyed watching & I loved the climax where Berta decides to take some sweet revenge on her family with an axe! One thing that did annoy me is that we, the viewer that is, never actually get to find out what that wine really was, it was implied that it's blood but it's never confirmed. On the negative side I would have liked a bit more blood & gore in it although this is a minor gripe as a horror film doesn't have to be gory or violent to be good, although it helps!
Director the late Klimovsky, who has 77 films credited to him as director alone, does a wonderful job & this has to be one of the best looking Dracula films I've ever seen. The best way I can describe it is as a Spanish Hammer film but even better, from the fantastic brickwork castle, the candlelit dungeons, crypts & dining rooms along with the spooky woods, graveyards & local village. The props, costumes & production design are sumptuous, from the horse drawn carriages & long white curtains flapping in the breeze to the period dresses & corsets to the amount of detail. I loved the way La Saga de los Dracula looked, it has a brilliant atmosphere even when nothing is happening on screen it still felt just a little bit eerie, there are a couple of cool shocks & as a whole the film is great to look at. There's not much gore here, there's a really freaky nasty looking deformed mutant kid, a couple of Vampire attacks, someone is stabbed which involves a very impressive special effect, someones head falls off during a dream sequence & at the climax Berta runs riot with an axe although very little graphic gore is seen apart from her chopping someones hand off. There's a fair amount of nudity as well.
Technically La Saga de los Dracula is far better than you would expect, it's a fantastic looking film although it's let down by some poor English dubbing as usual for these types of low budget Euro horror. The acting was OK & the ladies are pretty enough. I wasn't expecting to but I really liked La Saga de los Dracula & that's the biggest recommendation I can give it. If you like this sort of Euro horror than I can't recommend La Saga de los Dracula enough, a real surprise & a bit of a treat.
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