Les Charlots contre Dracula (1980)
Directed by Jean-Pierre Desagnat, Jean-Pierre Vergne

Film Review

The film career of Les Charlots, one of the most successful musical troupes in France in the 1970s, was definitely on the skids by the late 1970s and the commercial failure of their silliest film of the decade, Les Charlots contre Dracula, was very nearly the final nail in a pretty well-worn coffin.  With Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995), Mel Brooks showed how a vampire parody should be done (essentially by ribbing everything that had gone before, but with style), and next to this the Charlots' ramshackle comedy just looks facile and cretinous.  If there is any joy to be found in the film it is only thanks to the inspired casting of Gérard Jugnot (as the start of his career) as an evil but deliriously funny private detective.  In the early 1970s, Les Charlots had been box office dynamite, attracting an audience of 7.5 million with their second film Les Bidasses en folie (1971), but by the end of the decade their appeal had waned considerably. After their anaemic vampiric encounter, they made just three more films.

Dora Doll, a popular habitué of French B-movies in the 1950s (at her best in La Rose rouge (1951) and L'Envers du paradis (1953)), springs up right at the end of the film for the predictably asinine punchline - she is as wasted as Andréas Voutsinas, one of the blandest Draculas cinema has so far given us (although, interestingly, his appearance is much closer to Bram Stoker's original description of the Count than the more familiar horror movie interpretations).  Amiable as they were, the Charlots were never very funny but here they just look like a pathetic bunch of middle-aged men trying desperately to get a laugh.  Despite their best efforts, Les Charlots contre Dracula manages to be sporadically funny in places (hilariously so in a couple of scenes) but, saddled with an idiotic plot that moves as fast as one-legged zombie in the film's second half, it is a pretty bloodless affair - maybe because no one involved in its production had any idea what was at stake...

Film Synopsis

The son of the vampiric fiend Count Dracula is keen to follow in his father's footsteps, but he can only do so if he drinks a magic potion given to him by his doting mother.  When the latter dies before she can accomplish this task, the would-be vampire sets about finding a double to take her place.  To that end, he engages the services of a private detective, Lepope, who finds a suitable candidate for Dracula's substitute mum in Ariane, who runs an antiques shop in Paris with her fiancé Phil and his friends Gérard and Jean.  Once Lepope has succeeded in abducting Ariane, her three enterprising rescuers set off on a long train journey to Rumania, arriving finally at the castle of Count Dracula...