Hey, I forgot to blog one: I saw El Conde (2023) at my sister's. It's a black and white Chilean horror comedy where Augusto Pinochet turns out to be a vampire.
It starts with a plummy English voice giving the back story: A French soldier with blood sucking tendencies sees his queen Marie Antoinette guillotined. He vows to protect the aristocracy in any way her can. Over time, he has to get out of France, so he moves to Chile, joins the Army, and becomes the military dictator that we know as Pinochet, but his friends call el Conde, the Count.
After a time, he fakes his death and retires to a distant deserted mining town. He takes his mistress, who he refuses to turn, and his butler, who he does turn. He lays low for a while, but now his grown children here of girls going missing, drained of blood, and they come to visit.
He tells them he has decided to die, and his offspring start to quarrel over the his ill-gotten treasures. They bring in an outside auditor to help them find these assets. They don't know (or do they) that she is a nun, with a mission to take down the monster. Or is that her mission? Because the count has no trouble seducing and turning her to vampirism.
The heart of the film seems to be the nun's interviews with the grown children, asking for details of their father's and their crimes, financial and otherwise. As far as I know, these accounts are historically accurate, and appalling. The perpetrators either insist that it was just business as usual, or wiping out communists. I wonder how this played in Chile. Were the funny parts "too soon"? Were the serious parts shocking, or old news?
Well. the black and white photography of the misty coast, the ruined mansion and so forth was lovely enough, and the nun was very cute, especially when, as a vampire, she learned that she could fly.
And I'll spoil the ending. The plummy narrator turns out to be Pinochet's mother, the vampire... Margaret Thatcher.
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