Dracula (Paul Naschy) moves into a deserted castle and immediately starts making vampires. He is aided in this by by a carriage-load of young hotties suddenly stranded by an accident and the death of their driver. Vampire stuff ensues.
Count Dracula’s Great Love is a quite unusual vampire story; although the setup above points toward a typical Hammer-style gothic tale, it quickly unwinds into novel territory. Great Love‘s central conceit is that Dracula’s immortality is not based on eternal life, but instead on a cycle of reincarnation, with the Count living and dying over and over again until a virgin falls in love with him for himself.
Also, she gotta take a knife to the neck.
One of our hotties falls for him but, alas, she is no virgin. There is another, however, who fits the bill, and that is where things start getting really weird. There is a subplot about reviving Dracula’s daughter, even to the point of kidnapping a local girl and sacrificing her to revive said daughter, but his Great Love doesn’t like that, so he abandons it. Sorry, local virgin!
Eventually, Dracula has killed all the other vampires in his employ and the virgin still won’t give in, so Dracula stakes himself to start the cycle all over again and the virgin is sorry, boo hoo hoo.
“Your coffins are right this way. ROOMS! Rooms. I meant rooms.”
Snarky recaps aside, this is held up as a high point for Naschy as an actor and Spanish horror in particular. Those are both true, and it has to be admitted, this most unusual twist on the mythology was refreshing, and certainly worthwhile.
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