Nosferato in Brazil – review

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Director: Ivan Cardoso

Release date: 1970

Contains spoilers

When I sit and type up these reviews I, by rote, put the words “contains spoilers”. This time I nearly added in “not really” in brackets and then decided that, rather than do that, typing this explanatory paragraph would take up some much needed wordage as there is little to actually talk about with this one.

This review could be one word… if it were that word might be “bizarre” or it might be “crap”. Both are suitable for this effort. You’ll note from the screenshots that the film I watched was from a washed out VHS print, which itself was of a film originally shot on super 8. The film has no dialogue but does have occasional intertitles in Portugese. Don’t worry if you don’t read Portugese, there isn’t a gist to get. I understand that the first black and white section is historical and the colour section contemporary. Luckily the film is only 27 minutes long.

a victim

So the film is silent, sometimes completely silent and at other times accompanied by a groovy acid jazz soundtrack. In the first section we get the main pattern for the film. Nosferato (Torquato Neto) wanders along in a cape and finds a girl or two (actually in the very first scene he is already sat with her) and then attacks and chows down on her neck, leaving a puddle of tomato sauce rather than blood flowing from a wound.

swordsman

This changes at the end of the historical section when he is confronted with a swordsman (looking rather Captain Kronos like, some four years before Kronos) and they duel. The swordsman has a foil in one hand and Christ in the other – and by that I mean the figure from a crucifix without a cross. He seems to defeat Nosferato – and, with regards his misspelt name, I don’t know if that is meant to be genus or actually Dracula.

beach vampire

Things go much the same way in the contemporary section, though we do get stills of a cemetery interspersed with stills of the first victim and we also get Nosferato on the beach wearing trunks, a cape and sucking from a coconut. In one scene he flags a lift, attacks a girl in the back seat and then the driver calmly opens the passenger door to help him exit the vehicle. Later we get vampire women attacking men. All told there seem to be three of them, so if he is Dracula they are the vampire brides. At the end of the film he gets on an airplane and returns to Europe.

Sheesh… Absolutely, unmitigated bizarre crap. Director Cardoso would go on to direct As Sete Vampiras, the latter being better than this, which gets a magnificent 0 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.