'El Conde' review: You'll laugh till it hurts

Having premiered to raves at the Venice Film Festival, "El Conde" ("The Count") is a shockingly funny horror show -- now in theaters on its way to a Netflix debut on Sept. 15 -- that represents Chilean director Pablo Larraín at his most conceptually daring and visually astonishing.

Best known for biopics on JFK's widow ("Jackie") and Princess Diana ("Spencer"), starring Oscar nominees Natalie Portman and Kristen Stewart, Larrain portrays real-life fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet as a bloodsucking 250-year-old vampire, who goes back far enough to remember licking the blade of the guillotine that beheaded Marie Antoinette.

Let that sink in a second. The actual Pinochet, the U.S.-backed military despot who ruled Chile in a reign of terror that lasted from 1973 to 1990, died in 2006. But Larrain and the magnificent Jaime Vadell, who plays the titular Count, uncover a legacy of cruelty that never dies. It turns out vampirism is a keen allegory for war criminals who keep popping up in new forms.

Larrain knows you have to laugh at the monsters or they'll make you cry, a philosophy that Mel Brooks played to the max by lampooning Hitler through comic song and dance in his classic film and stage farce, "The Producers."

There's no springtime for Pinochet in "El Conde." He's a vampire who's feeling his age -- he even uses a walker -- and might be ready to kick his jones for guzzling blender smoothies made from human hearts and die for real, except for the unfinished business of redeeming his reputation. As if.

Larrain shows us Pinochet -- undead and so not loving it -- living in exile with his parasitic family and cronies on the southern tip of Chile. Among those sharing his so-called life are his sinister wife Lucia Hiriart (a stellar Gloria Münchmeyer), his five conniving children and his ever loyal butler Fyodor (Alfredo Castro), a White Russian who ran Pinochet's death camps.

Margaret Thatcher is also involved, but I won't spoil the scrappy fun of her participation. Just when you think Larrain has played every wicked trick in his arsenal, he springs a new eyeopener, notably about which of his team Pinochet agrees to turn into a fanged demon.

Larraín has put the bite on Pinochet before in a film trilogy ("Tony Manero," "Post Mortem" and "No"). Still, the comic thrust of "El Conde," with its wide implications about the eternal life of tyranny, qualify this film as the be-all-end-all best of the bunch.

It's true that the plot threatens to fly of course with confusing sidebars and too many characters, a major exception being the most excellent Paula Luchsinger as Carmencita, a French nun who helps Pinochet cook his books in favor of her financially-strapped church, which also comes in for its fair share of critical drubbing.

What can't be questioned is the bruising, black-and-white beauty of the film's images, including the Count flying over the night sky of Santiago like a winged Dracula. The film's haunting and hypnotic visuals represent a new career pinnacle for camera wizard Ed Lachman ("Far from Heaven," "Carol'), who shows why cinematography is indeed a genuine art form.

Flaws and all, "El Conde" raises our hopes for a cinema of undying ambition. In Larraín's hands, the droll absurdity of vampirism as metaphor becomes an insightful tool for raising moral consciousness. You'll laugh till it hurts.