"My favorite Portabella film. It glides effortlessly between telling parts of the Dracula story (with Dracula as an implicit stand-in for General Francisco Franco) set in a dank period location to providing a personal and ironic commentary on Count Dracula's production by focusing on stray details. (...) Meanwhile, periodic sounds of jet planes, drills, operatic arias, syrupy Muzak, and sinister electronic droning ingeniously locate Dracula and our perceptions of him in the contemporary world.

Recalling without imitating such classics as Nosferatu and Vampyr, the film uses high-contrast cinematography to evoke the dissolution and decay that strikes viewers who see those films today in fading prints. It all adds up to a kind of poetic alchemy in which Portabella converts one of the world's worst horror films into one of the most beautiful movies ever made about anything."

CHICAGO READER
Jonathan Rosenbaum

"Starting with somebody else's work and reflecting on a huge cinema and fantasy literature tradition, taking into account the interrelationship between writing and filming, Portabella (and Joan Brossa, his co-script writer) create something fascinating."

EL PERIODICO
Quim Casas

"When the narrative is mediocre and films are made in an already accepted mold, the opening of a film so out of step with the times and so weird as Vampir-Cuadecuc is a cause for celebration. The film was directed by Pere Portabella in 1970 with the invaluable help of visual poet Joan Brossa but was banned by  Franco's censorship.

Regardless how hard and demanding his vision is, the artistic experience of watching this visual, aesthetic and sound trial on a big screen is unforgettable.

At the time of the shooting of El Conde Drácula by Jesús Franco, Portabella was on site watching and preparing to show later on his peculiar vision of the vampire world.  (...) The result is a kind of torture shot with a camera  that like in Arrebato by Ivan Zulueta, stalks, moves and finally eats you up."

EL PAIS
Javier Ocaña

"The black and white, the contrasted lighting, the peculiar background music, the radicalism of some images and the questioning into the mystery of an ambivalent character like Dracula  / Christopher Lee give way to a  hypnotic and fascinating show which after all speaks about cinema and its power of seduction."

AVUI
Carlos Losilla

"One of the most controversial and surprising attacks on the conventionality of the last decades.

The director reaches the summit of the critiques with this beautiful and stunning sample of pure anarchist cinema.

An unusual and innovative key work because of the time it was shot. Since 1970 and up to the present time, the reiterative or use and dispose cinema has not received such a fierce and complex critique like this one.

Vampir-Cuadecuc is more modern than any other super-production we can watch right now. It is something different than a work of art."

MUCHOCINE.NET
Ramón Balcells

"A suggestive homage to the classic terror cinema, and especially to Nosferatu by Murnau and Wampyr by Dreyer.

It oscillates between the two extremes of the genre, the most illustrious and the shabbiest one. (...) It recreates the classic expressionist style as well as the satire of a sub-product with Ed Wood's special effects."

EL MUNDO
Ismael Merinero

"The first word in the title of Pere Portabella's ravishing 1970 underground masterpiece, made in Spain while General Francisco Franco was still in power and shown clandestinely, means both "worm's tail" and the unexposed footage at the end of film reels. (...) Portabella offers witty reflections on the powerful monopolies of both dictators and commercial cinema."

CHICAGO READER
Jonathan Rosenbaum

"An instant of truth.

Pere Portabella reinvents the "making of" before this audiovisual pseudo-genre even existed. And he does so with an absolutely free creativity (...) borrowing elements from avant-garde and underground cinema of the time, editing freely with ellipsis as a leading recourse, working the sound atypically. The result is seventy minutes of fantastic inventiveness and an enviable capacity to capture certain intangible essences in each of the images that make up the film.

Vampir is, from all points of view, an unforgettable experience."

Diego Brodersen

"The celebration of the inter-textuality of horror cinema."

MOMA
Mark Nash

"A hypnotic 1970 deconstruction of a Christopher Lee vampire film directed by that other and quite opposite pillar of the Spanish cinema, the exploitation specialist Jess Franco."

THE NEW YORK TIMES

"Vampir-Cuadecuc is possibly the key film to understand the change that took place in the Spanish field of cinema from the time of the so-called "new cinema" (which was allowed by Franco's government) to the clandestine, illegal or openly against government practices.

It tries to be an ambitious and complex reflection over narrative using the conventions of the genre as an excuse."

FOTOGRAMAS

"Inspired by Franco's description of his Spain as a "peaceful forest," this cruel -and at times raunchy and slightly incestuous- story was initially banned by the censors and nearly doomed to oblivion before being resuscitated by the San Sebastiàn Film Festival."

MOMA

"One of my favorite films."

CHICAGO READER
Jonathan Rosenbaum