'Dracula's Great Love' (1973) – Javier Aguirre.

 

Mercurial master of the Danse Macabre Paul Naschy immerses his burly self in the eldritch law of Bram Stoker's immortal Transylvanian terror titan Count Dracula, and reuniting with the blood-thirsty director of exploitation classic 'The Hunchback of The Morgue', the two create a sinister, slo-mo dream delirium of camp vampire glamour as a prim party of goodly city folk traverse the storied causeway of the infamous Borgo Pass, and thus vampire law dictates their carriage and driver have a terrible mishap and the mostly female must seek shelter in the once abandoned asylum of a notorious medical practitioner who was rumoured to have perpetrated many monstrously experiments upon his luckless patients, ending in his destruction at the hands of a righteously enraged mob. Given succour by the urbane, broad shouldered Dr. Wendell Brown (Paul Naschy)whose willingness to aid them might not exactly be wholly altruistic, as on that very same night one of their number is gorily bitten by a vampire, and this seemingly benign host exposes a rather more malign, increasingly more inhospitable nature! 

'Dracula's Great Love' is a splendidly grisly, darkly sensuous, visually voluptuous vampire shocker that is equal parts torrid, bosom-brandishing hammer Horror, creepy castle-set costume melodrama and exquisite blood-spattering exploitation, with a generously full-blooded, deliciously batty performance by Iberian fear iconoclast Paul Naschy, who not only manifests another majestically cultivated monster, the terrible, but ultimately tragic Dracula, endowing this aristocratic, blood-craving beast with a heart, that, perhaps, would ultimately lead to his doom! This is arguably one of the more sensually satisfying titles in maestro Paul Naschy's delightfully ominous oeuvre, 'Dracula's Great Love' is an eerie, erotically charged nightmare that is anything but bloodless, and one that may well turn you into a more than willing Paul Naschy fang boy!