USA. 2004.
Crew
Director/Screenplay – Anthony Marsiglia, Producer – Michael Raso, Photography – Dag Lenawae, Music – Don Mike. Production Company – Seduction Cinema.
Cast
Darian Caine (Dracula), Misty Mundae (Mina Harker), Casey Jones (Beth), Andrea Davis (Sara), Julian Wells (Jonathan Harker), Shelly Jones (Abigail Van Helsing)
Plot
Beth awakens as a newborn vampire. She is taken under the wing of Sara where the two become lovers. Elsewhere, Mina Harker longs to have a baby but is ignored by her husband Jonathan. Dracula, a female vampire, then appears beside her apartment pool and seduces Mina.
Lust for Dracula comes from Seduction Cinema, a New Jersey-based company that specialised in producing glossy softcore erotica for the video and cable market throughout the 2000s. Their output has consisted of a number of erotic takes on other popular genre works and themes as evidenced by such titles as Crimson Nights (2000), The Erotic Witch Project (2000), Mistress Frankenstein (2000), The Erotic Time Machine (2002), Lust in the Mummy’s Tomb (2002), Mummy Raider (2002), Play-Mate of the Apes (2002), My Vampire Lover (2002), Satan’s School for Lust (2002), Vampire Obsession (2002), Vampire Queen (2002), Vampire Vixens (2003), Bikini Girls on Dinosaur Planet (2005), G-String Vampire (2005), An Erotic Werewolf in London (2006), Kinky Kong (2006), The Insatiable IronBabe (2008), Batbabe: The Dark Nightie (2009) and Mad Maxine: Frisky Road (2018).
Anthony Marsiglia is a director who first appeared with the horror film Phoenix (1995). He made several films for Seduction Cinema with Dr. Jekyll & Mistress Hyde (2003), Sin Sisters (2003), The Witches of Sappho Salon (2003), Chantal (2007), plus the independent Misty Mundae thriller Sinful (2006). Like Marsiglia’s Dr Jekyll & Mistress Hyde, Lust for Dracula is another take on a classic horror tale rewritten with an erotic emphasis and played out by an all-girl cast.
The film’s take on Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) is odd to say the least. Here Dracula is a woman (Darian Caine), as also is Jonathan Harker and Van Helsing. Beyond the names of the characters, there is nothing in the film that intersects with the plot of Stoker except perhaps the scene where Dracula appears and seduces Mina. Darian Caine does get the “children of the night, what music they make” line (which comes from the films rather than Stoker). On the other hand, the characters of Sara (Andrea Davis) and Beth (Casey Jones), a novice who it appears that Sara only convinced is a vampire for reasons unclear, have no equivalent in Stoker unless at a major stretch you think of the vampire brides.
Perhaps the most bizarre part of the all-girl casting is that we have a girl playing Jonathan Harker. This is a character that is meant to be a male – Julian Wells (a female actress) wears a suit and is seen shaving in the morning. He/she is married to Mina (Misty Mundae) who seems to regard him as a male, despite the fact there are scenes where Wells is walking around nude and clearly is a woman. Later in the film, Misty tears off Julian’s top and is shocked to find what she thought was a man is a woman. This is followed by a bizarre scene where Julian forces himself on her, which is followed by several minutes of scenes where Wells pretends to hump Misty.
Anthony Marsiglia directs some reasonable erotic scenes, if there is a tendency to let them drag on for minutes at a time. If nothing else, Marsiglia’s softcore films are quite different to the run of the mill and he seems to have arty ambitions. In the opening scenes, we have an amnesiac Casey Jones, splashed in blood, seemingly first coming to the awareness that she is a vampire, as she strips and takes a shower, while getting flashes of a nude man crawling across the floor begging, before the appearance of vampire Andrea Davis whereupon they make out. Equally, there is a randomness to some of the scenes. In the next scene, we have Casey Jones and Andrea Davis dressed in schoolgirl uniforms who sit on chairs in front of a strange red zigzag sculpture and engage in a masturbation sequence for about five minutes, a scene that has absolutely nothing to do with anything else that happens.
The film was apparently shot in five days where Marsiglia threw out the previous script and rewrote scenes fairly much as he was shooting, The result is a little too freeform for my liking. Even in the reduced arena of the softcore erotic film, Marsiglia doesn’t pay enough attention to small matters like plot or even explaining why things are happening. Perhaps the most ridiculous scene in the film is one with Misty Mundae, for all the world seeming like a leftover Flower Child who is out with the space cadets, rocks an empty baby’s crib while singing a made-up rhyme about bats.
Darian Caine later repeated the role of Dracula in Seduction Cinema’s all-girl The Sexy Adventures of Van Helsing (2004).