Absolutely Fantastic

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

Only 8 reviews here online and that for a movie made by Nicholas Cage his brother Christopher Coppola. I give him some credits because this was his first attempt. I really enjoyed the movie because I was surprised by the amount of gore that was in it. But the flick sadly is ruined by Sylvia Kristel. I just couldn't believe her acting. She holds her hands just like Nosferatu (1922). Once she's between a vampire and herself the make up is really laughable but luckily once she's a bat that worked out very well. You will only see it at the end of the movie but that part was really great. It's weird but every time I saw Sylvia I thought, nudity time because she was best known for Emanuelle (1974 - 1993)but here she kept her clothes on, the other females do strip their upper parts. I would recommend it to watch it with friends to start off an excellent horror night.

When a film is titled "Dracula's Widow", and we see the title character seducing and killing a guy within the first 5 minutes, what's the point of having nearly half the running time taken up by a police investigation that can only eventually lead to what we already know from the start? Also, I thought that getting bitten by a vampire wasn't enough to make you a vampire, you also had to drink blood from the vampire that bit you. Ah, never mind, it seems that every movie in this genre is making up its own rules. Sylvia Kristel is pretty bland in a role that a better actress could have done MUCH more with, wears an awful wig, and doesn't provide any nudity either. The special effects are mostly terrible - when Kristel is in full-beast mode, she looks more like a werewolf than a vampire! The lovely Rachel Jones, as the hero's girlfriend, is one of the film's few bright spots. (*1/2)

The only reason I am commenting on this dumb '80s B-movie is because this is the first R-rated movie I rented at the video store when I was 14 back in 1990. It wasn't the first R-rated movie I saw in my life, but I remember this was the first one I rented and got away with renting at 14. So I will always remember this stupid piece of filth. I was hoping for loads of nudity and plenty of sex scenes back at that age. I spent the whole time fast forwarding to "the good parts", but alas there really weren't any. There is very BRIEF nudity in here and ZERO sex. Oh yeah, the story sucks too and its not scary or interesting in the least bit.

Could this have been the very film that inspired the director's uncle, Francis Ford, to make "Dracula" some three or four years later?We're supposed to ignore other reviewer's comments, but I can't resist mentioning another opinion in these hallowed "comment" pages, where the film viewer sounded scared out of his wits. Fear is a relative thing, isn't it? The shock moments were awkwardly handled for the most part, in this film; note the guard who's sitting by a window, and the monster uses the old "crash through the window" trick (Argento, for example, used this trick a little more effectively in "Tenebre" six years earlier) to make the guard wish he had a guard. How could you crash a window and dig long vampiric fingernails into the victim's neck at the same time? I've tried it, and believe me, it takes some doing.Then there's the create havoc with over a dozen devil worshippers scene. Talk about one uninspired montage of creating havoc.A friend lent me this, along with a few other vampire films... he loves vampire films... and I happened to see "Midnight Kiss," another obscure film about bats. As it was made a few years after "Dracula's Widow," perhaps it was Dracula's Widow that inspired it (since Uncle Coppola may have been inspired by Dracula's Widow, why shouldn't the makers of Midnight Kiss?), but I was struck by some similarities. Let's see... vampire bites victim, and victim takes a few days while the vampire virus goes to work. Meanwhile, victim has to wear sunglasses and be tempted to feast on animals. There was even a "morgue" scene, where recent victims get served stake, coming to life as soon as they got the point.Sylvia Kristel did a credible job as the widowed Dracula, conveying an otherwordly and monstrous power pretty effectively. Raymond, our hero-turned slave (or is it slave-turned-hero?) played by Lenny von Dohlen, reminded me of a Jon Stewart-ish Harry Langdon... the helpless child trapped in an adult's body. He even had silent film star Langdon's eye make-up. My favorite performer was Stefan Schnabel, who played the grandson of Dracula's famous nemesis, Van Helsing. Boy, what a great ham! He was like a combination of Burgess Meredith as "The Penguin" from the old Batman TV show and Gilbert Gottfried. Josef Sommer was also very solid and watchable, as the police hero. As far as sweet girlfriend Jenny, played by Rachel Jones, at least we get to see her topless in a bathtub scene.