Jonathan – 1970
Director
Hans W. Geissendörfer

Writers
Bram Stoker (novel)
Hans W. Geissendörfer

Cast
Jürgen Jung
Hans-Dieter Jendreyko
Paul Albert Krumm

Review by Wayne Malin

Hilarious,

I caught this a few years ago at a revival theatre in Massachusetts. They had to special order a copy of it from Germany. I knew that it was a political vampire film–I believe it likened fascism to vampirism. Not a bad idea but the movie is a total mess. For starters some of the subtitles were misspelled (“piece” was used instead of “peace”) and the plot was basically nonexistent. It just had a bunch of people in bad vampire makeup mumbling some political propaganda. My audience took it seriously–at first. Then when it became obvious that the film was going nowhere and repeating itself the audience began to laugh. When the villagers in the movie destroyed the vampires my audience was in hysterics. Gotta love the scene where a woman is slapping a dead person…and the guy obviously blinks! It all leads to a truly stupid ending with the vampires being forced into water and dissolving (????) So, the basic idea was not bad but this movie didn’t know how to handle it in an interesting (or coherent) manner. Hard to find for obvious reasons. I give it a 1.