Flesh & Blood

Udo Kier will present Flesh for Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula (above) at the Alamo Drafthouse Downtown this weekend.

With his piercing blue eyes and aquiline features, actor Udo Kier's striking physicality is bested only by his trademark German accent, which lends his every utterance a singularly bizarre weight. That accent, sounding by turns amused, bored, and more than a little debauched, belies the fact that these days Kier, who now makes his home in Los Angeles' Echo Park neighborhood, has become -- over the course of a career that spans some 140 films -- something of a legend in his own time.

It was a pair of films directed by Paul Morrissey in 1973, however, that secured the actor's place in cult-film history. Flesh for Frankenstein and Blood for Dracula -- both appended with the sobriquet Andy Warhol's ... to capitalize on Morrissey's work on Flesh, Women in Revolt, and other Warhol-backed productions -- showcased Kier's uniquely European acting style and feral, Euro-trash inflections while allowing him the freedom to improvise when the day's script pages arrived late or not at all. (Both films will screen at the Alamo Drafthouse Downtown this weekend with Udo Kier in attendance.)

"We went to Italy to shoot Frankenstein in Cinecittô," recalls Kier, "and at the time we were all living together in a small villa in Via Appia. You know, everybody at the time assumed it was going to be all sex, drugs, and rock & roll, but it was totally the opposite and very disciplined."

Morrissey's campy, comedic take on the two monster classics effectively turned the genre conventions on their pointy heads and ratcheted up the stakes with plenty of sex and outlandishly violent set pieces that featured all manner of viscera and body parts flying to and fro. (To this day, Blood for Dracula remains the only vampire film in which the hero slaughters the undead fiend between revolutionary Marxist pronouncements and buff bedroom hustling.) The combination of Morrissey regular Joe Dallesandro's Brooklynese, gas-station-attendant delivery and Kier's sardonic mewling left audiences unsure whether to laugh or weep, but to the credit of everyone involved, once seen the films are impossible to forget.

Of the Frankenstein shoot, Kier says he took lessons to learn Latin, "but I couldn't learn it in three days, so when I played the part I got all the Latin words totally all out of control. I was talking about the gall bladders and all that, but I didn't even know what I was saying, which made it all very ... interesting."

For his role as the anemic and enfeebled Count Dracula, Morrissey asked the actor to lose 10 kilos in four days, which resulted in his being confined to a wheelchair for much of the film. It worked to the movie's advantage, however, and Kier's scrawny, vegetarian vampire who requires the blood of "wirgins" to survive is as memorably perverse as they come.

"For the role, I did not see on purpose any famous Dracula films," says Kier. "You know, in America, under the word 'research,' you can do anything! You can run naked through the city of Los Angeles, and if they arrest you, you can say you are doing 'research' for your next movie."

Kier notes that the films had a fair amount of improvisation to them as well: "Frankenstein was more programmed, but Dracula we did as it came along because at the beginning we weren't sure how it was going to end -- it wasn't written in the script. We knew somehow we wanted that famous stick going through my heart because we wanted to do a cliché of the old way to kill a vampire. But then we cut my arms and my legs off, which was kind of a new issue. It was fun. It was 1973 and they were my first international movies."

Since then Kier has worked with everyone from Rainer Werner Fassbinder (whom he met in Germany when the two were 16 years old) to Gus Van Sant (in My Own Private Idaho) and longtime friend Lars von Trier (The Kingdom, Dancer in the Dark). He returned to his vampiric roots for 1998's Blade and continues to harbor a fondness for roles he can -- ahem -- sink his teeth into (including a recent turn in which he plays Adolf Hitler as a woman).

"I like the vampire films because of the fantasy of it," he says. "With these kinds of figures you can do whatever you want as an actor because there are no guidelines, there are no real vampires. Except in Los Angeles, where everybody's a vampire, you know? My agent is a vampire, my lawyer is a vampire, they're all vampires, but they don't suck your blood, they take your money! Vampires are everywhere. It just depends what they're running after."