Director/Screenplay – Donald F. Glut, Producer – Kimberly A. Ray, Photography – Gary Graver, Music – Peter Damien, Visual Effects – RetroFX, Special Effects – Mark Bedell, Horror Effects – John Carl Buechler, Production Design – Steve Ralph. Production Company – Frontline Entertainment.
Cast
Glori-Anne Gilbert (Diana Ruthven), Paul Naschy (Padre Jacinto), Arthur Roberts (Lord Ruthven), Kennedy Johnston (Roxanne), Eyana Barsky (Martine Dracula), Tony Clay (Count Dracula), Del Howison (Renfield), Lolana (Lilith), Jana Thompson (Valerie), Belinda Gavin (Anna), Mark Bedell (Dumas), Jason Peters (Mal), Marina Yaloyan (Natasha)
Plot
Southern California, 1897. Dumas goes to the priest Padre Jacinto after finding his sister Roxanne is being preyed upon by the vampire Lord Ruthven’s sister Diana. Padre Jacinto goes and stakes both Lord Ruthven and Diana. In present-day Los Angeles, Count Dracula’s daughter Martine brings Lord Ruthven back to life. Cursed by Padre Jacinto, Ruthven is unable to drink blood but sends a resurrected Diana out to seduce strippers and hookers and then return so that he can drink their blood from her. All the while Ruthven searches for his love, the modern-day reincarnation of Roxanne.
Donald F. Glut is a name that you might recognise if you have been around genre cinema and fandom for a time. Glut was a classmate of George Lucas at the University of Southern California. Glut wrote articles for Famous Monsters of Filmland (1958-2002) and then a series of books on subjects like dinosaur, Frankenstein and werewolf films. He wrote numerous episodes of animated tv series and for comic-books. My introduction to Glut was upon first reading his novelisation of The Empire Strikes Back (1980) back during the Star Wars mania of my youth and then a few years later when I began collecting books about films.
Between 1955 and 1967, Donald Glut directed 41 short films, which mostly offer continuing adventures of various famous movie heroes and monsters. Countess Dracula’s Orgy of Blood was one of a series of feature-length erotic films that Glut directed and wrote between 1994 and 2008 for Frontline Entertainment, along with Dinosaur Valley Girls (1996), The Erotic Rites of Countess Dracula (2001), The Mummy’s Kiss (2003), The Mummy’s Kiss: 2nd Dynasty (2006) and Blood Scarab (2008). In more recent years, Glut returned to the director’s chair with Dances with Werewolves (2017) and Tales of Frankenstein (2018).
Among these films for Frontline, Countess Dracula’s Orgy of Blood is the second in a connected trilogy that began with The Erotic Rites of Countess Dracula and ends with Blood Scarab and concerns the Draculas in present-day Los Angeles. The three films feature the continuing character of Del Howison’s Renfield, while Tony Clay plays Dracula in the latter two.
I was disappointed with Countess Dracula’s Orgy of Blood. Well not disappointed in a sense – it advertised itself as an Erotic Film and it didn’t let down in that regard. However, Donald F. Glut has established himself as someone with an esteemed grounding in genre cinema and the disappointment is that he does nothing more than produce a B Vampire Film pitched for the erotic market. There have been a bunch of erotic vampire films over the years with The Nosferatu Diaries Embrace of the Vampire (1994), Embrace the Darkness (1998) and sequels, The Erotic Rites of Countess Dracula (2001), An Erotic Vampire in Paris (2002), Emmanuelle the Private Collection: Emmanuelle vs Dracula (2004), Lust for Dracula (2004), The Sexy Adventures of Van Helsing (2004), G-String Vampire (2005) and Twilight Vamps (2010). We have also seen several pornographic takes with The Case of the Full Moon Murders/The Case of the Smiling Stiffs (1973), Dracula Sucks (1979) and Dracula Exotica (1980), plus the nudie film Dracula (The Dirty Old Man) (1969).
Glori-Anne Gilbert as Diana Ruthven
What I kind of expected of Glut was him to heap Countess Dracula’s Orgy of Blood with in-references to and deconstructions of the vampire film. Certainly, in this regard, we get a character named Lord Ruthven, named after the first ever fictional vampire in John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819). And Glut does get in one of only five US performances from Spanish horror legend Paul Naschy better known for his Waldemar Daninsky werewolf films and who had previously played Dracula in Count Dracula’s Great Love (1972). Beyond that however, Countess Dracula’s Orgy of Blood is just a regular vampire film.
Your impression of the film is that Glut was operating with a low-budget and when it came to casting was forced to rely on strippers. Most of the girls reveal they are perfectly capable when it comes to taking off their clothes and dancing seductively but lacking when required to do anything more than that like acting. In terms of erotica, the film is incredibly tame and barely raises enough steam to mist a window on a winter’s morning. We get lots of girl-on-girl action with lots of boobs and butts but nothing that goes beyond the merest pubic glimpse.
The surprise is that for a film that calls itself Countess Dracula’s Orgy of Blood is that Dracula and his daughter are sidelined and relatively unimportant to the plot – fairly much there at the beginning and the end – and the heavy lifting in the plot is done by Lord Ruthven and his daughter, primarily her. I don’t understand why the Ruthvens could not have been rewritten as being Dracula and his daughter.
