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Saturday, May 24, 2008Voodoo Island
Release Year: 1957
Country: USA Starring: Boris Karloff, Beverly Tyler, Murvin Vye, Elisha Cooke Jr., Rhodes Reason, Jean Engstrom, Friedrich von Ledebur, Glenn Dixon Writer: Richard H. Landau Director: Reginald Le Borg Alternate Title: Silent Death I think most of us realize that American films have done a pretty poor job of depicting voodoo over the years. The thing is, I think we usually think of the depiction as being poor because of its (pervading) undertones of racism, if not explicit prejudice and a sense of cultural and moral superiority. And, yeah, that's out there. But there's more. For what I guess are a variety of reasons, voodoo in particular suffered a scattering, diasporic treatment by Hollywood. Until George Romero and company gave the zombie a new home and a conceptual transformation in the late 1960s, zombies and their parent religion always had an uneasy relationship with cinematic geography. Haiti, where voodoo or vodoun/vodun is still widely practiced, was in the public eye in the 1920s and 30s, due to the American occupation there. William Seabrook's The Magic Island (1929) is generally credited as America's first exposure to the zombie phenomenon--a phenomenon which he insisted was very real, in contrast to other Haitian legends which he dismissed as fairy tales--and it was the inspiration for Bela Lugosi's outing in White Zombie (1932). However, I guess producers felt that American audiences only had so much patience in watching a film set in Haiti, because four years later zombies somehow became Cambodian in the 1936 film Revolt of the Zombies. There are two particularly significant things about that film. First, zombies no longer had to be dead--they could simply be living people under the supernatural or hypnotic control of another person (yes, they allowed for this in White Zombie, but only for the female lead, probably because corpses are generally viewed as unsexy). Second, zombies became nomads, thereafter doomed to settings pretty much anywhere the writer or director wanted to set them up, as long as it was a tropical setting that was preferably set on some unknown island. Sure, uncharted islands are great for adventure and horror films, as were the ambivalently-received imagistic power of thick, impenetrable jungle and surly, spear-wielding natives. But although vampires, for instance, were not always placed in Transylvania in any given movie, it was sort of understood that they had a homeland. Zombies and voodoo, by contrast, could be made to inhere in the culture of any dark-skinned group of island dwellers that the writer or director wanted to concoct. I know Keith is skeptical of a lot of the scholarly inquiry into films, but I think there are some pretty real implications of the power relations involved in that treatment of what remains a poorly-understood and very real religion which is to this day racialized in the public eye, and I think there's a lot to be said about it. ...but instead, in this space I'm just observing it, because the focus is another stop on the zombie's pre-Romero peregrinations: Voodoo Island, an uncharted island somewhere in the tropical Pacific which is owned by the filthy rich Howard Carlton, who plans to open a hotel and resort there. Googling the movie will obviate my need to tell you that it kind of sucks. Karloff, the obvious star of the film, seems to have been doing mostly TV work around this time, and I've seen at least one person claim that this film marked his return to film. For all the failings of the movie, I think it's not a terrible return; he turns in an impressive performance, especially given the very limited power of the script, and manages to make a somewhat abrasive character charismatic. Not much can be said for the other actors, though Rhodes Reason appears to have had the looks and voice of a classic leading man, and Beverly Tyler seems to have been a talented (and lovely) young woman; ascribe it to the script. Because more than the movie, the script really sucks. And yet, despite that, I find a number of redeeming features in this film, though judging by the reviews I've seen out there, I stand nearly alone in caring to say so. After an opening credit sequence focused on a shitty-looking wooden doll with some kind of needle stuck through its head, we see an equally pathetic-looking model hotel in a miniature landscape. Go ahead and get a chuckle out of it, but the joke's on you, because in a rare moment of cleverness for this film, the credits end and the camera pulls back to reveal that it is, in fact, a model of the hotel which Howard Carlton wants to build on his private, unexplored island. However, he sent a four-man team to survey the location, of which Mitchell was the only returnee. Mitchell is now permanently stupefied; he stares blankly and unblinkingly at nothing all of the time, more or less comatose unless someone leads him to a new place to sit. The doctor is baffled by the symptoms, so Carlton hires Phillip Knight, renowned debunker of supernatural and paranormal phenomena who apparently has several popular books and a television show. Knight is a stolid "realist" who assumes that supernatural phenomena and native religions, as well as belief in monsters, etc., are all means by which the unscrupulous can take advantage of ignorant laymen and make a quick buck. Even though this is not a particularly eye-opening concept, and in the 1950s at the height of faith in science it may have seemed a very easy perspective to agree with, Knight is such a skeptic that he risks being unsympathetic. If Karloff were not able to use his talents, as he does, to make Knight a very charismatic and charming jerk, this movie would be numbered amongst the films so mediocre that they can make a grown man cry blood. (If you don't know what I mean by that, then I'm happy for you. Don't try to find out.) So Knight is convinced that the whole thing, like everything else he's ever come across, is a huge publicity scam. "The public loves to be frightened," he explains to Carlton. Knight agrees to investigate the phenomenon, accompanied by Carlton's employees, his own assistant, and... the comatose Mitchell. To the latter's inclusion, the doctor protests, and when Carlton's assistant Finch explains over the phone that Mitchell will be the sixth and final member of the exploration party, the line goes dead, caged parakeets start flapping around, and a plant for some reason growing on the miniature landscape of the model hotel wilts and then bleeds. We will soon see scenes introducing the other characters, the most remarkable here are the two women. Adams (Beverly Tyler) is Knight's beautiful but very reserved assistant, who is academically skilled but socially cold; Winters is Carlton's decorator or somesuch, and she unsuccessfully attempts to convince Adams to have a preflight martini or two with her. So begins what is by far the most interesting character dynamic in this film--Winters is pretty clearly intended to be a lesbian, and for the era, at least, her attempts to get under Adams' skirt are relatively overt. Given the apparent budget, the genre, and the time period, I found this not-exactly-latent homosexuality rather surprising, and much more impressive than most of its attempts at horror. Or any of the rest of its romantic depictions, which are more awkward than teenagers getting drunk and making out for the first time. The next day, the group departs by plane for a stopover island. They're buffeted by a storm and unable to make radio contact... but on the destination island, the radiomen can hear them loud and clear and are unable to make themselves heard in reply, and they can't detect any evidence of weather disturbances at all. The plane lands without incident nonetheless. In the following scene, the same phenomenon occurs--they are able to be heard via radio, but don't realize this because they can't hear the replies--and there are a lot of mostly-silent closeups of people sitting around until Mitchell becomes animated for the first time, taking several steps toward Adams before collapsing and suffering a drop in blood pressure. As Adams insists that he was trying to say something (it looked more like he was having too much trouble just trying to walk, but that's me), his blood pressure returns to normal and the group finally is able to hear a reply from the Wake Island radio station. That's a relief, I guess. So, after that string of good luck, the group has no qualms departing the next day for another island. Just before takeoff, some guy who may or may not be a native porter finds a split-faced ragdoll under the landing gear which looks like the same doll that some native girl was sewing up before the group's first departure. We'll return to that doll, sort of, in a bit. Arrival at the next island brings Finch and Knight into conversation with down-on-his-luck hotel owner Schuyler and his ship's captain, Gunn. Yes, pretty much every character is known on a last-name basis here. Gunn might best be summed up as a poor man's precursor to Han Solo; he makes wisecracks, sports a devil-may-care attitude beneath which lies a caring individual, and he's a pilot (of a ship). Schuyler might best be summed up as a wiener. Not a cock, not a jerkoff, but a wiener. His basic role is to be wide-eyed and quick to protest, but also easily bought off with the promise of future riches by cooperating with Carlton. True to that theme, Schuyler's initial protests of his inclusion in the party and Mitchell's presence on his island are both quelled with a few piles of greenbacks. "This is just a small down payment," Finch assures him. Schuyler then agrees to let the group use his boat to get to Carlton's island and figure out what happened to Mitchell and his three missing companions. That night, Winters really makes her orientation clear. She approaches Adams as the latter is gazing out into the night, and under the guise of discussing her attire and makeup techniques, makes statements such as, "I could make you come alive." Adams gets flustered and storms off, and Gunn attempts to convince Winters that since he's a man, she might want to give it up to him. She explains that her "club" is exclusive and very private, and he's not going to become a member. Again, this seems pretty ballsy (honestly not a backhanded pun) for the times, and a lot more ambitious thematically than most of the rest of the film. The next day, before launch, Mitchell wanders off on his own and drops dead on the dock, his arms pointed toward Voodoo Island. When the group returns to the spot to launch, they find designs on the ground drawn in white powder, at the center of which is an "ouanga" bag filled with "death wishes" written out on strips of paper or leather or something, one for every member of the party. Knight smiles at this and pitches the death wishes into the sea, and the group embarks... only to find that the boat's engine inexplicably stops working after the island comes into view. They're forced to let the tide take them to shore, which takes all night. It's from here on out that the movie comes about as close to "coming into its own" as it ever will... Although I previously linked it to other voodoo and zombie films, it's worth also linking it to the tradition of monster films set in island locations where it takes forever--eternity being manifested in irritating and patently false dialogue regarding tepid-at-best bickering and other crude and ass-backwards attempts at creating character development or something--to finally see what turn out to be underwhelming monsters with a dearth of screen time (Navy vs. the Night Monsters, The Mushroom People, I'm looking at you). So you can gauge it, we're already more than halfway through the movie before it actually kicks into gear. If you can call it that. The group stumbles upon surveying equipment perfectly aligned to lead them to Mitchell and co.'s quondam campsite. While the men return to the boat only to find that their food supplies are now filled with maggots, Winters unsuccessfully acts the temptress only to decide, around the time that the men return with the bad news, that she'll go skinny dipping in a nearby lagoon. Call her an overzealous pioneer, or a lesbian being punished by a horror film unable to free itself from the conservatism of its era, but she's the first to find out that the plants of the island eat people... by getting tangled up in the inflated leaves of some kind of lake plant with cephalopod-looking suckers all over them. Winters thus becomes the first martyr to the cause of the group's enlightenment. Knight incredulously exclaims that the plant which killed her (by drowning, I guess?) is a "throwback" to the Cretaceous or earlier... as far as I know, dinosaurs were not eaten by giant carnivorous plants, but I guess if you don't care whether voodoo is Haitian or Hawaiian, you're not likely to care about palaeobotanical reality, either. Not long after, the group learns that there's another, more dangerous, "more carnivorous" (Knight's term, not mine, whatever the fuck it means) plant living on land. Adams is saved by some quick machete work from being the next victim. That night, perhaps awakened by Winters' death, Adams proclaims her ardent feelings for Gunn, and the two embrace for an embarrassingly-scripted fireside kiss. Finch, the next morning, decides for some reason to move away from the fire and attempt to get more sleep under the shelter of the nearby undergrowth. I understand that sometimes we all experience a bit of slow-mindedness in the morning, but given the imminent sense of danger likely shared by the group, and Finch's consistent protests against further exploration ever since the first discovery of carnivorous plants, this move seems less a demonstration of his fallibility as a character and more a convenient and really stupid plot device. The device operates curiously; when he's nearly eaten by carnivorous plants, rather than running back to the fire where there's a safe clearing, he runs... into the jungle. Like an asshole. Because of his stupid flight, he's then able to witness two native girls at play, one of whom steps into the newest type of carnivorous plant, whose immense leaves curl up around the victim as it presumably digests her. In some ways, this is one of the more effective scenes in the film, as this very innocent girl is subjected to lethal incarceration. In other ways, the ridiculously stupid and random setup really undercuts that effectiveness, because I don't see how this girl, young as she is, was raised in this jungle but never learned about this dangerous, snare-like plant, and yet Finch the wandering jackass somehow stumbled through a great deal of thick growth without getting attacked by anything. Finch doesn't return, and the group awakens surrounded by painted, spear-wielding, lai-wearing natives, who then guide them to their chief. Knight cautions everyone to go along with them; first, because the natives outnumber them and could slaughter them easily, and second, because it's clear to him that someone has been watching them the whole time, guiding them to the abandoned campsite, and that people have only been killed or menaced by the plants when they were foolish enough to wander off, away from the guided trails. So who's the mastermind of that whole plan, the point of which still escapes me? A white guy. Friedrich von Ledebur plays the role of the "native chief," who offers up some kind of narrative of having to island-hop to avoid the persecution of white people until his people were able to get to the center of this island of deadly plants, thus being protected from the outside world and rendered invisible. He explains all of this in what's clearly a German accent, which I guess in 1957 must've passed as an indigenous South Pacific accent. This is another legacy of racism which long haunted cinematic depictions of voodoo; behind every voodoo scheme, at least before the 1970s, was a white person who somehow had power over any darker-skinned practitioners. The case of Voodoo Island is unique in that sense, I guess, because the actor is white but they're trying to pass him off as native (kind of like that scene in Death Curse of Tartu where they try to pass twelve noon off as nighttime simply by acting like they're not sitting in broad daylight). Still, this might be the most jarringly absurd moment in the movie, because I could put war paint on my freckled, Irish-looking skin and pass as a Zulu warrior before von Ledebur could pass for a Pacific Islander chief. From there, the movie winds down. I mean, I guess the climax is still up ahead, but I'd argue that there's less of a climax than... well, the movie is basically an uneven plateau, full of minor ups and downs, which concludes by just kind of ending in mid-air, with you still wondering if anything is really going to happen. But if you're not cynical about it, the climax comes shortly after the discussion with the chief. Knight works his magic in persuading the chief that he'll keep the islanders' secret safe from the public, but Schuyler then protests because Knight promised him riches and fame, damnit! Consequently, the group gets tied up, and when they awaken the next morning, Schuyler has been replaced with a new voodoo doll. Soon after, Knight finds Schuyler behaving strangely on a bridge, and when Schuyler looks down, he sees the ghostly image of his own voodoo doll in the wooden planks and then flings himself off the bridge, dropping a fatal couple of yards into water that's probably as deep as he is tall. Knight, persuaded by whatever the fuck exactly happened, admits to Chief Friedrich that he lied the other day, but is now convinced that the voodoo powers of these natives are real, and so this time, he'll respect the agreement that last night he intended to renege on. This is somehow persuasive to these people whose oral history seems to focus on perpetual attempts to escape white persecution and treachery before accepting the dangers of an island filled with maneating plants in exchange for total isolation. The end. The movie is really not better than it sounds, although it's not absolutely horrible. It skirts around toxic levels of mediocrity, of that dangerous sort alluded to before. But as I said, I found some redeeming features in it. If you're going to bother tracking it down for any reason, I guess they'd be as follows: 1) Zombies. Zombies have at least some redemptive power most movies, although there are even less zombies in this film than Zombie Holocaust, and barely more than in the zombieless Zombie Island Massacre. Although Mitchell is repeatedly described as being like a dead man, he later actually dies... "zombie" here means mind control, and the mind control isn't really exercised for any particular purpose. Traditionally, zombies provided slave labor. Other mind-control zombie films of this era offered zombies as guards, assassins, or soldiers. This film... just kinda has them. Like in Zombie Holocaust, they're just there, and most of the danger is other tropical stuff like carnivorous plants. Zombies aren't really a redeeming feature here, but I thought I'd point that out more specifically because their inclusion at all makes this a "zombie film," which is exactly why I, for one, bothered to watch it at all. 2) The lesbian tensions between Winters and Adams are significant enough that I'd imagine some people might want to track it down. If the script ever comes close to not sucking, it's in Winters' exchanges with Adams and, separately, with Gunn. Unfortunately, the third side of that triangle, Gunn's exchanges with Adams, are extremely trite heteronormative crap, in which wisecracking and mutual loathing give way to passionate embraces and nighttime cliched confessions. 3) Karloff turns in, as stated, a very charismatic performance. Despite that Knight isn't particularly likable, Karloff makes him seem likable. As another online reviewer put it, it's not hard to see how Karloff's Knight could have become famous. His rational realist reductions of anything the least bit enigmatic today seem dated and arrogant, perhaps even more than they did in the 50s, but they still allow Karloff to make him an interesting character, all the more when he's paired with his assistant Adams. Beverly Tyler isn't given much to work with here, as she plays a pretty but cold assistant who's in love with Knight's rationalism and analytical acumen, but this does create an interesting relationship between the very charismatic and effervescently skeptical Knight, and his un-charismatic and "robot-like" assistant... though this relationship is later compromised, again, by Adams' being broken out of her shell by Gunn, who rescinds his assessment of her as a "push-button robot" only as she shrugs off the characteristics that inspired it. 4) The irrationality of the film is in some ways before its time. I think this is part of its ultimate failure; the writers clearly wanted to create a sense of un-reality at a time when there weren't many films whose lead they might follow. Bleeding plants, the voodoo ragdoll which serves no apparent purpose, the "death wishes" based on real magic (so goes the conclusion of the film) which don't end up being lethal, the trouble with the radio, etc.... These have been criticized elsewhere as loose ends of a script that never had a final draft. I'll throw out the possibility that, in fact, they were more deliberate attempts to undermine Knight's stolid positivism because--and I'm not trying to be cute here--there was no unity to their disunity. Knight and co. are about to enter a world where rationality defers to "black magic" and the unlikelihood of an entire island of maneating plants which apparently evolutionarily predate mankind by millenia upon millenia. The scattered phenomena really undermine the power of science: radios which stop working, doctors at a loss to explain Mitchell's condition (much less offer a cure), ship engines which fail, storms which exist only subjectively for the individuals inside one airplane, and plants which bleed... But wait, isn't that what any supernatural horror film does? Yeah, kinda, usually, but remember, this film is all about the conversion of a skeptic: for the first time in his life, Knight is led to admit that there's no rational, man-behind-the-curtain, damn-you-meddling-kids explanation for the phenomena the group has experienced. Each phenomenon builds up to that climax, forcing Knight to assume an ever-greater orchestration of a bigger and bigger hoax, until finally the hoax becomes too vast to be a hoax at all. This adds up to an attempt, I think, to achieve the same sort of unreality which Fulci, for instance, attempted. The attempt is just very ham-handed and lacks the subtlety and completeness which would have made the writers' intentions clearer, and their vision more evocative. ...of course, if they'd actually had more vision, this would be a better movie. It's never clear what causes the wind to pick up, and supernatural storms to appear, and radios not to work. Is someone specifically practicing voodoo magic? Is it just the magical power of the island? Probably the former, but we never learn any properties of that magic, and so the island becomes a metonym for voodoo, which itself is basically reduced to a symbol of the limitations of science. Unfortunately, when the symbol is more important to the writers than its manifestation in the story, it ends up falling flat and lifeless, and being confusing to boot. The overarching point is, I guess, that regardless of its shortcomings and weaknesses, this film does exist. I'd recommend it to you only if one of the four above points really strikes your fancy. If you just want to see Karloff in a zombie movie, I would strongly suggest The Snake People instead; it has more zombies, and a crazed dwarf. But if you're interested in the history of zombie films in America, as I've tried to note above, this film embodies all at once a number of the distinctive features of the zombie's meandering geographic basis and conceptual identity before Romero established a new model which wasn't limited to the exclusionary category of "exotica". White guys in power behind the dark-skinned natives, transplantation across tropical locales, a lack of differentiation between voodoo and any other tropical island religions, and a very selective definition of the zombie... these things are all there. So if that's your deal, then like I said, this movie... exists. Labels: Horror: Creepy Cults, Horror: Zombies, Year: 1957 posted by Ryan at 3:51 AM | 0 Comments Wednesday, October 17, 2007Devils of Darkness Release Year: 1965Country: England Starring: William Sylvester, Hubert Noel, Carole Gray, Tracy Reed, Diana Decker, Rona Anderson, Peter Illing. Written by Lyn Fairhurst. Writer: Lyn Fairhurst Director: Lance Comfort Cinematographer: Reg Wyer Producer: Tom Blakeley Music: Bernie Fenton Alternate Titles: Talisman Availability: Buy it from Amazon  .So let's say, just for the sake of argument, you're a vampire. Not one of those post-Anne Rice vampires with the leather trenchcoat and the bad poetry and the ill-advised appreciation of Pigface. No, I'm talking about one of those older, more distinguished vampires. Not too bad, huh? I mean, yeah, there are drawbacks. I, for one, would miss the sun and a good day's surfing. On the other hand, if you were to become any monster, a vampire would be pretty sweet. A mummy or Frankenstein monster would be the worst, of course. Mummies only have one outfit, and they have to spend the entire afterlife shambling around in pursuit of some dame who looks like some other dame the mummy loved back in ancient Egypt, and then a dude in a tweed jacket sets you on fire. And Frankenstein monsters have to do pretty much the same thing in terms of shambling, though at the very least they get to smoke cigars and drink wine. As for werewolves -- sure, cool power, but you have no control over it, it only happens once a month, you can't remember anything afterward, and your clothes are constantly getting ruined by your transformations. But vampires -- vampires are all right. Yeah, there's the sun thing. And you're going to have to put up with the occasional fat goth girl who calls herself Cassandra and wants to read you her Lestat fanfic. But luckily, when that happens, all you have to do is turn into a bat or some mist and get out of there. And like Keifer Sutherland, or maybe Wilford Brimley, said, you won't get any older and you won't ever die. Not unless someone kills you in one of the various ways a vampire can be killed -- but honestly, what are the chances of that? Have you seen the people who believe in vampires? They're not all Blade-y and full of kungfu fury. They're fat goth girls who call themselves Cassandra and want to read you their Lestat fanfic they wrote in their notebook with the Sisters of Mercy logo drawn on the cover. And what's the deal with all the kungfu fighting with vampires? Seriously, who fights a vampire with kungfu? All the vampire has to do is turn into some fog and wait it out while the vampire killer spin kicks himself into a state of exhaustion. Plus, you're like ten times stronger than a human anyway, so big deal with your kungfu.
So let's say you are a vampire who has survived through the ages. Also, your name is Sinistre. That would be a pretty cool name, at least until you realize that a vampire might have trouble being named Sinistre, because it's the kind of name that sticks out. You might as well be called Spooky McGhoul or Gregor O'Bloodsucker. I think if I was a vampire named Count Sinistre, no matter how cool that would look in album liner notes, I'd probably change my name to Steve Smith or Mike McGill in order to maybe not stand out as much and attract the attention of Cassandra. But that's neither here nor there, and I've been over the territory of fruity vampire names before (hint for all vampires: no one is named Tristan anymore except for porn stars). You're a vampire, and your name is Count Sinistre. Pretty cool, right? But no, you're not satisfied with just being a vampire named Sinistre with all your vampire named Sinistre powers like flying and commanding the will of rats. Like a greedy corporate raider, you want more, more, more. And so you also appoint yourself the head of a Satanic cult comprised largely of mod young hipsters and sophisticated older folks who, when they aren't busy gadding about in bright red devil cloaks, like to talk about antiques and collectibles, sort of like if The Monkees, Anton LaVey, and Antiques Roadshow all got in a car wreck. But such is the ambition of Count Sinistre, menacing vampire leader of the Satanic cult in Devils of Darkness, a previously forgotten horror film in the vein of AIP's Poe films or Hammer fare like The Devil Rides Out. Devils of Darkness pits our sinister Sinistre against -- well, basically, it pits him against a dad from some early 60s sitcom in a veritable whirlwind of opera capes and devil cloaks versus cardigan sweaters and well-pressed slacks. This is the sort of movie where square-jawed everymen sit on couches with their legs crossed and stare intently at their cigarettes while saying things like, "Vampires? But this is the 20th century!" and everyone seems to know a guy who happens to be a professor of the occult. You know, I went to college, and all I learned about was physics and John Adams and whatever the hell it was I didn't pay attention to in that macroeconomics class everyone was required to take to get into the school of journalism. As far as I know, there were no professors whose entire tenure at the university involved them sitting around giving speeches about Pazuzu and magick circles, but maybe I just didn't take the proper classes. Or maybe by going to a public university in America, all I got to learn about was the coefficient of friction and the tragedy of the commons while guys at upper-crust British colleges got to learn about wizards and Ouija boards and how to set rampaging mummies on fire.
Lucky for me that I love movies where guys in sweaters sit around in well-appointed dens, smoking cigarettes and saying, "But you can't entirely discount the stories of vampires" as they drink brandy or some other beverage only Peter Cushing drinks. Lucky for me that I love movies where people put on bright red devil cloaks and hang around in old basements, drawing circles on the floor and lying out scantily clad kidnapped women on stone altars. Devils of Darkness is exactly the kind of fun, old fashioned horror film that makes me happy, so I was pretty happy watching it. William Sylvester stars as the aptly named Paul Baxter -- these guys always have exactly the sort of name you expect them to have -- on vacation with friends and loved ones in some remote part of France where gypsies frolic and dance and emerge from the shadows to point at you and administer ominous proclamations regarding your fate. You know -- the usual gypsy stuff. It turns out that this quaint little vacation village is lorded over by the sinister Count Sinistre, played with Udo Kier-like effete weirdness by Hubert Noel. The exact nature of the seemingly benign Sinistre is called into question when all of Paul's friends start vanishing or turning up dead. Unfortunately, the local police are no help, and when Paul attempts to have the bodies returned to England for examination, all the coffins go missing. Luckily, while all the French are busy being hypnotized and submitting to the will of Sinistre, Paul and some other guys in England are on the case. But then, so is Sinistre, who trails Paul to England to retrieve a talisman and set up a new cult with acolytes culled from the bored and decadent fringes of wealthy society. When Paul falls for an aloof model, Sinistre targets her to become his next bride, something vampires are always doing. How many times did Dracula try to seduce the daughter or granddaughter of some rival? These guys would die a lot less often if they could lay off trying to marry the daughter or girlfriend of their arch enemies. If you like the old style horror of Roger Corman's Poe films, or if you like what I'll call the Hammer B-Team (meaning, not Dracula or Frankenstein) movies from the 60s, then I think Devils of Darkness will please you. It's brightly colored, especially when everyone throws on their devil cloaks, solidly lensed, and ably acted by a cast of B-movie stalwarts who never turn in anything less than a professional performance. William Sylvester is a bit stiff as Paul, but since Paul is a bit of a stiff, that suits him well. Sylvester was a veteran television actor with some notable appearances in a couple B-movie faves, including Devil Doll and Gorgo. His role with the highest profile was probably as Dr. Heywood Floyd, creator of HAL, in 2001: A Space Odyssey, though honestly, who remembers any of the human characters besides Dave from that movie? As the straight man fighting the occult and going to the library to look up ghoulish subject matter, he's all right.
The star of the film is the villain, of course, and as Sinistre he's perfectly creepy and menacing even though he doesn't have the sort of build one would consider menacing. Hubert Noel. Noel was an accomplished actor in France with appearances in a ton of films, often period pieces, that I've never seen but would like to, because they all seem to be full of cavaliers and highwaymen. Like many continental actors tapped to play vaguely menacing, vaguely effeminate villains, the strength of their native career doesn't really translate into international stardom, unless you count the apt appearance of Noel as "Citroen Driver" in an episode of CHiPs. Still, as Sinistre, he's pretty great, and he's convincing as a guy who could work some magic on ladies, especially when he backs it up with his vampiric mojo. The female spotlight is on two actresses: Tracy Reed plays Karin, the model for whom Paul falls, and Carole Gray plays Tania, the gypsy woman who was Sinistre previous main squeeze until Tania came along. Karin barely registers, as she shows up, wears some sunglasses, then spends the bulk of the film lying in a bed or sitting listlessly in a trance. But Carole Gray's gypsy Tania is a fireball of beauty and rage, introduced to us via one of those colorful gypsy dance numbers that are always happening. She didn't have much a career -- a couple appearances here and there on television shows like The Avengers and The Saint, a role in Brides of Fu Manchu -- and I can't understand why, because she's quite engaging in her role here as the vampire woman scorned.
The rest of the cast is comprised largely of people who have to chant about Satan and wear devil cloaks, or make speeches about the possibility or improbability of vampires in modern society. The basic philosophy is summed up by Paul Baxter's professor friend, played ably by Eddie Byrne (The Mummy, Hammer version). As he explains, there were trials for witchcraft up until the 1920s, and in many places, belief in the supernatural remains the mainstream rather than a fringe belief as it would be in modern London. Vampire movies that attempt to transport a basically Victorian character into modern times have to tackle the "unstuck in time" aspect of their character in a variety of ways. Dracula A.D. 1972 does it by confining Dracula to a single location, which happens to be Gothic in design. Satanic Rites of Dracula does it by dropping pretty much everything that made Dracula Dracula and turning him into a pulp novel style super-villain straight out a James Bond movie. Devils of Darkness takes the same route as the American Count Yorga films, allowing Sinistre to operate first in a somewhat small (though by no means remote) village where he can exercise his will over the locals and leverage the innate superstition of the local gypsy population. When he comes to London, he survives by moving in relatively small circles on the fringe of polite society -- rich decadent freaks, the kind I want to be friends with so I can sit around in posh dens, smoking hookahs and debating philosophy and the supernatural in a bored tone as a naked girl covered in body paint flowers dances on a table in front of me. I have failed at so many of my former life goals.
Sinistre covers his vampire tracks, more or less, by becoming a member of a social circle that values odd behavior and late nights. Anything out of the ordinary he may say or do is casually disregarded (yes, this means that those vampires who hang out in industrial clubs are a logical evolution of guys like Sinistre, but there's still no excuse for their woe-is-me self-ildulgences). He is an artist, after all, and an eastern European. He further controls his environment and expands the power of his influence by tightly controlling where he is seen and by whom. He hangs round an antique store, goes to parties at the pad above the store, and holds his Satanic rituals in an old, remote farmhouse near a cemetery. By and large, he has adapted well to his surroundings -- it is unclear whether he has been around for hundreds of years, changing with the times, or whether he has recently been resurrected by some ritual that involves, frankly, little more than the lighting of a candle that causes his stone sarcophagus to collapse, presumably on Sinistre's face. What parts of modern society to which he has not been able to adapt he has keenly excised from his life. Once again, you find a similar evolution of the vampire in Count Yorga, who hangs around a remote farmhouse and befriends people who are already flaky and into the occult.
As with many B-movies, there are points at which you can poke around and find some flaws in the film. In particular, the script by Lyn Fairhurst places an undue amount of importance on Sinistre's talisman. It is pegged as the source of the vampire's influence over others, so valuable to Sinistre that he would risk coming all the way to London and exposing himself on order to retrieve it. And yet, the loss of the talisman doesn't seem to have any impact whatsoever on his power. He still manages to hypnotize and convert a whole room full of revelers in a remarkably short period of time, and once he fixates on Karin, he forgets the talisman almost completely. I think he just thought it was cool and was afraid Paul would pull some nonsense like putting it on a thick gold chain and wearing it around. And as is often the case, everyone from Paul to the police are pretty quick to shrug their shoulders and go, "Yep, must be a Satanic cult lead by a vampire." Additionally, Baxter and Sinistre never really go toe-to-toe. There is no battle of wits or battle of fists, and when the final showdown does come Sinistre is quick to turn and run. Dracula usually turned and ran, too, but he would hiss while he was doing it, and usually take at least a little time out to throw Peter Cushing across a table. But all in all, I think the story for Devils of Darkness is well written and executed. It could be simply because I like movies of this sort, but even though much of the film is research and guys sitting around, smoking cigarettes, and talking about vampires, I didn't feel the movie dragged. The tight direction by Lance Comfort (sounds like a character from a romance novel, the less threatening cousin of Rock Slabchest) adds to the feeling that something is happening even when very little is. There is almost no on-screen violence and very little blood, but Comfort's eye for composition is great, and he creates an otherworldly atmosphere that carries the otherwise dialog-heavy film. Additionally, though this was a low-budget affair, Comfort had access to Pinewood Studio's massive pile of old sets, and so he could pilfer the goods from much more expensive films to dress him own modest production in much fancier duds than it might otherwise have had access to.
Although the main villain is a vampire, this is much more like Hammer's The Devil Rides Out than it is any vampire film. Sinistre feels similar to Charles Gray's ominous Mocata than he does Dracula. He's sort of like a dry run for Mocata. Not nearly as imposing but still ominous enough despite his slight build. William Sylvester's Baxter is certainly no Duc de Richleau, but then Duc de Richleau was one of Christopher Lee's best roles. It's also very similar to AIP's color horror output, both in look and execution. Corman's Poe films were always heavy on dialog and atmosphere, and the juxtaposition of bleak, decaying sets with vivid colors. Like the Poe films, Devils of Darkness moves slowly until the enthusiastic finale when all hell -- literally, more or less -- breaks loose. Ultimately, it may be a lesser devil cult film, but it was one of the earlier "vampire in post-war times" movies, and one of the only "vampire leads a Satanic cult" movies. It may far short of the mark set by two of the best examples of occult thriller's -- Hammer's The Devil Rides Out and Jacques Tournier's Night of the Demon (which I would assume was a major influence on Devils of Darkness), but I still think Devils of Darkness, especially if you like the AIP Poe films or don't mind lots of dialog, is a good old-fashioned occult thriller that winds up being a great way to spend midnight, provided you don't have any decadent rich parties that devolve into an orgiastic ritual lorded over by a vampire to attend at midnight. Labels: Horror: Creepy Cults, Horror: Satan, Horror: Vampires, Year: 1965 posted by Keith at 3:06 PM | 5 Comments Thursday, October 11, 2007Satanic Rites of Dracula Release Year: 1974Country: England Starring: Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Michael Coles, Joanna Lumley, William Franklyn, Freddie Jones, Richard Vernon, Barbara Yu Ling, Patrick Barr, Richard Mathews. Writer: Don Houghton Director: Alan Gibson Cinematographer: Brian Probyn Music: John Cacavas Producer: Roy Skeggs Availability: Buy it from Amazon  Promote It: Digg | del.icio.us What a long, strange trip it's been for Hammer Studio's lord of the undead, the prince of darkness, the king of vampires, Count Dracula. When first we met him back in 1958, he was a snarling beast, a barely contained force of nature that ripped into his prey with lusty abandon and was explained by his arch-nemesis Dr. Van Helsing in purely rational, scientific terms. Dracula, and vampirism in general (as expounded upon by Van Helsing in Brides of Dracula), was nothing more than a disease, like any other disease, and what we regarded as "supernatural" was really nothing more than an explainable part of the rational world that humanity had simply not yet learned how to explain. As Hammer's Dracula series progressed, however, Van Helsing faded from the picture and was replaced by a procession of forgettable guys named Paul, usually in league with some sort of religious authority figure. In Dracula, Prince of Darkness, we have a monsignor who seems to have some degree of faith in faith's ability to defeat Dracula, but he's far more reliant on his trusty bolt-action rifle than he is on the Lord Almighty. With the next film after that, however, Dracula Has Risen from the Grave, Van Helsing's assertion that Dracula could be defeated by reason and science was beginning to fade. Dracula Has Risen from the Grave is a transitional film, one in which an atheist who would seem to share Van Helsing's belief that vampirism is a virus and not a function of the supernatural, begins to doubt his faith in science just as he begins to doubt his doubt of Christianity. When Dracula is felled by a bolt of lightning, we are left to wonder: is this science -- a metal lightning rod, an explainable weather phenomenon -- or an act of God -- lightning strikes being the most common weather-related act of God, after the rain of frogs. After that film, however, there is no doubt as to Dracula's nature. In Taste the Blood of Dracula, he is recast as a satanic demon, summoned by black mass rituals. This trend of "religionizing" Dracula continued in Dracula AD 1972 despite the return of a Van Helsing to the scene. Where as the Lawrence Van Helsing of Horror of Dracula and Brides of Dracula regarded vampirism as a scientific issue, his descendant Lorimar Van Helsing sees it as a mystical issue of the occult, like witchcraft or devil worship. Dracula is once again summoned by occult rituals (not to mention Caroline Munro's half-clothed writhing), and where you might think that placing the Victorian vampire in a modern setting alongside a modern Van Helsing, would prove an opportunity to revive the concept of Dracula as scientific problem and biological oddity, it never really happens. I think there is one token utterance of, "Vampires? But surely you must be joking, man! This is the 20th century!" but that is quickly dismissed as everyone from Van Helsing to the police are quick to accept the supernatural and rattle on endlessly about the occult. At this point, Dracula is less a vampire and more a full-fledged demon, perhaps even the embodiment of Satan himself.
One would assume, then, that with a title like The Satanic Rites of Dracula, the sequel would follow in the footsteps of turning Dracula into a religious anti-icon. But then, honestly, what more can be done to make him Lucifer incarnate than having him summoned by rituals and pentagrams and strange runes? Are they going to make him don a silky red Danskin and gad about with a pitchfork? Dracula AD 1972 was already a rehash of Taste the Blood of Dracula, and while Hammer's Dracula films have never shied away from rehash, it seemed like the evolution of the count was complete. What was left to do? The correct answer is, "Nothing." Just don't make another Dracula film. Make Christopher Lee happy, and just lower the curtain on the series. It had a good run. A few missteps here and there, sure, but all in all, Hammer's Dracula films were a pretty solid lot, even at their worst. Dracula AD 1972 had been a somewhat desperate attempt to modernize the franchise, and it was met with mixed reactions, at best. So just let the sleeping corpse lie, this time. Christopher Lee was already printing up his leaflets to be dropped from a plane over London, explaining to any who found them that he was never going to play Dracula again, ever. Save the guy some effort, people said, and maybe he'll start talking about something else besides how everyone just talks to him about Dracula, instead of mentioning some of his other classic work, like Circus of Fear. Come on -- Chris Lee and Klaus Kinski? That's a power duo, my friends. But Hammer had nowhere else to go. They couldn't get new stars or new franchises launched. The entire British film industry was in a tailspin, and Hammer was even worse off than most. Not knowing what else to do, they commissioned Dracula AD 1972 writer Don Houghton and director Alan Gibson to make yet another Dracula movie, causing Christopher Lee's eyes to turn blood red as he launched into a furious string of interviews about how awful the Dracula movies were and he sure as hell wouldn't...look, seriously. By this point, you know how this ends, right?
So with "nowhere" no longer being a viable answer to the question of where Dracula goes from AD 1972, what would Houghton do? Could they serve up the same old, same old one more time and get away with it? Unlikely. In fact, it was unlikely they could get away with anything they served up. Dracula was DOA at the box office no matter what they did. This last movie was just going to be a post-mortem nervous twitch. So what the hell? Why not bring the whole thing to its oddly logical extreme, the only place left for Dracula to go? And so, despite the occult title meant no doubt to cash in on the sudden popularity of devil worshiper films (working titles for the film included Dracula and his Vampire Brides and Dracula is Dead and Well and Living in London), Satanic Rites of Dracula takes the persistently undead vampire from satanic bogeyman and propels him into the realm of the James Bond villain or, perhaps more appropriately given the quality of the final film and the return of Christopher Lee to the role of Dracula, Fu Manchu. No longer is Dracula a savage beast. No longer is he a biological mutation. No longer is he a ghoul lurking in the overgrown corners of shadowy gothic buildings. No longer is he a demon. With Satanic Rites of Dracula, he becomes a super-villain, complete with a secret lair, henchmen, kidnapped scientists, and dreams of global conquest. That the film really does contain satanic rites is superficial. This movie begins, like Dracula A.D. 1972, with the action already in progress. A determined Professor Lorrimer Van Helsing (Peter Cushing, once again) chases the murderous vampire Count Dracula into a swanky London nightclub jammed wall to wall with zoned-out teens dancing to some nondescript psych-funk like you were wont to find in films from the 1970s that couldn't afford to license songs from established artists. In an attempt to blend in with the youthful revelers and shake his pursuer, Dracula dons a big, bulbous pair of sunglasses and a paisley print cap. Finding himself hemmed in by the revelers, Van Helsing discovers that the only possibility he has of making his way across the dance floor to Dracula is by dancing his way across. And so we get the now immortal scene of Peter Cushing, still dressed more or less like a guy from the Victorian era even though this is the 1970s, doing the Watusi across the crowded nightclub, while dazed ravers look on in admiration and even begin mimicking Cushing's spastic moves.
OK, maybe not, That is not a scene from The Satanic Rites of Dracula. It's actually from a different movie, called Dracula Goes Mad in Chelsea, but since prints of that movie are almost impossible to find, we won't speak any more about it (even Christopher Lee himself has admitted to be unable to find a copy on any format for his personal library). However, given the unintentional camp value of Hammer's Dracula A.D. 1972, one could half expect that, when Hammer announced a sequel film also set in the 1970s, we would get scenes as corny as Dracula in mod sunglasses and an exasperated Peter Cushing doing the mashed potato with some cute young chick as he tries to explain the importance of leaving the dance floor to continue his pursuit of his arch-nemesis. When it was further announced that the writing-directing team of Don Houghton and Alan Gibson would be returning for the sequel, such scenes seemed almost inevitable. It was not the case, however, leaving the scenes of Van Helsing cutting the rug and Dracula smoking a bong to appear in the obscure (and by obscure, I mean "entirely made up") Dracula Goes Mad in Chelsea, which some people refer to mistakenly though not inappropriately as Dracula Goes Mod in Chelsea. No, this film actually begins with a satanic rite, some gratuitous nudity to let us know this is the 1970s, and then an action sequence in which some guy who looks like a cross between Burt Reynolds and Saddam Hussein escapes from a building guarded by bikers with droopy Louis Tiant mustaches and sheepskin vests. They totally look like something out of Marvel's Tomb of Dracula comic book, and in fact much of what happens in this movie seems far more at home in the pages of Tomb of Dracula than it does in a Hammer Dracula movie -- which I guess is the trick. When you keep making Hammer vampire movies, everyone complains about it being just another stodgy old Hammer vampire film. When you switch it up and do something new, everyone complains that it's not enough like a stodgy old Hammer vampire film. Although my initial assumption was that this escaping guy was some horrific experiment concocted by Dracula (possibly with the help of Frankenstein) to combine the iron will and ruthlessness of Saddam with the down home sex appeal and amusing laugh of Burt Reynolds, thus creating the ultimate world conqueror (sort of like Serpentor, but with a big mustache). It turns out that this guy is actually an undercover agent sent in to investigate the mysterious Pelham House rituals, which seem to include a group of the richest, most powerful men in England. The problem is that the head of the group investigating Pelham House also happens to be one of the guys attending the Pelham House rites, thus making an official investigation impossible. So they call in Inspector Murray from the last film, reprised by Michael Coles. Coles, in turn, hears the agent's crazy ranting about rituals and blood sacrifice and devil cloaks and immediately places a call to Van Helsing, played once again by Peter Cushing, who smokes his cigarettes with more intensity than ever. Cushing sure knew how to smoke a cigarette on screen, but he didn't just smoke a cigarette; he smoked the hell out of a cigarette, with lots of clenching and staring at it in quiet contemplation. I think the biggest problem with Star Wars is that they didn't let Peter Cushing smoke on the Death Star. Honestly, you could make a whole movie of nothing but Peter Cushing smoking cigarettes and flipping through books and peering through a magnifying glass, and I'd probably think it was pretty good since he did those things with such conviction and more gusto than most actors would put into an action scene.
While Van Helsing investigates an old colleague who is among the Pelham House acolytes, Murray and Jessica Van Helsing (being played this movie by Joanna Lumley of New Avengers and Absolutely Fabulous fame) go to investigate Pelham House itself. Van Helsing discovers that his old friend has created a super-plague for someone at Pelham House. Murray discovers that the basement of Pelham House is full of half naked vampire chicks. Jessica screams. And of course, we eventually discover that the shadowy billionaire recluse behind the Pelham House plot is Dracula! It seems that even Dracula is getting tired of being revived and has decided that the only way he can end his existence is to end all life on earth. That way he will have no one feed on, and he won't have to worry about cocky mods or Chinese women summoning back up through goofy rituals. Dracula has used his powers of persuasion to control the aforementioned most powerful men in England, and he intends to use them to spread the plague throughout the world and finally put an end to everything. But despite his Fu Manchu aspirations and new corporate benevolent society, Dracula can't entirely let go of the past. Pelham House is an uncomfortable mix of 70s sci-fi stuff and Victorian frilliness, and he still wants to piss off Van Helsing by turning Jessica into Dracula's vampire bride. At least Dracula's final solution is a super-virulent strain of bubonic plague. As far as super-villain super-weapons go, that's a pretty good one. Plus, it's a vampire distributing the plague, and not just some bald guy in a fancy jacket, as is usually the case. It's much better than if Dracula had scheduled a meeting with Van Helsing at the office (which does happen, by the way) and unveiled a new super laser that can blow airliners out of the sky! But still, all this plague talk is far, far away from the expected Dracula territory. He surrounds himself with the trappings of previous Dracula hobbies: the vampire brides in the basement, for example, and floral print wallpaper of questionable tastefulness, but his heart hardly seems in it this time. And yeah, he throws the cape on and appears in backlit mist to scare someone, but he doesn't stick with it throughout the movie. Even his plan to irk Van Helsing by marrying Jessica seems more like something he feels like he has to do than something he wants to do. Just another item on his corporate CEO to-do list.
In a way, I suppose this plays in with the plot of the movie, that Dracula is sick of it all, maybe even sicker of it all than audiences watching his movies, and despite Van Helsing's best efforts, people just keep bringing Dracula back. His resurrection in Satanic Rites of Dracula takes place well before the film begins, but one can almost assume that when it happened, Dracula looked at himself and just thought, "Seriously? I mean, seriously?" There are almost as many ways to bring this guy back as there are to kill him in the first place, and Dracula seems positively suicidal this time around, scattering his house with bits of old wood and such. But ultimately, he knows a stake in the heart will probably just kill him for a little while, so all of mankind must be destroyed so the lord of the dead can get some fucking sleep. Even the final showdown between Van Helsing and Dracula seems suicidal. Dracula is lured into some Hawthorne bushes, which being the thorns that were used to make Christ's crown of thorns, are deadly to a vampire. And Dracula gets caught in the bush basically because Van Helsing stands on the other side and yells, "Hey, come get me!" Surely Dracula knows about the bush. I mean, Van Helsing knows all sorts of ways to kill Dracula, so you'd think that Dracula himself would have researched the subject, although I will admit that every time he dies in a new way, he seems surprised, sort of like, "Are you kidding me? This, too? I can be killed by this, too?" Whatever the case, Dracula plunged headlong into the thorns, which is something most people wouldn't do even if they weren't' prone to turning into a time-lapsed decaying corpse as a result. Despite the fact that Satanic Rites of Dracula was written and directed by the same crew and has largely the same cast of adults, it bears little resemblance to AD 1972 or any of the previous Dracula films. Not just because of the Fu Manchu plot, but also because it entirely eschews the colorful nature of past films and opts instead for an oppressively bleak atmosphere populated by washed out skies, overcast days, and tired looking men in drab flared suits. Like Dracula, like the audience, everyone just seems worn out. Not that they aren't game for another go-round, mind you. This is a solid British cast, after all, and no one is going to do anything but their best. Cushing is as he always is; Lee is the same; Michael Coles is a welcome familiar face from the last film, someone to whom we can relate, and while Joanna Lumley is fine as Jessica, she really has little to do beyond scream and warn people about vampires too late. So I guess it's not so much a tiredness as it is a...let's say world-weariness. I don't want to read more into the film than there is, but it really does give off a sense of the meta, that the threadbare worn-out nature of the series is reflected in the characters.
As a Dracula film, I can't call it a success. Dracula has always been a supporting player his own movies, but here he's less like Dracula than ever before, taking on instead the role of Howard Hughes meets Blofeld (or, alternately, Blofeld in Diamonds are Forever). As a whacked out sort of spy film, it almost works. It's a bit too boring and far too serious to really capture the spirit of that genre, though. Instead, we have a beast that is neither fish nor foul, and not very good at doing much of anything. There are embers of a good movie here, meaning that I can't entirely dismiss it, but you have to blow on those embers pretty furiously to generate any sort of warmth. The initial idea, that of turning Dracula into a tired man whose sole final option is to destroy everything in order to destroy himself, is worth exploring, but where Don Houghton come sup with a great premise, he can't really deliver a great script. It plods along, and there are even more holes and contrivances than usual. I feel like, had this movie been written by someone like Brian Clemens (who wrote Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter, and because of his experience working on The Avengers, would have been more at home with the loopier aspect of Dracula-as-Blofeld), it would have had a much better chance for success. At the very least, had it been a bit less heavy-handed and plodding, it could have gotten by on the quirkiness of the premise, maybe even been something like Scream and Scream Again, a film (featuring Lee and Cushing, no less) that mixes espionage thrills, science fiction, horror, and general weirdness far better than Satanic Rites of Dracula. Instead, Houghton's no-nonsense but not well written script doesn't do the high concept justice. If there is a highlight to the film, other than Peter Cushing's emphatic smoking of cigarettes, it's the theme song and ensuing score, which have far more life in them than the movie itself. Following the lead of Dracula AD 1972, John Cacavas contributes a theme song that is even cooler and funkier than the last one. It deserves to be played over a scene where Dracula -- still in his cape and black suit, of course -- fights a gang of drug dealers in slow motion a la Superfly. The rest of the score is variations on this theme, and it's pretty good stuff. Cacavas also wrote the score for Horror Express, one of my very favorite horror-meets-scifi films, also starring Cushing and Lee and released around the same time as Satanic Rites of Dracula, which could have really used Telly Savalas in a big Cossack coat swaggering onscreen and punching out those dudes in the sheepskin vests. Perhaps the most disappointing thing about Satanic Rites of Dracula is that it lacks a sense of finality. Given the plot, given Dracula's admittedly effective monologue about wanting to die and watch the whole world burn with him, the final act is sorely lacking. When the end comes, it's pretty much a blase, "Oh, so it's a Hawthorne bush this time then, is it?" It's no different than any of Dracula's other many deaths. I don't expect that Dracula would be allowed to succeed in some way with his mad scheme -- though that sort of cynical conclusion wouldn't have been out of step at all with the current trend in horror films, where the bad guys very often won -- but after all the apocalyptic talk, after the world-weary feeling permeating the film, at the very least what I wanted from the end was something that said, once and for all, it really was over this time. As it stands, Satanic Rites of Dracula ends in a way where Dracula could be getting resurrected yet again a week later, same as always.
For Lee, this really was the end, but it's hard to claim he finally made good on his boasts. More than likely, had Hammer made another Dracula film, he would have shown up, under protest no doubt but present never the less. Instead, Hammer went out of business after allowing Satanic Rites of Dracula in 1974 and To the Devil...A Daughter in 1976 to effectively kill the company off. Like Dracula, they deserved better at the end, but if they'd had better, it probably wouldn't have been the end, so what can you do? Cushing reprised the role of Van Helsing one more time, returning to the Victorian era but this time to China for the completely nonsensical but still fun Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires. That film does feature Dracula, but since he transforms into a Chinese guy at the beginning of the film, and since the film itself doesn't really jibe with the continuity of the previous film, it's not really part of the Dracula series and instead plays out like an alternate universe take, similar to The Evil of Frankenstein. Both Cushing and Lee would go on to make much better horror films than this one, as well as few that were much worse. It's not a great way to end a series that gave us so many wonderful films. With the relatively poor performance of Dracula AD 1972 at the box office, distributors suddenly weren't interested in Satanic Rites of Dracula. It took years before it found its way to American screens. Where as a Dracula film starring Cushing and Lee would have been a simple sell even a few years earlier, by 1974 it was all over, and the quality of Satanic Rites of Dracula is a perfect example of why. It's too bad the series couldn't muster a better send-off, because while the concept isn't bad and the idea was good, the final execution simply lacked the sophistication, energy, and magic that the film deserved.  Labels: Horror: Creepy Cults, Horror: Dracula, Horror: Vampires, Series: Vampires in the 70s, Stars: Christopher Lee, Stars: Peter Cushing, Studio: Hammer, Year: 1974 posted by Keith at 3:38 PM | 19 Comments Monday, October 08, 2007Dracula A.D. 1972 Release Year: 1972Country: England Starring: Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Stephanie Beacham, Christopher Neame, Caroline Munro, Marhsa Hunt, Michael Coles. Writer: Don Houghton Director: Alan Gibson Cinematographer: Dick Bush Music: Michael Vickers Producer: Josephine Douglas Availability: Buy it from Amazon  Promote It: Digg | del.icio.us And so we enter the dire straights of Hammer Films in the final throes of a long, drawn-out death much like those experienced by Dracula himself. As has been detailed elsewhere and will be summarized here, by the 1970s, England's Hammer Studios -- the studio that pretty much defined and dominated the horror market through the 50s and 60s -- had fallen on hard times. The old guard had largely retired or died, and the new blood was flailing about, desperately trying to find the direction that would right the once mighty production house. The problem was that everyone felt like they needed to update their image, but no one actually knew how. In retrospect, though they may have seemed painfully antiquated at the time of their release, many of Hammer's releases during the 70s were quite good and often experimental (by Hammer standards, anyway). This movie isn't really one of them, but it's still pretty enjoyable in a completely ludicrous way. Unfortunately, even Hammer's good films in the 1970s simply weren't in step with contemporary trends in horror films. No one wanted to see a gothic horror anymore, not in this new era of slasher movies and stuff where devil worshipers listlessly chant about Satan and then hassle Warren Oates and Hot Lips Houlihan.
Hammer tried to launch several new properties that were variations on their old themes, and several of these showed considerable promise. Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter was a spectacular horror-adventure film that mixed classic Hammer atmosphere with a more playful, swashbuckling tone. Although Twins of Evil is best remembered for the prominent assets of its two Playboy Playmate co-stars, underneath the cheesecake nudity is another very good film. And Vampire Circus was one of Hammer's most experimental vampire films, integrating a hallucinogenic, dreamlike state into Hammer's formerly all-business approach. But these films either didn't perform well at the box office, or studio executives didn't have any faith in them. In the end, Hammer decided to return to the same-old, same-old, and audiences got new Dracula, Frankenstein, and mummy movies. With each of these, Hammer tried something different. The mummy movie, 1971's Blood from the Mummy's Tomb, was adapted from a Bram Stoker novel and deals with a mummy's curse but contains no actual mummies. 1974's Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell was roundly lambasted for its ridiculous monster make-up (a hairy caveman design featuring a face mask where the lips don't move when the actor talks), but if one can get past that, it's an exceptionally well thought-out final entry for the series, completing Baron Frankenstein's journey from slightly cold man of science on the verge of a miraculous breakthrough to completely disconnected butcher engaged in pointless, crude retreads of his old experiments. And then there was Dracula. Hammer's Dracula series started out with a promising entry, 1970's Taste the Blood of Dracula. The original idea behind that movie had been to, as with Brides of Dracula so many years before, make movie in which Dracula is an ever-present force and invoked name but not an actual on-screen character. Distributors balked at the idea of a Dracula-free Dracula movie, especially when there was no name star onto which they could hook their wagon as an alternate. Brides may not have featured Christopher Lee as Dracula, but at least it had Peter Cushing reprising his role as Van Helsing. Taste the Blood, on the other hand, revolves around young Ralph Bates, an actor Hammer had hopes of turning into their next big thing, though it never really happened. And so Hammer somehow convinced Christopher Lee to sign on yet again for one absolutely final appearance as the count. The result is a great entry in the Dracula series, and sensing that there was still some gas left in the tank, Hammer decided to give it another go. Scars of Dracula is a pretty bad movie, a major step backward after a good movie, showcasing Hammer filmmaking at its most profit driven, but it also stands out as the only film where Dracula is a major character, with lots of screentime and lines. It was enough to do the trick at the box office, and so to the well once again -- but this time, Dracula was gonna get funky!
In 1970, American International Pictures -- a studio that built a franchise of horror films based loosely on the writing of Edgar Allen Poe by copying Hammer's gothic horror films -- released a movie called Count Yorga, Vampire. It was an attempt by AIP to transfer the feel of their gothic Poe films into a modern setting, and a vampire -- given its longevity provided it can stay away from Peter Cushing -- was the perfect creature for the experiment. You could still deck his pad out in all sorts of frilly Victorian hoo ha, but you had a reasonable explanation for why he was still hanging around in 1970, listening to his old Edison Cylindrical Phonograph device and complaining about how modern music was crappy and modern fashion was ridiculous. Count Yorga also had the good sense to turn poke subtle fun at the idea of this out-of-touch Victorian style character dropped wholesale and unchanged into what was then modern time, as if the intervening hundred years or so hadn't caused the vampire to change in the slightest. But what do I know. I'm writing this review win 2007, and I'm listening to the same music I listened to in 1987. What's another eighty years? Yorga, no doubt with some help from Hammer's early 70s vampire output, sparked a bit of a vampire revival that really came to a boil in 1972. Marvel Comics released their outlandishly ridiculous but imminently enjoyable Tomb of Dracula comic book, in which modern-day descendants of Van Helsing, Jonathan Harker, and Dracula himself team up to battle a revived Count who would explain his entire life history every time he got a word bubble to himself. Only Doctor Strange showcased the potential to ramble on and spew as much purple prose. The comic book was a whirlwind of bell bottoms, tweed blazers, and jumpers, not to mention vampire hunter Blade's bizarre combo of lab goggles, a raincoat, and some swashbuckler boots. When they updated him for the movies, it's a shame they didn't keep the original outfit and afro. And if Dracula's flowery long-windedness, punctuated as it often was by the phrase, "Foolish humans!" and "I, Dracula..." was a little much to swallow, wait until you get a load of Blade running around calling the count a jive turkey and "baby."
In the same year, AIP released Blacula, a blaxploitation twist on the Count Yorga theme which, despite the jokey title, turned out to be a remarkably good and thoughtful film that managed to deliver vampire thrills and make comments on race relations, ghettos, and drug abuse without it coming across as overly heavy-handed. Plus the character of Mamuwalde (Blacula, to you) was an exceptionally complex villain/hero inhabited by a great actor in William Marshall. Once again, a movie got to play with the idea of a Victorian era character revived in the modern era -- with plenty of light jokes about fashion. Lucky for the vampires, the early 70s were such a jumbled mish-mash of outrageous fashion trends that even a guy running around in a vest and opera cape didn't really stand out, though he could often be mistaken for a pimp. In a classic example of "student becomes the master" flip-flopping, Hammer looked to AIP for inspiration and released their own "vampire in modern times" movie in 1972. The idea was hatched that Hammer, too, should make a modern day vampire tale, one that would easily lend itself to integrating modern settings with classic the Hammer gothic trappings. And since Hammer already had Count Dracula hanging around in the shadows, he was the most obvious choice. Of course, there remained one problem: Christopher Lee was absolutely, positively, entirely unwilling to do another Dracula movie for Hammer, not when he was having so much fun making high quality films for Jess Franco, like Eugenie... the Story of Her Journey Into Perversion, all those Fu Manchu films, and...oh hey! What do you know! Jess Franco's Dracula. I doubt anyone at Hammer was actually worried that they wouldn't be able to get Lee to reprise his role as Dracula. After all, he announced after every single Dracula movie that they were awful and he'd never make another one in a million years. And then a few years later, there he is again, donning the cape and red contact lenses for another go round which, upon completion of principal photography, he would run to the press and complain about, announcing that he would never do another shitty Dracula film again. Blah, blah, blah, Chris. And you know what? He still complains about it. Dude, no one thinks you're Dracula anymore. The only people who bring it up are a few cult movie fans and you. Everyone else thinks your Saruman or whatever the hell your name was in those awful Star Wars films. I've theorized in past reviews of Hammer Dracula films and Lee's whining that the entire thing was a ruse devised by Hammer and Lee to drum up controversy and business. After all, if your star is out there bad-mouthing his own film and saying stuff like, "Well, the last one may have been gory and tasteless, but this one is so much worse that I can't stand it!" is going to do wonders for getting folks interested in seeing the movie.
The other option is that Christopher Lee is just pompous and annoying. And I say that as a guy who enjoys Christopher Lee's work. But while I may love many of the films in which he's been in, there's no denying that his filmography has considerably more "worst film ever made" candidates and parts in it than anyone short of Michael Caine. But, like Caine, Lee gets the British Actor's Golden Pass -- that coveted ticket that allows a British actor to emerge unscathed from a career of mostly utter garbage and still have people think they are incredible. I mean, Tom Cruise has one flop, and his career is pronounced over. But Michael Caine? He gets to be in Jaws IV, Blame it on Rio, Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, and The Swarm, and he comes through like he's coated in Teflon. Similarly, while Christopher Lee was busy bitching about the lack of class in his Dracula movies, he found time to make The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sadism, The Castle of Fu Manchu, Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf, To the Devil...A Daughter, and Chuck Norris' An Eye for an Eye, yet he remains one of the most revered actors of our time. Not even Vincent Price, who was far more talented and made just as many great films (and just as many crummy ones) commands the respect that Lee gets. I'm not saying he doesn't deserve it. What I'm saying is, Chris -- shut the hell up about Dracula. You made a lot of really awful films to go with your good ones, so quit picking on Dracula, the character that made your career. You should be more like Michael Caine. He shows up, does his job, and then moves on without running to the press to bitch about the last job he had or how everyone only things of Carter or Harry Palmer or ol' Peachy or whoever Michael Caine is typecast as. I think he's actually typecast as Michael Caine. All of Christopher Lee's complaining, still going on to this day, coupled with the fact that no matter what he said, he always went back and did another Dracula film, means that, if this wasn't a clever marketing ploy by Hammer and Lee, then Lee is just sort of a...you know. If I ever meet him, I'm going to call him Dracula non-stop. Great. You know, among my goals when I started Teleport City, I never counted "talk shit about Christopher Lee" to be among them.
So whatever the case, after swearing he'd never do another one, Christopher Lee was never the less coaxed back into the series, perhaps because of the promise that, for the first time since 1958's Horror of Dracula, he and Cushing would be teamed up as Dracula and Van Helsing. Also, I'm sure they threw some money at him, and a couple rare editions of Shakespeare books or whatever the hell Christopher Lee likes more than making Dracula movies. There are, of course, sundry other problems facing Dracula A.D. 1972, but we shall address each of those as we come to them in the course or this article. The pre-credit opening sees us joining the finale of a film that was never made, but looks like it was pretty good. Dracula (Lee) and Van Helsing (Cushing) are locked in mortal combat atop a carriage that is careening out of control across London's Hyde Park. Remember that Cushing and Lee hadn't been paired together as Van Helsing and Dracula since the very first film back in the late 1950s, so seeing them together again should have been a big deal, at least bigger than a pre-credit sequence that feels like, "We now join our regularly scheduled vampire fight already in progress." But we'll let that slide, because it really is a fantastic opening, and one that can fool you into thinking Hammer's Dracula is back with a vengeance. After both Dracula and Van Helsing keep over dead, a mysterious third man rides up and scoops some of Dracula's ashes into a little glass vial and takes Drac's signet ring. Then, at Van Helsing's funeral, the guy dumps some of Dracula's ashes into a little hole in some far-off corner of the graveyard, and plunges the stake that killed Dracula into the ground. The combination of seeing Van Helsing and Dracula together again after so many years and the high-energy action of the scene is really fun, and like I said, perhaps they should have just made this movie instead. Given that Taste the Blood of Dracula sees the Count transported for the first time to London, a movie in which Van Helsing and the ace bloodsucker tangle with one another one last time on Hammer's home turf would have been a movie to get excited about. And I guess technically, that is what Dracula A.D. 1972 is, in a weird, convoluted way. After Van Helsing dispatches Dracula and keels over dead himself, we get the funky Dracula A.D. 1972 theme song by Michael Vickers. And here is where Hammer lost a good many of the remaining traditionalists that were hobbling on their walkers out to the theaters, no doubt trailing their colostomy bags behind them, to see Hammer productions. Up until this point, every Hammer Dracula theme song had been written by James Bernard, the man who defined the Hammer score the same way Hammer itself defined the gothic horror film. Bernard's scores were bombastic and powerful, with the conductor explaining that in every song you could hear the syllables of the movie's title (and it's true). But with Dracula A.D. 1972, Hammer was trying to create an amalgamation of their past glory with something new. With Lee and Cushing serving as the links to the past, Bernard's theme writing services were not tapped. Instead, Michael Vickers turns in an attempt to blend classic Hammer horror music with a more modern film theme sound, something more along the lines of Lalo Schifren or Roy Budd. The dramatic shift from the thoroughly old-fashioned Hammer opening to this theme song full of horns and wah-wah guitars jarred many people, though they are lucky I didn't make the movie because I would have accompanied this completely bad-ass theme song with shots of Christopher Lee -- wearing a black flared-leg suit and platform shoes (and his cape, of course) high steppin' down the street with a magic cane, using it to turn fat women thin and bring dead people back to life in front of grieving relatives. That's right, people. You should be thankful Hammer's movie is what it is, because if I had my way, it would have been...well, it would have been Petey Wheatstraw, the Devil's Son-in-Law, but with Dracula. Which just makes me think that we really should have had a movie where Dracula is revived, hisses out his token line, "Who dares disturb the sanctity of Dracula?" only to have Rudy Ray Moore step in with a Thompson machine gun and say, "Dolemite, mother fucker!"
After our funky theme song, the action jumps a hundred years to the groovy, mod setting of London in the swingin' sixties. Except, you know, it's 1972 and all. A bunch of groovy young mop tops are skulking about London, holding "freak outs" and the most tame "horribly out of control" parties I've ever seen -- and I've been to some really tame parties. Leading this merry band of pranksters is one Johnny Alucard, trotting out the Alucard "puzzle" for the millionth time. We get it! Who, by this time, doesn't get the Alucard thing? Imagine if Frankenstein had tried that instead of just cleverly calling himself Dr. Frank or Dr. Stein whilst incognito. Actually, I guess Nietsneknarf isn't any worse than many actual German words. Johnny happens to be the owner of Dracula's ring and some of his ashes, passed on we assume from his nefarious ancestor from the beginning of the film. And one of his friends happens to be the grand-daughter of the latest Dr. Van Helsing. And if you think they're all going to end up in an abandoned churchyard summoning up Dracula, then you don't really earn yourself a prize. Actually, Johnny Alucard is less a reincarnation of Dracula than he is a cheap knock-off of Malcom McDowell in A Clockwork Orange. In fact, many of the sets and situations in this movie feel cribbed from Kubrick's film, which is only fitting, I suppose, considering the outfits Malcom McDowell wore in A Clockwork Orange. So OK, now my movie has a jive walkin' Christopher Lee as Dracula (with a magic cane, remember...and a big floppy pimp hat) battling Dolemite and trying to possess Alex from A Clockwork Orange. Seriously, why does no one ever give me development deals? How does Return of the Living Dead: Rave to the Grave get funding, but my Dracula/Dolemite/Malcom McDowell movie languishes in limbo, alongside my ideas for Cobra-Shark vs. Croco-lion and Great White Squid, a movie about Wings Hauser fighting a genetically engineered giant squid that has great white sharks for tentacles. Somewhere, my friends who bother to read this site are going, "Oh God, is he on about the Croco-Lion thing again?" Johnny (Christopher Neame) convinces the gang that what would really be fun would be to hold a black mass. Having nothing better to do, the gang agrees, in some cases reluctantly so. It is at this point we learn that one of the groovy gang is Jessica Van Helsing (Stephanie Beacham), great grand-daughter of Lawrence Van Helsing, slayer of Dracula, and current grand-daughter of Professor Van Helsing -- played by Peter Cushing, because in movies no one thinks it's weird when you look 100% identical to one of your distant relatives. Genetics tells me that I should look less and less like my relatives the further removed from them I get, but in movies, people are always the spitting image of some great grandfather or third aunt or whatever, and no one ever thinks that is weird. Hell, the mummy built his entire career of resurrections on randomly stumbling across women who looked exactly like their ancestor from thousand of years ago. No surprises here when Johnny summons up Dracula during their black mass ritual -- which takes place in a desanctified church that happens to be the same place Lawrence Van Helsing and Dracula were buried. You'd think that, given that the current Professor Van Helsing has a portrait of his grandfather in his study, collected all the man's books, and remains himself an expert on the occult, that he would know where his idol and close relative was buried. But whatever. All that's important is Dracula is back and he's going to...well, he's going to hang around the church and send Johnny out to kidnap Jessica Van Helsing, because Dracula knows how to hold a grudge. Meanwhile, as members of the gang disappear -- including the lovely Caroline Munro (Captain Kronos, Starcrash) and the equally lovely Marsha Hunt (you may recall her hairy werewolf boobs from Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf, also starring Dracula) -- the police become increasingly convinced by Van Helsing's tendency to blame the murders on a vampire. There are a few things people tend to harp on when criticizing this film. The first, most obvious, and dumbest argument is that the film is dated. I think I may have said before that "it looks dated" is one of my most hated complaints about any movie. It's cheap, ignorant, and shallow, and it has no merit as an observation. That a film is a reflection of the time in which it was made hardly strikes me as anything inherently negative, and I utterly detest whenever someone trots out that hoary old cliche and expects us to have any respect for their opinion. Oh, so Dracula AD 1972 contains slang and crazy fashion. Big deal. I look at those things as assets more than as detriments. So if your complaint is that the movie is dated looking, well we may still be friends, but I'm certainly going to regard your opinion on any film from here on out with a tremendous degree of suspicion. The second most common complaint is that Dracula is hardly in the movie at all, and when he is, he does nothing. I can understand this complaint a little bit more, but honestly, if at this point in the series, you are mad that Dracula isn't on screen and doesn't do very much when he is, then you haven't watched any of the previous films in the series, except perhaps Scars of Dracula, which is the only film where he has anything approaching substantial screentime or more than two lines. Not to say that it isn't disappointing. One can't help but want scenes of Dracula cutting lose in modern London, even if those scenes don't involve him dancing down the street with a magic cane or fighting machine0gun toting kungfu pimps. Still, it would have been nice if he did a little something more than stand around in the desanctified church. Dracula's confinement to the church is representative of Hammer's difficulty with updating their image. They want to figure out a way to enter the modern era, but in the end, they imprison their title character in a Victorian set and don't ever figure out exactly how to bring him out.
Previous Dacula films have always relied on the rest of the cast, with Dracula looming in the background as everyone's motivating factor. Unfortunately for Dracula AD 1972, it's a pretty weak supporting cast, comprised primarily of inexperienced young actors who aren't bad but don't really contribute much that is memorable. They spend most of their time either sitting around being bored, or sitting around talking about how they are concerned, then most of them head off to a party and are never heard from again. Stephanie Beacham as Jessica Van Helsing obviously has a more substantial role, but only if you consider substantial to be screaming, then being put into a trance. As the menacing Johnny Alucard, Christopher Neame is all right -- equal parts spooky and pathetic -- but he's basically playing Malcom McDowell, as I said. Dracula AD 1972 is more or less a remake of Taste the Blood of Dracula, complete with the bored circle dabbling in the black arts, the mysterious outsider spurring them on and summoning Dracula, the vial of Dracula remains, the kidnapped woman, and so on. But Ralph Bates was a much more charismatic actor, and Taste the Blood of Dracula had a much more compelling cast of older character actors to propel it forward in between scenes of Dracula showing that he can count to four or five. Dracula AD 1972 lacks that, and although the young cast is perfectly acceptable, the characters they inhabit just aren't interesting. Plus the jackass who wears the monk's cowl around the whole time was intensely annoying and yet escaped death. Shame on you, Dracula! Shame on you for not killing the odious comic relief. Caroline Munro has a small but memorable part as one of the gang of youths seduced by Johnny Alucard's ability to mimic what he's seen in A Clockwork Orange, but she would quickly become one of the most beloved cult film actresses of all time. She got her start on the horror scene playing Vincent price's dead wife in the Dr. Phibes films, though I'm not sure lying there dead for every one of your scenes earns you a whole lot other than other parts where you do nothing but lie there. She at least gets to talk, writhe, show off heaving breasts, and get blood dumped all over her in this film. Her career took off shortly thereafter, and she has a much more substantial role in Hammer's superior Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter, as well as major roles in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, At the Earth's Core, the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me, and of course the infamous classic Starcrash, featuring what was no doubt her most memorable outfit. She was still working, albeit only occasionally, up until 2006, and if you've seen her lately, in her late fifties, then you know she's still ridiculously gorgeous and awesome. A shame she doesn't have more to do in this film, but even a little Caroline Munro is worth watching. As the current Van Helsing, it's great to see Peter Cushing back in action, and naturally he goes at the role with absolute conviction. Unfortunately, the character is written as Van Helsing Lite, and most of his scenes are pretty dull. He spends a lot of time tracking down clues to the one thing he already knows. Everyone knows where Dracula's base of operation is, and yet Van Helsing spends half the movie trying to track down clues to the location of Dracula's hide-out, which he already knows! And once again, he decides to go fight Dracula at night, instead of swinging by and staking the bloodsucker when Dracula is asleep in his coffin. Why oh why are vampire hunters always waiting until dark to go fight vampires? I guess a movie where vampire hunters swing by during the day, stake Dracula, then head down to the pub to celebrate wouldn't be as long, but it'd be a nice change of pace. Other than that, Cushing is always Cushing. He comes in and does his job well, or as well as he can with what he's given. The final common criticism of this movie, then, is that it's not very good, and I guess that's a fair assessment. The script needed more work. You can tell the hip young lingo was written by old men who didn't really know what they were doing. The plot is a bit of a letdown, especially considering that it's the first time Van Helsing and Dracula have been on screen together since the first movie. And despite all that, I really quite like Dracula AD 1972. I like the young cast. I like the awkward attempt at being hip. I like the outlandish counter-culture fashions. I like the attempts at freak-out cinematography. I think the movie is fun regardless of its faults, though I recognize that I may be in the minority here. By no means is this the film to save Hammer, and by no means is it as good as the previous film it rips off, Taste the Blood of Dracula. But it's not an entirely bad effort and has much to recommend in it, at least for me.
Screenwriter Don Houghton didn't have a terribly deep resume at this point in his career, his primary credit at the time of this movie being a stint as a writer for Doctor Who. And in fact, he had very little in the way of a career after Dracula AD 1972. He went on to write The Satanic Rites of Dracula, and two of Hammer's co-productions with Hong Kong's Shaw Brothers studio -- the crummy Shatter and the pretty good if sloppily written Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires, in which Peter Cushing reprised his Van Helsing character one more time, this time on a trip to China to stop Dracula from raising an undead army. Despite the appearance of Dracula in the movie, Christopher Lee did not sign on, possibly because he was to busy making the James Bond film Man with the Golden Gun. Or The Satanic Rites of Dracula. Houghton was in his early forties when he wrote the screenplay for Dracula AD 1972, and while that's not really all that old, it is a little too old to be trying to write hip teen lingo. I'm only thirty-five right now, but I wouldn't consider myself adept at writing slang-heavy dialog based on modern teens. They say...what? Like, "sweet" and "cuckoo,man, real cuckoo" right? Despite the faults, Dracula AD 1972 managed to turn a profit, which meant that Hammer was going to make another one, even though Christopher Lee swore this was the worst movie ever and he would never play Dracula again. That follow-up, another film set in the 1970s, was The Satanic Rites of Dracula, and if you want to see a genuinely awful film, that is the one you should be watching.  Labels: Horror: Creepy Cults, Horror: Dracula, Horror: Vampires, Series: Vampires in the 70s, Stars: Caroline Munro, Stars: Christopher Lee, Stars: Peter Cushing, Studio: Hammer, Year: 1972 posted by Keith at 6:16 AM | 7 Comments Monday, March 05, 2007Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf
DIGG THIS ARTICLE. 1985, United States/some Eastern European country. Starring Christopher Lee, Annie McEnroe, Reb Brown, Marsha Hunt, Sybil Danning, Judd Omen. Directed by Phillipe Mora. Written by Gary Brandner and Robert Sarno. Buy it from Amazon
 . There are those among us who, in a moment of moral weakness, find themselves unwilling or unable to turn away from a grisly situation. As to the psychological motivations behind this tendency, they are legion and vary from person to person. Perhaps it is a desire to affirm that someone is worse off than you, that even though your rent is overdue and your daughter is hopped up on the goofballs, at least you're not a corpse being yanked out of some twisted, smoldering wreckage along the interstate. Perhaps, instead, it is little more than a reflex reaction symptomatic of the seemingly insatiable human hunger for spectacle, however grim it may be. Perhaps, in some, it is a genuine perversity, a wicked satisfaction gleaned from witnessing the suffering of others. And finally, it may be that some of us look out of guilt -- that we are torn between not making a gawking spectacle of suffering and ignoring suffering. Whatever the case may be, the urge is there, commonplace, and hardly solely the purview of the misanthropic. It manifests itself in a variety of forms, everything from slowing down to stare at a traffic accident to gathering on the street corner to gawk at a crime scene to greedily devouring the sensationalist news about the sordid downfall of a celebrity. Or, in my own peculiar case, it manifests itself in a complete inability to not watch Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf every single time I run across it on television.
I have no reasonable explanation for my addiction. At least heroin makes you feel good for a little while. I garner no pleasure from my addiction to Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf. There is no benefit to me in staying up until three in the morning yet again just because Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf happens to be on. And yet there I am, never the less, Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf on the television, a tumbler of bourbon in my hand to help dull the pain, and a deep-seated loathing of myself gnawing away at my very soul as I catch myself tapping my foot in time with that horrid pseudo new wave band that appears in the opening scene. But as much as my hate myself in the morning, as much as my addiction may cripple me socially and bankrupt me morally, I can still go to bed at night with a single dab of salve to soothe my troubled conscience: at least I wasn't in the movie, which is more than venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee can say.
In 1981, up and coming horror film luminary Joe Dante (who would give the world one of the greatest Christmas movies of all time in 1984, and had already given the world Piranha) teamed up with writers Terence Winkless and John Sayles (of all people!) to direct The Howling, an updated werewolf tale released at roughly the same time as John Landis' An American Werewolf in London. It was a good year to be a werewolf (better than the year in which Van Helsing was released, anyway), because both films were greeted with enthusiasm by fans and praise from a number of hot shot critics. Sequels were in order, but while Landis' film had to wait roughly sixteen years to get its first godawful sequel, Dante's own werewolf film wasted no time. Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf, also known as Stirba: Werewolf Bitch, was released in 1985 and quickly went down in history (and flames) as one of the worst goddamned movies anyone had ever seen. I'm not really one to argue -- almost nothing about this film resembles anything remotely close to competence. The script by Robert Sarno and Gary Brandner (who's never written anything but Howling scripts) is dreadful. Direction by Phillipe Mora is passable, but there's a reason he didn't go on from here to direct movies that weren't Pterodactyl Woman from Beverly Hills. The acting is almost uniformly awful, anchored as it is by none other than our good friend Reb Brown, last seen on Teleport City back when we reviewed Yor, The Hunter from the Future, and an embarrassed venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee, who must have been thinking that all those Dracula roles he bitched about his whole career were looking pretty good now that he had appear in movies like this or the one where he fights Chuck Norris. Oh, there's also Sybil Danning as the alternate title titular werewolf queen (or bitch), Stirba. And some chick named Annie McEnroe who was in Warlords of the 21st Century.
And yet, as undeniably bad as it all is, there I am, every time it's on television. And what makes it worse is that I own the DVD! I own the goddamn DVD, and still I watch it whenever it's on television. Let this be a lesson to anyone who ever takes my advice on anything; if you ever find yourself faced with a difficult decision and ask yourself, "What would Keith from Teleport City do?" then your immediate next thought should be, "Who cares? That guy watches Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf all the time." Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf is one of those early movies, alongside classics such as Beastmaster and Revenge of the Ninja that I got to see thanks to a friend with cable television (I couldn't just have him tape them for me though, because while he had a newfangled VHS machine, my family went Betamax). But even nostalgia can't excuse my adoration of this truly unwatchable film. Things start out OK. Venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee shows up to harass Ben (Reb Brown), who is supposed to be the brother of one of the chicks who turned into a werewolf in the first movie. Ben and and his girlfriend Jenny Templeton (Annie McEnroe) don't take too kindly to this nine-foot-tall guy lurking around the cemetery during the sister's funeral, constantly walking up to them and, in gravest tone imaginable, delivering the line, "Your sister is a werewolf," over and over. When, during the next full moon, the sister does spring forth from her tomb and make with the lycanthropy, they are more disposed toward believing venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee, whose character is named Stefan Crosscoe (oh good grief -- did a spooky high schooler come up with that name? At least it wasn't Chris I. Fixtion or something).
Somehow through a series of events I don't care about, they all end up going to Transylvania together, because it is the heart of werewolf power. But they don't do that before venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee gets to go to the punky club and put on a pair of those plastic wrap-around new wave sunglasses. If any scene justifies watching this movie, this is it. But when, "venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee dons amusing new wave sunglasses" is the high point of your movie, you know you're in trouble. Actually, pretty much everyone agrees that if there is a high point in this movie, it's "werewolf orgy," but we haven't gotten to that part yet, and honestly, it's not as good as " venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee dons amusing new wave sunglasses." When "werewolf orgy" isn't as good as "venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee dons amusing new wave sunglasses," you're in ever deeper trouble than you were when it was just " venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee dons amusing new wave sunglasses."
So next we're in one of those secret warehouse clubs where the usual assortment of movie punks/new wavers/dominatrixes/neon freaks are hanging out listening to a crummy band called Babel -- and by "crummy," I mean, yes, I did search around for mp3s. I couldn't help myself. While the band goes through their wolfy song about howling (what a coincidence!), a hot chick named Mariana picks up a couple of typical goofball movie punks who I'm sure had names like Razor and Chainlink and Puke. She shows them her boobs (quite nice of her), then turns into...I guess it's a werewolf. It looks more like one of those monkey men from 2001 though. Anyway, she gets all hairy and toothy and rips them apart. When The Rolling Stones wrote the song "Brown Sugar," it was about Marsha Hunt, the actress who plays Mariana. I bet they didn't envision her turning into a hairy monkey-woman werewolf, but then, maybe they did. I mean, it is the Stones, after all. Whatever, she's still dead sexy, had a huge 'fro in the 1970s, and we all saw her die in Dracula A.D. 1972, though I doubt she and venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee looked upon Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf as a grade-A reunion. It turns out that Stirba, the queen bitch of the werewolves, lives in a castle in Transylvania, which in this movie is a country rather than a region or town, and the seat of werewolfery (which I prefer over lycanthropy) rather than the seat of vampirism -- but whatever, man. Any chance to needle venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee about the Dracula movies is worth taking. Venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee, Ben, and Jenny must unite to destroy Stirba and her werewolf legion, which includes Brown Sugar and Mickey the escaped con who hung out with Pee Wee Herman. That actor's name is Judd Omen. Seriously, man, if they had named one of the characters Judd Omen I would have complained about that, but then it turns out there's really a guy named Judd Omen. I hope he hung out at some point with Thurl Ravenscroft. When Stirba and her minions aren't messing around with punker dudes at new wave clubs in Los Angeles, they're busy having werewolf orgies where they all grow lots of hair but don't quite turn into werewolves, then writhe about on the big ornate bed in Stirba's antechamber. It's sort of like watching a bunch of hirsute hippies makin' out, except with more growling.
While this is going on, our trio of half-assed vampire killers, err, werewolf hunters, show up and, in one of the movie's most nonsensical scenes, stumble upon a car wreck out in the middle of nowhere. While all the colorful, toothless local peasants vanish into thin air, Jenny, Ben, and venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee are attacked by werewolves. In broad daylight. And after venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee battles the murderous locals, he sort of just randomly wanders off and says, "We'll meet back in the village." But aren't they all going to the village right now? Why the hell does venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee wander off at random, except to go weep quietly behind a nearby tree? Sure enough, as soon as he's gone, one of the dead daylight werewolf things springs back to life to menace our remaining heroes for a little while. When we finally get to the town, it's one of those typical bad Eastern European movie towns where everyone is a medieval peasant clad in a colorful array of rags and potato sacks and ill-fitting wool suits, and they all spend every waking hour cackling insanely and making "crazy eyes." We spend a lot of time watching people wander around the town square or chase midgets in disturbing Punchinello masks. I'd say it's pointless, but this movie pretty much lost any point it might have had right after venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee took off those sunglasses. So basically, after some random town nonsense, some lame werewolf ambushes, and that werewolf orgy seemingly playing on loop, we discover that Stirba and venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee are brother and sister (oh SNAP Stefan Crisco or whatever your name is -- your sister is a werewolf, too!), and it is his destiny to put an end to her reign of terror, which seems to consist largely of killing jerks at new wave clubs and inconveniencing the local fall festival or whatever it was that was going on in that town. Eastern European towns are always having some sort of festival in the town square, complete with medieval era puppet shows instead of discotheques and David Hasselhoff concerts like actual Eastern Europeans like. No matter what year it is, they're always watching medieval puppet shows, and no matter what time of year it is, they're having a festival. It's sort of how any film that has a chase scene through a Chinatown will run into a lion dance or dragon parade or something, no matter what time of year it is, like they have those things every day in Chinatown.
Oh folks, it's just terrible. And when I sit down and try to write about this film, it becomes even more evident just how bad it really is. And when the true depths to which this film plummets become thusly crystal clear, my fondness for it is only amplified. In fact, right now, I'm sitting here, writing this, and thinking to myself, "Man, this movie really is horrible. I wish I was watching it right now." This week, I will have the choice to either go out and get a lapdance from a cute Cuban chick or stay home and watch Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf, and right now I can't decide!!! I guess we should go step by step, and start with the acting. I don't think I really need to even comment on Reb Brown. I'm pretty sure the big lug might not even know he ever had a film career. He goes through pretty much every film with the same dazed look of confusion on his face, and he doesn't stretch his acting chops here. Man, I wish someone had put him, Sam Jones, and Miles O'Keefe in the same movie. That would have been a classic. And as for Annie McEnroe -- really, do you even care? She looks like Jamie Lee Curtis' little sister, and neither she nor Reb serve any real purpose than to spout lines like, "What's going on?" and "Stefan!" Similarly, Brown Sugar and Mickey from Pee Wee's Big Adventure are mostly there to wear a leather catsuit (what self-respecting canine would wear a catsuit???) and a jaunty circus knife-thrower gypsy outfit respectively. Sybil Danning is in the film primarily to preside over her werewolf court, then rip her bodice open. Oh, and she wears possibly one of the worst outfits ever made -- the pointy-hipped baggy leather catsuit covered in angular mirrors. What in the the hell???
Sybil Danning has never really done it for me. From all I hear, she's a spectacularly friendly and charming person, and I would love to hang out with her for hours on end and listen to ridiculous stories about the making of Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf or Panther Squad. But I'd like to do that with David F. Freidman, too, and I certainly don't think of him as a sex symbol. But as a sex object to fawn over, I think I was turned off by her frizzy blonde 80s hair. No matter how nice the boobs and legs may be -- and on Sybil, they are both spectacular -- frizzy blonde 80s hair will kill it for me. I'm sure Sybil Danning stayed up crying late into the night because some twelve-year-old kid thought to himself, "No, I would rather jerk off to Marsha Hunt." But still, the makers of Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf must have known that Sybil's boobs were a much bigger potential attraction than her flashy animated laser beam showdown with venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee, because her bodice-ripping scene (or whatever you call a leather halter top plastered with giant mirrors) is repeated over and over in the movie -- twice during the end credits alone. I guess they paid her for a boob flash, and this was their way of getting their money's worth out of that couple of seconds of upper nudity. And if it seems like I'm base and degrading because I'm talking about Sybil's boobs instead of her acting in this movie -- trust me. I am doing her a favor. And then there's venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee, who intones every single line with -- well, honestly, it's pretty much the same acting job he always does. No more, but no less, even though the material isn't just below him -- it's also below Reb Brown. "Material not worthy of Reb Brown" is really something, but venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee still gives it the ol' college try and treats every single line, no matter how ludicrous, as if it was the single most important line of dialogue ever uttered. That said, venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee's acting style is not well-suited to making this movie more tolerable, and here in lies the big difference between him and fellow venerated horror film icon Vincent Price. Price would have had a field day with this movie. Lee is way too solemn, which is my polite "I respect venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee" way of saying he's boring. In the right role, his booming voice and towering presence is extremely effective. But it's pretty much the only trick he has. He lacks the versatility of Price, or even of fellow Hammer horror alumnus and venerated horror film icon Peter Cushing.
Not to say that it isn't amusing to watch venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee go about the role of Stefan with the same approach, method, and gravitas as he did that of Sauruman in The Lord of the Rings. And I will always appreciate that whenever I watch one of those pompous interviews where Lee drones on and on about literary tradition and the craft of acting, or about the tragedy of being typecast as Dracula, I can always let out some of the hot air by remembering fondly his time spent getting kicked in the face by Chuck Norris or shooting glowing beams at Sybil Danning, who is wearing a suit of leather and mirrors. Lee's acting actually works well with the movie's overall tone. Where Joe Dante's original was fused with his usual tongue-in-cheek humor, Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf plays it completely straight. As far as Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf is concerned, this is nothing short of the greatest story ever told, and it goes about the whole nutty affair with a seriousness and complete lack of humor generally only found in adaptations of the various books of the Bible (of which, this might be one, as the whole film opens with venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee solemnly reading from a giant leather-bound tome while he and that skeleton from the old House on Haunted Hill float around in space).
As goofy as the acting may be, the sets and special effects are even worse. The Howling was famous for its revolutionary (within the world of special effects, anyway) werewolf transformation scenes, which may have been overshadowed by the same in An American Werewolf in London but remain impressive never the less. Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf achieves its transformation scenes by showing Sybil Danning making "growly face," then cutting to someone else making growly face, then cutting back to Sybil, only this time they've pasted some mangy hair to her chest. There's almost no effort put into making any of these werewolves look like werewolves. They mostly look like humans with some fake hair pasted to them. The town/country/region of Transylvania is realized via a painting of some hills and a castle, then one street carnival set. An annoying guy does get his eyes gouged out, but other than that, we're in pretty shoddy special effects territory this time out. And the werewolf lore is almost as jumbled and hodge-podge as Underworld, which may or may not be a worse film than Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf. It's really a toss-up. Silver bullets, it turns out, are not what kills werewolves. No, you have to use titanium bullets. Isn't titanium an alloy? I'm no metallurgist, but isn't it not a naturally occurring material? How can a werewolf's fatal weakness be something that didn't even exist prior to whenever the hell some guy mixed some stuff together and said, "Hey! Titanium!" But no fear, because if the grubby peasants of yore had no titanium bullets with which to dispatch the werewolves, they could always use the trusty old wooden stakes. I guess a wooden stake will kill pretty much anything in Transylvania. Oh yeah -- garlic wards off all evil, too. And there's apparently a full moon every night. As bad as all this may be, at least the werewolves just go out and see crappy bands that only have two songs in their entire set, then they go have hairball orgies. I'll take that any day over yet another scene of Larry Talbot looking dejected and moaning about his terrible curse.
As bad as Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf is, it's also strangely compelling. Lots of people try to make films this flaky and weird on purpose, and it never works. Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf is one of those rare occurrences where a tremendous lack of care, talent, and sanity combined to make a completely warped and absolutely awful movie that never the less has immense entertainment value, provided werewolf orgies and midgets getting thrown out of windows are what you consider entertaining (and why wouldn't you?). Mora pads out his film with inexplicable cut-aways to puppets, people in masks, fake werewolf heads, owls, some complex grim reaper clockwork scene, and whatever the hell else he found lying around the place. It gives the film a completely bonkers sense of surrealism, though I will bet good money it was less an artistic decision and more an "I really don't give a crap" decision. Whatever the case, the end result is an off-kilter weirdness I find endearing. Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf isn't the worst movie ever made, but it's pretty bad. Still, I really enjoy it. I know I try to cover for the fact by pretending that it is in some way painful for me to watch Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf, but that's not true. I lied. I experience no pain. Partially, this is because I died inside a long time ago. But also it's because I just like Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf despite its being a truly odious example of filmmaking. And I like that as bad and as goofy as it is, this isn't the worst movie in Sybil Danning's filmography. Hell, it's not even the worst movie in venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee's filmography. And yes -- as much as I have insulted the film, as much as I have poked fun at it and told you how awful it is, rest assured the next time I'm flipping through my DirecTV programming guide and see that Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf is on, I will be on that channel, bourbon in hand, giddy with the anticipation of seeing werewolf orgies, mirror-plate jodhpurs, and venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee in plastic wrap-around new wave sunglasses. Labels: B-Masters Roundtable, Horror: Creepy Cults, Horror: Just Plain Weird, Horror: Werewolves, Stars: Christopher Lee, Stars: Reb Brown, Stars: Sybil Danning, Year: 1985 posted by Keith at 3:56 PM | 11 Comments Thursday, October 19, 2006Night Watch & Day Watch
NIGHT WATCH -- 2004, Russia. Starring Konstantin Khabensky, Vladimir Menshov, Valeri Zolotukhin, Mariya Poroshina, Galina Tyunina , Yuri Kutsenko, Aleksei Chadov, Zhanna Friske, Ilya Lagutenko, Viktor Verzhbitsky , Rimma Markova, Mariya Mironova, Aleksei Maklakov, Aleksandr Samojlenko, Dmitry Martynov. Directed by Timur Bekmambetov. Written by Timur Bekmambetov, Sergei Lukyanenko, and Vladimir Vasiliev. Buy it Now from Amazon.com
 .DAY WATCH -- 2006, Russia. Starring Konstantin Khabensky, Vladimir Menshov, Valeri Zolotukhin, Mariya Poroshina, Galina Tyunina, Yuri Kutsenko, Aleksei Chadov, Zhanna Friske, Ilya Lagutenko, Viktor Verzhbitsky, Rimma Markova, Mariya Mironova, Aleksei Maklakov, Aleksandr Samojlenko, Dmitry Martynov. Directed by Timur Bekmambetov. Written by Timur Bekmambetov, Sergei Lukyanenko, and Vladimir Vasiliev. After I finished watching the Russian fantasy-horror film (though there is very little that is scary about it, unless you are scared of vampires in velour track suits, which, come to think of it, I am) Night Watch, I had to sit and ponder what I'd just seen for a few minutes before deciding that I needed to watch it again. I usually only do this if a movie is excessively enjoyable or excessively incomprehensible. In the case of the latter, I usually rewatch it for two main reasons: 1) to see if the movie really is that convoluted and disjointed, or was I just not paying attention, and 2) I have a massive intellectual ego and utterly refuse to accept that any film, no matter how opaque, could possibly escape my vast and nigh supernatural capacity for comprehension. Or, you know, something like that (my grades from assorted physics classes I've taken over the decades will attest to the true might of my powers of comprehension). In the case of Night Watch, I was definitely watching again because I was confused. A second viewing and some quick readings of assorted summaries cleared things up for me pretty well, but at the end of it all, the experience of watching Night Watch was very close to the experience I had watching Kenji Fukasaku's Battles without Honor and Humanity for the first time. There is simply so much mythology, such a lengthy back story, and so many characters that trying to keep track of everything without a tally sheet can make your head spin. Beneath all the confusion and blurred vision it induces, however, is a fairly easy-to-follow core that is worth burrowing toward. Night Watch isn't a masterpiece, and it isn't the grand fantasy epic much of the marketing material made it out to be. It is crammed with too many camera tricks and it is indeed hard work to keep tabs on what the hell is going on. Despite all that, Night Watch, like Battles without Honor and Humanity, is worth the effort -- though you may not even realize this until you've watched the sequel, Day Watch, which is a much more coherent film than manages to make the first film a lot more comprehensible. I'm reviewing them both here as a single film, because that's pretty much what they are.
I'm late on the wagon of discussing these films, so forgive me if the history behind them is old hat to you. For those of you out there, however, who are like me and lag behind trends and what's hot by a year or two, here's the superficial lay of the land. Night Watch (aka Nochnoy Dozor) is the first part of a trilogy, followed by Day Watch (Dnevnoy Dozor) and whatever the heck the third film is going to be called. Dusk Watch or something. I think people were guessing that, but then, they were also insisting that George Romero's fourth zombie film was going to be called Dusk of the Dead, and look how that turned out for them. But I guess it makes more sense than most other times of the day. No one is really going to flock to see George Romero's Afternoon of the Dead or Timur Bekmambatov's Lunch Hour Watch. The movies were pre-ordained, in a way, as massive cult hits, and a campaign touting them as such seemed to hit the streets before the first film had even been released. Whatever they did worked, I reckon, because Night Watch became the highest grossing movie in Russian cinema history -- though I would preface that claim by freely stating that I have no idea what it takes to become the highest grossing film in Russian cinema history, and I'm not well-versed enough in modern Russian cinema to say whether Night Watch has much competition. Besides, it's not like "highest-grossing" translates to "good," even in Russia (the Russian word for "good" is pronounced "vodka"). After all, aren't those crappy Star Wars prequels some of the highest grossing films in America? And I'm pretty sure that if you discount the films of Miyazaki, the highest grossing film in Japanese history is Streets of Fire. Actually, that last one is OK. Any movie that gives us Northern Soul, Diane Lane, and Willem Dafoe in trash bag overalls is all right in my book.
All I've seen of Russian movies are those crazy fantasy films from the 1960s where big guys beat up wind demons or dudes tear around undersea kingdoms atop giant seahorses, which were pretty fun but probably not enduring blockbusters in the minds of modern Russian youths. Night Watch, on the other hand, is crammed full of visual gimmicks, grungy location work, and blaring Russian techno and metal music. So the kids can dig it. And so can I, though like I said, it took me a while, even with my tolerance for blaring Russian techno and metal music, which I have acquired courtesy of living in a largely Russian neighborhood for the past few years. I mean, I can't exactly complain. My people gave the world haggis and bagpipe music. Night Watch begins with an epic battle between the medieval forces of light and dark (which, as we'll learn through this film, don't necessarily correlate with good and evil), during which the two forces emerge as evenly matched. Faced either with mutual extinction or sorting the whole thing out, the general of light, Lord Geser (Vladimir Menshov), and the general of darkness, Zavulon (Viktor Verzhibitsky), momentarily halt time and work out the details of a truce that ends up looking a lot like your typical Russian (or any other country, for that matter) bureaucracy. The war will stop. Light and dark will not prey upon one another, and the forces of darkness -- who are somewhat vampiric in nature (though they don't necessarily follow all those rules about sunlight and whatnot) -- have to be licensed and can only feed on humans during certain previously agreed-upon periods of time. Exactly what the limitations the forces of light have placed upon them is never really made clear (at least to me), nor is the exact supernatural nature of the Light Others. To keep track of each other, two regulatory watchdog groups are formed: the Night Watch is comprised of Light Others ("Others" being the generic term for these supernatural beings who walk among us dopey, oblivious mortals) and polices the Dark Others. Conversely, the Day Watch is made up of Dark Others and keeps an eye on the Light Others, though once again, exactly what it is the Day Watch does isn't really explained. The duties of the Night Watch are pretty easy to understand: if a Dark Other gets out of line, starts killing humans during non-approved times, stuff like that, the Night Watch deals out the justice.
Both sides, however, are waiting around for a prophesized (yeah, one of those again) Other who will be more powerful even than the two immortal generals. Unlike most prophecies, however, this one isn't really all that specific. They know this uber-Other is coming, but they don't know when, and it would seem that whether he tips the scales in favor of light or dark is subject purely to his freedom of choice. Night Watch is split into two distinct plots that mingle together for the finale but don't make clear sense as being parts of the same story until Day Watch. The first plot is about a member of the Night Watch named Anton (Konstantin Khabensky), who is still something of a novice at his job and who may also be the father of the --and I shudder to use this phrase -- chosen one. We first meet Anton when he approaches a witch and asks her to cast a spell that will return his ex-wife to him (an act that will have severe consequences later on). He gets caught in the middle of things when the Night Watch show sup to bust the woman for illegally practicing magic, and not knowing what else to do with the poor guy, they induct Anton into the Night Watch. The second plot is about a young woman named Svetlana (Mariya Poroshina) who seems to be the focal point of a nexus of bad luck that manifests itself as a swirling funnel cloud of black birds and dust and threatens to destroy, at the very least, a good portion of Moscow. Neither of these ideas are particularly ground-breaking, and I didn't expect to like Night Watch that much since I have had my fill of stories about chosen ones and the eternal struggle between light and dark. However, Night Watch doesn't seem overly concerned with fulfilling all the hoary old clichés of these types of films, just as it seems uninterested in playing to what has become the modern image of the vampire as a sort of moping, soul-searching goth rocker with a silly made-up medieval sounding name. Instead, these vampires, shapeshifters, seers, witches, psychics, and whatever the Day watch people are, are strictly working class slobs. Rather than flashy cars, they drive utility trucks They pound vodka, wear sweatpants, and go about their supernatural wonderworld with a surly workmanlike weariness. I'm reminded in many ways of the similar approach to the fantastic that was taken by Hellboy. For humans, this is an incredible world of immortals, vampires, magic, space warping, and other mind-blowing stuff. For the people engaged with it on a daily basis, it's just the usual grind.
The entire cast plays the film perfectly, and they actually act rather than taking the standard American approach, which is to mumble and furrow your brow. Despite the convoluted nature of the film and the tendency it has to lose track of itself and, as a result, lose the viewer, it's still very easy to believe that each of these characters is an actual person. Working on the script, Timur Bekmambetov may fail to connect the dots of the plot itself, but he does manage to create some really likeable and believable characters, which alone makes Night Watch better than most contemporary horror, science fiction, and fantasy films. Viewers can sympathize with Anton in much the same way they might sympathize with Bunta Sugawara's character in Battles without Honor and Humanity. Like him, we're sort of thrown into the middle of a very long, complicated story, and we don't always have a clear idea of what the hell is going on. Like them, we are everyday Joes thrust into a situation that is way over our heads. Equally effective is the characterization of Zavulon, the leader of the Darks, who at this point we can't even peg as a villain. He's just on the other side, but there's not much he does that is evil. He wants to control the chosen one, but so do the Lights. Oddly, he looks a lot to me like Peter Stormare, the guy who played Satan in the much maligned Constantine film (which I actually rather liked), and his character is very similar to Stormare's portrayal of big sugardaddy Lucifer. I'd also compare him to Sam Hans, the flamboyant and completely likeable villain in the otherwise hilariously awful Indian film, Asambav -- but that may be as much for characterization as it is for the simple reason that both he and Zavulon seem to have a preference for gaudy, silk shirts.
Where the script falls apart, but not in a way that ruins the film for me, is in the plot itself, which as I think I've already communicated is rather on the convoluted side. based on a novel by the same name, Bekmambetov tried to cram an entire mythology into his film, and in an attempt to keep it packed to the gills with weird stuff, we never get a full handle on just what the heck is happening. Supernatural powers come out of the blue and don't conform to any previously established "rules" or roles. some characters are sort of vampires, but they don't have the same weaknesses of vampires, just as they have a lot of powers one doesn't normally attribute to vampires. The author of the novels also had a hand in adapting his own work for the screen, which almost never goes well. Fiction authors tend to either be too familiar with their own characters, and thus leave out huge chunks of information that may be known to them or to readers but not to filmgoers, or they are so in love with their own creation (writing a novel is difficult work, after all), that they can't bear to cut anything out, resulting in piles of exposition and things thats imply don't work in a movie. Night Watch, curiously, seems to suffer from both of these afflictions. And even after finishing Day Watch (also based on a novel, I still have no idea what the Lights are or why Anton is sometimes a vampire. There's a whole subplot spent on an airliner that is threatened with disaster as a result of Svetlana's bad mojo tornado, but that never ends up having much to do with anything and is ultimately resolved with very little more than a throwaway line to the effect of, "Oh, that airplane ended up being OK." Luckily, decent characters and a heady sense of delirium make it easy to surrender to the peculiarities of the story and just roll with it.
What Night Watch gets the most attention for is its visual style, which is derived from just about every flashy movie of the past ten years. Bekmambetov has never seen a weird editing, camera, or CGI trick he didn't like, and he tried to cram as many of them as possible into the film. Sometimes it works well, other times less so, and if the overall style of the film contributes to the lack of cohesion in the narrative, it also serves to keep you interested even when you've lost track of what is going on. Normally, I am put off by over-directed, hyper-stylized films that use visuals and computer animation tricks to compensate for being lousy in every other way. Looking good is no longer enough, because any movie these days can achieve similar results, and many have but have also not forgotten to include a compelling narrative. Night Watch is odd in that it wallows in gratuitous stylization, yet it never got irritating for me. I have no real explanation for why that is the case. It may be that the strength of the characters and the overall weirdness of what was going on was enough to make me overlook the visual overkill. Instead of being tedious and self-indulgent, Night Watch ends up being fun and self-indulgent. Some of the effects are better realized than others, but I don't think there was ever a concerted effort to make all the effects completely believable. The cruder ones add rather than detract to the overall otherworldly feel of the movie, and even though they are layered on thicker than the sugary icing of a supermarket birthday cake, the effects all work together to warp reality rather than create an entirely new universe. The Moscow of Night Watch is recognizable as the real world. A grubby, dreary, post-Communist real world full of cinderblock tenements, but reality never the less. By plopping his effects smack down in the middle of this very real looking world, Bekmambetov succeeds in making his movie even more effective. This is our world -- but with something not quite right about it.
Day Watch picks up almost immediately where Night Watch ends, and manages to retain the first films strengths while noticeably improving upon the weaknesses. Day Watch has much more focused, easy to follow narrative: the chosen one has been found, and he's made his choice. Now it's up to one side to retain him and the other side to convince him to jump ship. Meanwhile, it turns out that there might be more to Svetlana and her powers (she is a junior Night Watch member by this second film) that make her a potential rival for the chosen one -- or perhaps everyone is wrong, and she is the chosen one. I don't know if that was the impression I was supposed to get, but I did. Day Watch also introduces us to the Chalk of Fate, easily one of the least impressive all-powerful relics of all time. Although I ended up quite liking Night Watch, everything about Day Watch is even better. Anton is further developed as a character, and even gets to swap bodies with his female partner when he is set up for the murder of one of the Darks. This act ends up serving as the impetus for Zavulon attempting to goad the Night Watch into breaking the long-standing truce, so that he can finally start the war up again. But the real stand-out character for me this time around was Alisa, played by Russian pop star and all around scantily-clad media icon Zhanna Friske. From what I hear, she had a twenty-minute long sex scene (there is very little -- if any -- nudity in either film, by the way) that was cut from the final product, which upset both her and me. Shame on you, Timur Bekmambetov. You could have at least included it as an extra on the DVD. Not that I would have watched it or anything.
Alisa emerges as the strongest character in the second film, though that could be mostly because she dresses fabulous, has a cool spiky haircut with devil horns, and drives a sports car up the side of a building. In a fantasy world inhabited by vampires in their boxers and old man tank top undershirts, she's the flashy one. She's also a great character: Zavulon's right-hand, so to speak, committed to the Dark cause, but beginning to think that maybe Zavulon is getting a little out of control in his efforts to frame Anton and spark the breaking of the peace treaty. I have no idea what her reputation is like in Mother Russia, but she's wonderful in this movie. Plus, you know, she looks damn good in that slinky cocktail dress she puts on for the finale. Speaking of which, if there's one place where Night Watch trumps Day Watch, it's in the finale. Night Watch wraps up with a showdown atop a high rise apartment building surrounded by swirling tornadoes of birds and is highlighted by Zavulon ripping out his own spine to use as a sword. By contrast, Day Watch has a more subdued finale, but remember -- that's only in comparison to a guy ripping out his own spine to use as a sword. Only on that scale could a yo-yo that destroys half of Moscow be considered "subdued." Both films are well worth watching, and if the herky-jerky storytelling of night watch puts you off, I would still urge you to give Day Watch a try. It makes things much easier to understand. I have absolutely no idea where the series goes from day Watch, which ends in a way that would seem to wrap the story up. Having not read the books by Sergei Lukyanenko and Vladimir Vasiliev, I don't know where the story goes from here (nor do I know how closely the films resemble the books, or if everything would make perfect sense if only I'd read the novels), but I'm excited to find out. Although I was puzzled, perhaps even frustrated at first, while watching Night Watch, by the end of Day Watch I was feeling pretty damn good about Bekmambetov's series. It's imaginative, unconventional, and despite the fact that the dazzle and flash may overshadow things, it's as ambitious storywise as it is visually. Given the sordid state of modern horror, fantasy, and science fiction films, it's great to see a film that combines all three into such a dizzying but enjoyable celebration of filmmaking. Labels: Country: Russia, Fantasy, Horror: Creepy Cults, Horror: Vampires, Year: 2004, Year: 2006 posted by Keith at 3:31 PM | 2 Comments Wednesday, October 18, 2006Satan's Playground
2005, United States. Starring Felissa Rose, Ellen Sandweiss , Edwin Neal, Irma St. Paule, Danny Lopes, Christie Sanford, Ron Millkie, Salvatore Paul Piro, Robert Zappalorti, Jessy Hodges, Chris Farabaugh, Michael Ryan. Written and directed by Dante Tomaselli. Buy it now from Amazon.com
 .Why oh why do people walk into dusty, cobweb-covered, boarded up ruins and yell, "Hello? Is anyone here? Hello?" Lord, don't these people have any basis whatsoever in the real world? Who sees a crumbling shack out in the middle of nowhere and spends a few minutes walking around the obviously derelict calling out to see if anyone is there? Well, apparently people in poorly thought-out horror films do. I made fun of it when it happened in Zombie 3, but then, making fun of something that happens in Zombie 3 is sort of a foregone conclusion. I was hoping I wouldn't see something that glaringly stupid again, but I guess I was wishing against the inevitable. If you write a crummy horror film, then there's a good chance someone is going to walk into an abandoned, rotting building full of trash and dust, and yell out, "Is anyone here?" If you can combine that with someone going, "Bob, is that you? Come on! This isn't funny anymore!" then you have just written 95% of all the exchanges in crummy horror films. Dante Tomaselli's Satan's Playground isn't exactly a crummy horror film, but it does enough stupid things to keep it from being a good movie. It's a movie full of potential that isn't realized thanks to the standard microbudget horror film bugbear: the script. I know, I know. I should put my money where my mouth is and show these whupper-snappers how to write a decent script. It's not for lack of ideas or talent (well, at least not for lack of ideas). I haven't done it yet for one very important reason: I am, when it comes to getting work done, phenomenally lazy. I'm so lazy that I'm almost too lazy to tell you how lazy I am. Still, you don't have to be President of the United States to recognize a rotten president, and you don't have to write a script to recognize a rotten script. Satan's Playground is one of what I personally think are far too few movies that deal with the legend of the Jersey Devil, though it deals with the mythical beastie in a very roundabout way, focusing instead on the Leeds clan, a Texas Chainsaw Massacre-style family of nutjobs, the matron of which supposedly gave birth to the Jersey Devil, which in turn gave birth to a whole hockey team. For those of you not familiar with the legend of the Jersey Devil, you should peruse the various issues of the excellent fanzine Weird NJ, as they have adopted the legend and cartoon of the creature as their mascot. But should you not be prone to tracking down issues of the magazine or of their accompanying book, here's the legend in a nutshell: Sometime in early 1700s (the date, like most other aspects of the story, varies wildly depending on who is telling it and which version they are telling), a woman named Leeds, living in the ominous stretch of south Jersey swampland known as the Pine Barrens, gave birth to the latest of some thirteen or so children. Tired of being a fertile crescent of children, Mrs. Leeds exclaimed her displeasure at having another kid and bade the devil take this one off her hands. And so he did. Reports of the child's appearance differ, with some describing him as nothing more than human while others layer on the hideous disfigurements. Mrs. Leeds is also sometimes referred to as a witch, a Satanist, a British sympathizer, and someone who got on the bad side of a gypsy, all of which may have contributed in some way to the fate of her son (though I never knew that having familiar relations with a British officer could produce hellspawn beasts). The settled upon appearance of the Jersey devils these days is sort of an amalgamation of goat-man (the Goat Man was a popular woods-dwelling killer where I grew up, incidentally), bat, and human.
Since his inception as a local legend, the Jersey Devil has been blamed for all sorts of mischief along the lines of cattle slaughtering, destruction of public properties, and the occasional devouring of a wayward human. So basically, anything that could also be attributed to wild animals, damn teenagers™, or a chupacabra. For a long time, however, the Jersey Devil was actually considered a protector of the Pine Barrens, and seeing him was supposed to be good luck. At some point, people decided a hellish, murdering beast made a much more enjoyable local legend than did an ugly steward of the forest teaching people about native berries and instructing youths on the proper way to safely extinguish a campfire. In the reality of Satan's Playground, "good luck" manifests itself primarily by having your throat ripped out. The movie begins with a family -- husband Frank (Salvatore Paul Piro -- who looks exactly like a guy who would be named Salvatore Pauli Piro) and wife Donna (Felissa Rose) who could not be more Jersey even if you injected them with pure essence of Jersey (which is stinky fumes and trash that was dumped there by New Yorkers who didn't have room for it in their own state), their mentally handicapped son Sean (Danny Lopez) who has a tendency to drool and foam at the mouth for no particular reason, a baby, and the baby's mother, Paula, who happens to be played by...Ellen Sandweiss! Why would anyone go into the woods with Ellen Sandweiss? The last time she went camping in the woods, it ended with her getting split up the middle by a demonic tree while the rest of the campers beat up Bruce Campbell. Going into the woods with Ellen Sandweiss is like going to a tropical island with Ian McCulloch: there are some things you just have to know better than to do. Ellen Sandweiss hasn't made a movie that I know of since 1981, when she was attacked by the aforementioned tree in a movie no one remembers, directed by a guy I'm sure has absolutely no career these days. Where Dante Tomaselli found her, I don't know, though my first guess would be, "probably at one of the tables at the Chiller Theater convention." It's good to see her back in action, though the script gives her very little to do. In fact, the script gives pretty much everyone very little to do other than walk through the woods, run through the woods, then get hit in the head with a hammer. I hope you like seeing people run through the woods and get hit in the head with a hammer, because it's going to happen a lot in this movie. Exactly what this family is doing out in the middle of nowhere (and if you've never seen Jersey beyond the area surrounding New York City, then let me assure you that yes, you really can get way the hell out in the middle of nowhere) is anyone's guess. I would assume a camping trip, albeit one with suitcases, but they mostly just seem to be driving aimlessly down whatever potholed, unpaved country road they can find. As happens when a family aimlessly drives their station wagon around in the swamp, they get stuck. And they start hearing weird noises. And the son keeps pointing at something up in the trees. Having nothing better to do, the members of the cast file off one by one into the woods, with each one stumbling upon the old Leeds house (which is pretty impressive, considering that there is no path through the woods, and everyone leaves at different times, including in the middle of the night). Mrs. Leeds (Irma St. Paule) is still in residence (don't know if she's been lurking about since the 1700s, though), along with her giggling psychotic daughter and son (who are looking really good if they'v ebeen around since the 1700s). And there are also devil worshippers around, whipping naked dudes, for no real reason and with no real connection to the plot. But hey, what film was ever harmed by a gratuitous scene of cloaked devil worshippers whipping some nameless naked dude? Remember when they had that same scene in Pay it Forward? That was the best part of that movie. Or am I mixing it up with that episode of Starsky and Hutch where they fight devil worshippers while wearing red union suit long johns (just like the actual Devil wears)? No, I'm pretty sure it was Pay it Forward. What follows is the standard "normal folks stalked by a family of psychos" plot that has been worn thin since the days of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes. As with most of the microbudget horror films I've seen, the biggest problem with Satan's Playground is that there's just not enough script to go around, and what is there is frightfully unoriginal and plagued by colossal gaps in logic (or competence). At times, the Leeds house seems to be out in the middle of the woods with no sane living being around for miles, yet a passing police car notices devil worshippers frolicking on the front lawn and stops to investigate. When we see the police car, it is parked near the family's stranded station wagon, yet when people leave the station wagon it seems to take them a long time to wander to the Leeds house. Similarly, there's a completely pointless scene in which a hysterical Paula (Ellen Sandweiss) runs out the front door and smack dab into another person whose car broke down and is looking for assistance. Where the hell did this person come from? Does the Jersey Devil spend his days digging potholes in the gravel road in hopes of snaring unwary drivers? The dialogue exchanged between the young girl and ranting, blood-drenched Paula is also priceless. "My car broke down, but I can see you have your own things to deal with, so I'm leaving." So is the Leeds house out in the middle of the swamp, or is it sitting fifty feet off of highway 9? For an isolated farmhouse, there sure seem to be a lot of people wandering by at random. One would also assume the Satanists, wearing the requisite red cloaks they've had ever since they bugged Warren Oates and Hot Lips in their RV, are related in some way to the Leeds clan, perhaps even members of the family. But when one of them menaces Donna, he finds himself attacked by Mrs. Leeds' son, Boy (Edwin Neal -- not sure if this is supposed to be Tarzan's Boy all grown up and in a green surplus Army jacket, but I'm going to assume it is). Nothing else about the devil worshippers ever comes up again, except when Mrs. Leeds complains that they're a nuisance. I assumed she was laying it on for the cop, disavowing any knowledge of the Satanists and trying to paint herself as a helpless victim of "damn teenagers" -- which is an awful complex fib to weave considering that she's just going to have her daughter hit the cop with a hammer a couple seconds later. But then, maybe she was telling the truth, and what we learn is that even if you are the mother of a nightmarish brood of psychotic freaks that includes the Jersey Devil himself, you can still get irritated by kids playing around on your front lawn.
I could forgive all that pretty easily if the film paid off in other ways. Instead, the script just keeps collapsing on itself and piling on the, "Oh, come on!" moments. After Donna narrowly escapes her harrowing ordeal (by making it to a road and hitching a ride with a guy who seems remarkably unphased for someone who just picked up a screaming woman covered in blood) and we get the usual "wakes up in the hospital" scene, the local sheriff decides to go out and investigate her claims -- with no one but Donna as company. They establish that they know at least four people are missing and probably dead, including another cop, and he goes out into the woods with no radio and absolutely no back-up other than the freaked-out victim who just escaped the scene? And when he discovers that there is indeed something foul and murderous going on, he still doesn't call for backup and instead decides to explore the house he knows is populated by murderers and blood smears with no one by his side other than Donna? Don't the people who write these scripts make any effort whatsoever to reflect even the most basic of actual police procedure? I don't mind getting the details wrong, but this is absurd. This is an example of a writer making characters do something phenomenally nonsensical because it's the only way the writer could think of to get where he wanted to be. It really irritates me when people do things no actual person would ever do, simply because the script demands it of them. For that matter, you'd think the Leeds clan would stick to murdering wayward hikers and stoners and shy away from murdering cops. From what I hear, cop killers tend to attract special attention from other cops, who generally aren't amenable to just rolling casually with it when one of their own goes missing or turns up dead. And it's not like the Leeds's were being clever about it. The cop car was still sitting on the road, and there are not many other places the cop could be, especially if he radioed in beforehand (though given what we see from the cops in this movie, that is unlikely). But what irritates me even more than that is when a movie resets itself and you have to watch the whole movie play out again in an abbreviated format. This happens all the time, though most recently I was up late and watching a phenomenally dull and monotonous horror film called Cabin by the Lake on the Sci-Fi Channel. It starred Judd Nelson as the world's least interesting serial killer, and it did almost exactly what Satan's Playground does. The lone survivor gets away from the killer(s), is subject to something completely unrealistic and stupid done by the police, which results in her being right back where she was before her previous escape, so we have to watch the whole goddamn thing again. To the credit of Satan's Playground, it handles its plot redux much faster than Cabin by the Lake (which just might be one of my most hated movies of all time), but I'm still annoyed whenever a film can't think of anything else to do than repeat itself. And Satan's Playground is nothing but repeating itself. A guy goes into the woods and gets captured. A woman follows him and gets captured. Then someone else follows and gets captured. Then one more person follows, and they get caught, too. Then one of them escapes and comes back and repeats the whole thing. It's like watching the exact same ten-minute movie stitched together five or six times. Now, at this point, you may be asking about the Jersey Devil. Other than providing an excuse for the mentally handicapped kid to point at the sky a few times, he has no real role in this movie until he makes a cameo in a completely nonsensical aside where a stoner departs from a group of hikers so he can, as the kids say, "toke his reefer, dude!" This is also the film's one gore effect. Now, I don't demand gore from my horror films, but usually microbudget filmmakers slack in other areas because they're excited about all their gore effects. Tomaselli slacks with the script, but the movie doesn't try to compensate with gore. The Jersey Devil is also never shown -- which is actually a good idea, I think. Nothing undermines a monster's crdibility more than revealing it to be a really laughable special effect. At least the Jersey Devil maintains some air of mystery and menace that way. Still, his interaction with the main cast is almost non-existent, so even though I described this movie as being about the Jersey Devil, it's only that way tangentially. Mrs. Leeds and two of her other children are the actual villains. I know, I know. I always pick on the scriptwriter, but I only do that because the scripts are always so bad, and they frequently undercut what could have otherwise been a good movie. Satan's Playground possesses a decent concept, and Dante Tomaselli is talented as a director. The cast is actually somewhat professional, elevating the acting stories above the monotone of inexperienced "friends and family members" that usually comprise the cast of such films. And although Tomaselli's movie is slow, it wouldn't be boring if it didn't repeat the same thing over and over. He creates a suitably bleak and isolated atmosphere, and the Pine Barrens are a perfectly chilling looking backdrop for the action. But all these positive aspects are hamstrung by such a meandering, repetitive, and derivative script, that they get lost under the sheer weight of how clumsy the writing is. Almost all microbudget horror films, it seems, are the labors of love of their directors, and many of these directors are good directors. But they're not good scriptwriters, and they're not good at picking good scriptwriters. It seems to me that in their enthusiasm for making a horror movie, they get impatient with the labor-intensive, generally unsatisfying process of creating a good script. And I say "unsatisfying" meaning that, while just about every aspect of making a film -- especially one with a tiny budget -- is labor intensive, the labor that goes into crafting the script generally lacks the concrete sense of daily accomplishment that comes from something more active, like being on location or reviewing a day's footage. These things are labor-intensive, all right, but there is more of an immediate pay-off than there is with writing a script, whose value is never fully realized until the entire product is finished and the creation of which usually just requires someone to sit alone in a room with a bottle of scotch and a laptop.
So it doesn't surprise me that the script almost always gets the short end of the stick, though it does sadden me as a writer; and you would think that after years of similar bad scripts, someone would realize that the thing can actually be important to a movie and finally stop glossing over it in favor of just getting out there and shooting footage. Anyway, I think I've made the point, and the fact is that everything that makes Satan's Playground bad is the fault of the script. Tomaselli is a gifted director. He knows how to use the camera, how to light a scene and properly record sound, how to move his actors around; in short, he knows how to direct, and he knows how to do it in a way that is more engaging than the too-common "set the camera up and film each scene like a stage play" type of static shot on which many amateur films rely, and the "every second must be a wild jump cut full of shaky cam and random images and screaming" overkill that ruins almost every larger-budget horror film being made these days. No, Tomaselli knows how to direct; he just doesn't know how to come up with material worth his directing skills (a trait he shares with David Buchert, who directed the last microbudget horror film I reviewed, Blood Oath). Dante Tomaselli the screenwriter just doesn't deserve to be working with Dante Tomaselli the director. Although I mentioned it in passing, I want to dwell a little more on the quality of the cast. Most microbudget horror films rely on non-actors to do the acting, with a few genre staples appearing in enough films that they eventually stumble into some degree of competence and recognition for their contribution to the cause of starring in bad shot-on-video horror films. Tiffany Shepis might be the current reigning queen of such performers -- a decent actress in bad films. Misty Mundae was there for a little while until she made the switch to softcore comedies and finally, it seems, to legitimate film (where she goes by her real name and is proving that she is genuinely talented and worthy of being recognized for more than just her willingness to get naked and give Billy Hellfire a blowjob). But these types of stars are few and far between, and the vast majority of horror films in the DTV market feature people with a complete lack of acting experience -- and it almost always shows. Tomaselli, on the other hand, put some effort into casting people beyond the proverbial group of friends that usually make up the DTV horror film talent pool. For starters, he flushed Ellen Sandweiss out of hiding and got her acting again. Felissa Rose appeared in the original Sleepaway Camp before going on to a prolific career starring in low budget horror films that no one but the type of people who read this site would have ever heard of. Edwin Neal, who plays Mrs. Leeds' murderous non-Jersey Devil son, is most recognizable to horror fans as the loony hitchhiking member of the family from the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. You know, the guy who gives the informative educational speech about headcheese. He's also an extremely busy voice actor, having begun his career back in 1972 or so, dubbing the Japanese cartoon Gatchaman, better known in the United States as Battle of the Planets. He's been dubbing anime and sentai shows ever since, with occasional time off to appear in films like Zombiegeddon, which also happens to feature Felissa Rose and two of my all-time favorite B-movie mainstays: Joe Estevez and Robert "The Chin" Z'dar. Of the main cast, Christie Sanford (who plays the hammer-happy Leeds daughter) and Danny Lopez (who plays the mentally handicapped son of Donna) perhaps have the least experience, but even they still have experience. In other words -- this is a cast of actors. Some young, some seasoned, but almost all (at least in the core cast) experienced with and professional about the job. They are all pretty good at what they do. But they are ill-served by a script that doesn't give them much at which they can be good. There's only so many ways an actor can wander through the woods or into an abandoned gas station and call out, "Is anybody here?" There's only so many ways they can scream, "You're crazy!" Dante Tomaselli put a lot of work into the film. He put effort into assembling a real cast, which must have pushed the budget way above the usual breaking point for microbudget filmmakers who only hire actors that will work for beer and weed. I think this is the most disappointing thing about Satan's Playground -- Tomaselli assembles an impressive array of pieces and puts a lot of work into crafting them, but then completely ignores the fact that his foundation is so shaky. Satan's Playground has enough wrong with it to keep it from being very good. But it also does some things right that make it worth seeing if you are a student of the low-budget horror game, and especially if you are a potential filmmaker. There are lessons to be learned from Tomaselli's direction, casting, editing, and the overall atmosphere he creates, just as there is an equally important lesson to be learned from the weakness of the script. And while Satan's Playground is ultimately a deeply flawed effort, it's enough for me to think that there might be reason to keep an eye on Tomaselli as he progresses -- provided he progresses. Microbudget filmmakers tend to show a notorious immunity to getting any better at their craft. Tomaselli feels like he might be different, especially if he restricts himself to direction and not screenwriting. At the very least, I'm optimistic about his potential. Labels: Horror: Creepy Cults, Horror: Microbudget, Horror: Satan, Year: 2005 posted by Keith at 5:05 PM | 3 Comments Saturday, September 02, 2006Dagon
2001, United States. Starring Ezra Godden, Francisco Rabal, Raquel Merono, Macarena Gomez, Brendan Price, Birgit Bofarull, Uxia Blanco, Ferran Lahoz, Joan Minguell, Alfredo Villa. Written by Dennis Paoli. Directed by Stuart Gordon.
Generally speaking, Lovecraft hasn't been adapted to film very well. Most films based on his stories--rife with dense prose, antiquarian ramblings, and a strange combination of subtlety and the absolute antithesis of subtlety--fall short. In truth, they tend to suck. Whether it's in film or in literature, many people who attempt to do something "Lovecraftian" take something iconic like, say, a plasmodic squid-headed demigod/priest, and run with it, having little regard for the sense of untold aeons, strange conspiracies, bizarre alternative histories, and cosmic and extradimensional musings which actually ever coaxed anyone into taking the squid demigod halfway seriously to begin with. Or they'll pull a Daniel Haller and have some curly-haired guy stand in front of the camera with his fists against his ears and his thumbs pointed straight out from his skull reciting "Yog-Sothoth! Yog-Sothoth! YOG-SOTHOTH!" ...which, to be fair, does at least suggest insanity on someone's part. It's even worse if you hear "Lovecraftian" or "inspired by H.P. Lovecraft," because nine times out of ten it's just generic horror crap loaded with all of the cliches that are less reminiscent of Lovecraft than, well, other generic horror crap. Sometimes they'll even conflate Lovecraft's strange interstellar "demons" with Satan and Christian demons, and although I'm sure there's a talent great enough to pull that together brilliantly instead of just looking like they understand neither cosmology, that person has never attempted it. Well, unless we want to count Jaume Balaguero's Darkness, which is Lovecraftian in spirit but (thankfully) not unnecessarily so in content. Stuart Gordon is generally credited with the best Lovecraft adaptations out there. He's generally famous for his Lovecraft and Poe adaptations, though he also directed a few original horror films and contributed, oddly enough, to Honey I Shrunk the Kids. His adaptation of Re-Animator is a very enjoyable movie based off of one of Lovecraft's weaker stories, and I do remember liking Castle Freak years ago when I saw it, though his From Beyond--again, one of Lovecraft's weaker stories--is... not good. Part of why he chose some of the less-impressive stories by Lovecraft, I'm sure, is that bringing them to the screen could be realized with less of a budget-based compromise of the original vision. Working with a budget about five times larger than he did with Re-Animator, and presumably trying to return to his success in the Lovecraftian field after some time away from it, Gordon created a script which is sort of a pastiche of several Lovecraft stories, including "Dagon," "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," and possibly "The Horror of Red Hook" and others. Paul Marsh and his wife/fiancee/girlfriend Barbara are in a boat off the coast of Spain. We gather that somehow, Paul got rich by playing the stock market; but Barbara's tired of him never leaving his laptop because he neurotically wants to keep checking stock prices, so she takes it and throws it overboard. Then we see that there's a sunbathing older couple on deck who make wry, rich-person-sounding comments in wry, rich-person-sounding accents. Why do so many horror movies always seem to be filled with people who are completely, or at least generally, unlikable? When the boat crashes in a storm, Paul and Barbara go ashore to find out that the villagers are weird, pale freaks who all congregate in the town's bizarre church. When the priest promises to help them, they find that he has webbed fingers. Then the same priest convinces them to split up on the lame pretense that "someone has to stay to report to the police"... Whatever. Paul leaves to find out that his friends have disappeared and left blood behind, and then returns to find out what Barbara has already discovered--these freaks are dangerous and weird fanatics. What follows is familiar to anyone who's familiar with Lovecraft's writing. Admirably, Gordon even stays true to Lovecraft's xenophobia without himself being xenophobic--the film is shot in both English and Gallego, a Portuguese-like language spoken only in the northwest corner of Spain. The villagers, who were once peaceful fishermen, are corrupted by a man who's a stranger in his own right, and so although their language is a baffling concoction similar to, yet not identical with, Spanish and Portuguese, the people are treated as both humble and exotic, regular joes and yet also bizarre creatures which are not quite human. In fact, since it appears that Dagon premiered in Spain, the Galician language was chosen intelligently, as it is quite possible (though my Spanish and knowledge of Spain isn't good enough to say this with any certainty) that the dialogue stands on that unnerving edge that separates the familiar from the incomprehensible for the Spanish-speaker. Certainly, at least, that's how it was for marginally-Spanish-comprehending me--I'd constantly find myself thinking, "I almost understood that... but what the hell did he say?" The film is also pleasingly reminiscent of the video game Resident Evil 4, in which homocidal Spanish peasants chase down the protagonist with farm implements and occasionally rifles and other more lethal weapons (but then, anything that might remind one of such things tends to be pleasing, really). Beyond that, there's something genuinely creepy about the weird, winding streets and "queer houses" of Imboca ("boca" means "mouth" in Spanish, mirroring Lovecraft's invented New England town of Innsmouth), and some of the CGI creations are conceptually Lovecraftian and visually interesting, even if the CGI itself suffers from feeling unnatural in the wrong sorts of ways for even a Lovecraftian venture. I won't tell you that the film is perfect. It's not. I hated most of the characters, and I thought the action scenes were sometimes energetic in all the wrong ways--i.e. sort of less like what I'd be doing if I felt like my life were endangered, and more like what the Three Stooges might do. Overall, I couldn't call Dagon a good film. But the point is, it's a generally fun time and well worth watching, as long as you're not bothering yourself with identifying with characters. I can't call Gordon the best director of all time, but he deserves his title as the best director of Lovecraftian movies. Labels: Director: Stuart Gordon, Horror: Creepy Cults, Horror: HP Lovecraft, Year: 2001 posted by Ryan at 7:21 PM | 2 Comments Friday, October 21, 2005Night of the Sorcerers
Okay, so we've covered Spanish devil worshipper movies, and we snuck in one of Paul Naschy's werewolf movies. What's next? Oh, I know. How about one of those jungle movies where white folks are menaced by the undead locals? You know, I really love that things like that are plentiful enough to become actual genres unto themselves. So let us turn our attentions to such a film, and consequently, to one of the other pillars of Spanish horror: Amando de Ossorio and Night of the Sorcerers.
de Ossorio is best known for his Blind Dead films, in which the mummified corpses of a group of murdered Templars return to menace the Spanish countryside with slow-motion lurking and galloping about. Although the films vary wildly in quality -- sometimes in the same film -- the Blind Dead themselves remain one of the most effectively eerie monsters in monster movie history. de Ossorio's dancing zombie witch doctors? Considerably less so. I mean, they're not unscary, but they're hardly iconic. Like most everything in this movie, they achieve a sort of acceptable mediocrity -- acceptable mediocrity being, perhaps, the best general description of European horror film in general (which may or may not place them above American horror films -- I haven't done the math). Night of the Sorcerers opens in deepest, darkest Africa circa 1910, as a lone white woman is being prepared for sacrifice. If you think this preparation involves anything less than removing all her clothes by bullwhipping them off, then you're obviously new to the world of European horror. So far, every Spanish horror film I've watched manages to cram in a bunch of full frontal nudity before the credits even begin, and as you know, this is always the sign of a good movie. A ritual ensues which involves some rather disappointing dancing -- these people could learn a thing or two from the wild flailing and rampant jazz hands of voodoo trance dancing, though they're still livelier than the average monotonic, droning Satanist. The ritual culminates in the beheading of the white woman, just as a band of fearless British troops track down the cultists. They're a little late to save the woman, but they blast away at the tribe just for good measure. Satisfied with a job well done, they set about mopping up the place, only to discover that the woman's disembodied head has sprouted fangs and she just won't stop shrieking. Okay, so not a bad way to kick things off. You've got your nudity and you got your head chopping. You got your topless woman dancing with a machete, and you've got background dancers who are clothed one second, then topless the next time they're shown, then clothed again. You've got ritual dancing and screaming and guys in pith helmets. Unfortunately, it takes a strong movie not to go downhill from such a decent opener, and Night of the Sorcerers isn't that strong. We flash forward to 1974, same place, where -- accompanied by a breezy cocktail lounge score -- a group of researchers, photographers, and the one woman who's just there because are traveling through Africa to make a record of some vanishing species. As fate would have it, they happen upon the exact same clearing that was used for those nasty blood rituals so many decades before, and it ain't but a few hours before, in between wild lovemaking, the group finds themselves preyed upon by a vampiric woman in a leopard-print bikini, who begins taking the female members of the group out to get beheaded by the now living dead tribespeople, thus creating more vampiric women in leopard-print bikinis. Exactly where they spontaneously generate these bikinis from is anyone's guess. Africa is dark and full of mystery -- who are you to question the ways of its macabre rituals? Night of the Sorcerers does some things right, and as usual it's enough to convince me to give it satisfactory marks. The opening is both energetic and chilling, though unfortunately the film can't sustain that level of suspense except in tiny fits that string together dull scenes that would be called character development if the characters developed any during them. But we have what seems to be the standard collection of Spanish horror film figures: not as grating as their Italian counterparts, but hardly the sort of characters that pull you in or get you interested. They're not unlikable enough to actually be unlikable, but that's bout the best that can be said for them. The men are non-entities, there only to sit in chairs with guns, take their shirts off and splash water from the wash basin on their faces, and take the occasional roll with one of the women. The women have more developed characters, but only because they subscribe to generic expectations. There's the bitchy one, the slightly less bitchy one, and the one who gets killed quick enough so that you can't tell much about her other than she's a photographer since she carries a camera around al the time. The actors fill the rolls just fine, but the script demands very little of them. Scripts, of course, are the bane of European horror films, and devoted Euro-horror fans roll their eyes any time someone brings up things like logic or quality storytelling. European horror films, they will remind you, are films of images, surreal and atmospheric creations that value mood and dreamlike qualities over character development or coherent storytelling. I'm willing to accept this, as I like quite a few European horror films despite their logical flaws -- you can't exactly call them "storytelling" flaws, because the entire idea is that they tell the story in a different way (dream style) and thus demand a separate frame of reference from American films, which are (or were) often very clinical and A-to-B in their approach. However, Night of the Sorcerers' script problems don't stem from a lack of logic; all things considered, this is a pretty logical film, within the relative world of a horror film where zombie witch doctors send forth vampire leopard women to feed 'pon the living. No, the problems stems mainly from the fact that the script is just poorly constructed and haphazardly paced. The film never quite clicks, and in the end, as is often the case, you are left with several very cool pieces that just miss being assembled into an equally cool whole. de Ossorio manages a few quality surreal images, but the film is, by and large, too grounded in a realistic approach to successfully create that nightmare-scape mood that makes it easier to excuse other flaws. He relies once again on shooting his monsters in slow motion, except apparently someone forgot to undercrank the camera. We saw the "slow-motion floating" style of filming vampire women in Naschy's Werewolf Shadow, and it was used with considerable effectiveness. Unfortunately, de Ossorio's method is to film at regular speed, and then have his actresses pretend to be moving in slow motion. It, umm, well, it doesn't really work, you know? On the other hand, de Ossorio manages to avoid many of the pitfalls associated with jungle films, particularly the jungle films of Italian cinema. For instance, there's no stock footage of real animals being butchered or attacking one another. And while there's never been a b-grade jungle exploitation movie made that could resist stock footage of elephants, he does keep it down to a minimum. Also, I don't think anyone is menaced by a snake, which may also be a first. Unfortunately, he counters his temperance in terms of stock footage with unedited glee when it comes to some really mundane tasks. When one of the characters announces that it's time to set up camp, you assume you're not going to watch the entire, unabridged process of them setting up camp. Your assumption would, of course, be wrong. That he sets it all to a breezy lounge tune doesn't excuse it. Once again, we have a Spanish horror film that should satisfy people who have already reconciled with themselves with the peculiarities and short-comings of European horror films, but it's not strong enough to win over any new converts. De Ossorio fails to conjure up the creeping horror of his first two Blind Dead films, but he also manages to throw in enough beheading, nudity, cocktail music, and ritual dancing to keep the film staggering along despite some drawn-out periods of boredom. Labels: Horror: Creepy Cults, Horror: Vampires posted by Keith at 5:56 PM | 2 Comments Tuesday, December 14, 2004Taste the Blood of Dracula
1970, England, Starring Christopher Lee, Ralph Bates, Geoffrey Keene, Linda Hayden, Michael Ripper, Peter Salas, Ilsa Blair, John Carson, Martin Jarvis. Directed by Peter Sasdy. Available on DVD (Amazon).
Last time we saw the prince of the undead, he was impaled on a cross and turned into that pink sawdust bus drivers sprinkle on the floor when kids throw up. For just about anyone, even the common vampire, that would signal the end, once and for all. But this is Dracula we're talking about, and if Dracula Has Risen from the Grave proved to be a financial success for England's Hammer Studio, then you could bet good money on the fact that they'd find yet another way to bring the Count back from the dead, even if he'd been impaled on a cross and even if series star Christopher Lee was back out on the streets again telling anyone and everyone who would listen that the Dracula movies were awful and he would absolutely, positively, under no circumstances ever play Count Dracula again. Anyone who knows the cycle knows that means that the next film in the cycle, Taste the Blood of Dracula, stars Christopher Lee as the titular count, and that in turns means we'd have to read even more quotes from Lee about how he was practically forced to do this film, but that he'd sure as heck never do another one. There are two common paths of thought regarding Lee's frequent and increasingly irritating complaints about Hammer's Dracula movies. The first is that, well, Christopher Lee is just whiny and annoying. The second is that he made these statements with the full blessing of Hammer and with every intention, despite what he was saying, of reprising the role so long as the movies proved profitable. Having the star of a film out there talking about how horrible it all is and how he never wants to do another one is a surefire way to get people curious. Certainly Hammer seemed to have suspiciously peculiar luck with convincing Christopher Lee to go back on his bold proclamations. So either Lee is an obnoxious talker who never lives up to his own assertions, or he's just a cog in a clever Hammer marketing ploy, or Hammer has some bundle of pictures or other bunch of material that they use to regularly blackmail Lee.
In fact, Taste the Blood of Dracula was originally scripted by Anthony Hinds on the assumption that Lee would make good on his boasts and refuse to appear. Much like Brides of Dracula before it, Taste the Blood of Dracula was going to employ the threat of Dracula and his disciples without actually featuring the bloodsucker himself. As originally written Taste the Blood was going to be a showcase for Hammer's great young hope, Ralph Bates, the man they hoped would serve as the banner star for a new era of revitalized Hammer output. It seems like a good idea. Christopher Lee was becoming more difficult by the day, and one has to assume that despite the man's marquee value, Hammer would be happy to just move on without him for a spell. And Ralph Bates was certainly an able man around which to structure the faltering studio. Where as Cushing and Lee and the previous generation of Hammer actors had represented an older, more distinguished presence, Bates was young and handsome and would appeal, Hammer hoped, to the younger kids who were fast becoming the bread and butter of the movie industry. Bates was one of the studio's first attempts at a matinee idol (Oliver Reed could probably be considered their first). As the studio entered the 1970s, they were beginning to feel the weight of a faltering British film industry, a dearth of ideas for new movies that would keep Hammer fresh, and most of all, the feeling that Hammer films were simply outdated and old-fashioned. Behind the scenes, Hammer was rudderless and without any real leadership or idea of where the studio was going. As a result, Hammer's output during the 1970s was notoriously uneven, though several high points managed to rise above the widening pool of substandard Hammer fare. One of the keys to Hammer succeeding in the 1970s involved a serious update of the stodgy and old-fashioned reputation. This meant, among other things, more daring scripts, less naïve looks at life, and above all, some new blood in the acting department that would appeal to existing horror fans as well as those shaggy-haired hippies and burn-outs with their bell bottoms and their Sergeant Pepper albums. Unfortunately Warner Brothers, who distributed the films in the important US market, wasn't going to buy any of this. They didn't know who Ralph Bates was, and more importantly, they didn't care. If Hammer wanted their Dracula film distributed in the United States, then it damn well better have Dracula in it. American audiences wouldn't put up with a bait and switch, and if Warner couldn't have Christopher Lee in the film, then the film couldn't have distribution in the United States, at least not from Warner Brothers. Hammer scrambled to appease Lee in the same way but for much less money than the producers of the James Bond films begged and bought Sean Connery back into the Bond series (at roughly the same time. Diamonds Are Forever came out in 1971, but given the speed with which Hammer films were made versus the more liberal schedule of a Bond film, it's likely this sort of desperate buying back of established stars was happening at around the same time). With Lee on board again, under protest as he couldn't stop reminding people, a hasty rewrite of the script was in order so that Dracula could actually appear in the film to see who it was that going around tasting his blood. Taste the Blood begins with a clever intro that signals the film's intention to put more work than usual into the process of reviving Dracula. A merchant traveling via coach with a couple of your standard issue gruff, superstitious villagers is bragging about the rare wares he has acquired during his recent antiquing sojourn through the Carpathian hills. While he may be proud of his knick-knacks, the villagers aren't as impressed, and when the merchant mentions a certain village, they just haul off and kick him out of the coach. Stranded in the woods at night, the merchant begins to hear the standard "stranded in the woods at night" sound effects. Owls, scurrying, and a howl that may or may not be Oliver Reed from Curse of the Werewolf. When a blood-curdling shriek fills the air, the merchant realizes that some seriously foul things are afoot in this cursed forest. By and by he falls off a ledge and comes face to face with the thrilling climax of Dracula Has Risen from the Grave. Once that movie finishes up, the merchant twists up his courage and sneaks down to collect the remaining artifacts, which include, as the title suggests, the blood of Dracula, or at least the powdered "just add water" variety we're used to seeing once Dracula finishes dying. Some time later, we meet three upstanding citizens of Queen Victoria's England, and as you can guess, all three of them aren't nearly as pious as they pretend. Ring leader William Hargood (Geoffrey Keene, who appeared in Cromwell every James Bond films beginning with The Spy Who Loved Me in 1977 and concluding with The Living Daylights) is the most despicable of the bunch as he beats and berates his daughter for smiling at a boy and engaging in other acts of harlotry while, the very same night, gathering his cronies together for a night of exotic pleasures at the local brothel. Hargood and his fellows form sort of a mini Hellfire Club, though their indulgences in the forbidden pleasures of the world consist almost entirely of going to same brother every month under the guise of "charity work" and then sitting in a room, drinking liquor, and watching foreign women dance naked. I'm not saying that isn't a fine night out on the town, but as far as experiences the taboos from the farthest reaches of the globe go, it's pretty unimaginative, pedestrian stuff. Hargood seems to realize this, and their boredom with their panty-waist sin leads them to seek out eccentric dandy Lord Courtley (Ralph Bates), who is one of those broke counts who gads about town in the finest high society frippery, scamming free meals from expensive restaurants and mooching off exquisite looking women of loose morals and poor judgment as he twirls his walking stick, doffs his top hat, and snaps his hankie about. In other words, a perfectly fine role model. Courtley is rumored to have dabbled in the black arts of Satanism or voodoo or something sinister, and so the three upstanding gentlemen seek out his company, though they never stop insulting him - which seems to me a poor way to treat the madcap young fop you're asking to initiate you into the next level of debauchery. Courtley sees in the gentlemen the perfect opportunity to get enough money to do something he's always wanted to do: namely, visit that merchant from the pre-credit sequence, buy Dracula's stuff, and mount a ritual to return the count to life. Reason? For the hell of it, it seems, which is as good a reason as any, I suppose.
As one would imagine, the ritual goes awry when Hargood's friends balk at actually guzzling down the thick, foaming blood of Dracula milkshake with which Courtley presents them. The ensuing argument results in Courtley's murder as he thrashes and writhes about after drinking the blood himself. Hargood and Co. high tail it out of the ruined old building in which the fun was taking place, and Courtley, not surprisingly proves to be just the vessel Dracula needs to return from the dead once again to wreak his unholy vengeance upon those who murdered his assistant, which doesn't make a whole heck of a lot of sense when you remember that Dracula has no idea who Courtley is, and that Courtley's death was necessary for Dracula to return to the land of the living. But what do you want when the script gets rewritten at the last minute? The remainder of the film sees Dracula (Christopher Lee) gaining control over the sons and daughters of the three men against whom he bears this grudge, so that he can have them murder their own parents, which frees Dracula up to stand nearby in the shadows and count down the number of people against whom he has successfully extracted his revenge. Considering there's only three of them, it's not much of a countdown. One of the things that sets this film apart from previous Dracula films is that Dracula, like Godzilla, is arguably the hero of the film. Though we still have to see him destroyed in the end, there's little doubt that he's no more vile than the men he's hunting. When he manipulates Hargood's battered daughter Alice (Linda Hayden, Blood on Satan's Claw) into smashing her wretched father's head in with a shovel, one almost feels like cheering, especially since this comes after a grotesque scene in which a drunk and leering Hargood viciously beats his daughter and looks on the verge of flat out raping her. Previous Dracula films have had gray characters - the self-righteous blowhard Monsignor from the last film springs immediately to mind - but those characters always had redeeming qualities. Hargood possesses no such qualities. He is despicable from beginning to end, and the audience has no problem feeling that he got what he deserved. The only thing wrong with his death, as I see it, is that it's the first, leaving the other two far less revolting characters to carry the plot when, if you ask me, Hargood's death should have been the climax of the story. Instead, we get Dracula hunting down the remainder of Hargood's cabal while milquetoast Paul (yet another Paul - nearly as many of these in Dracula films as there are Kloves, or Hans's in the Frankenstein movie) tries to save the soul of his beloved Alice Hargood and, in the process, send Dracula back from whence he came. Taste the Blood represents a more savage critique of Victorian society than any previous Dracula film. There has always been an undercurrent in the films of the ongoing struggle between enforced morals and repression and the wild animalistic abandon represented by Dracula. But in previous films, the scripts always came down on the side of society, preferring its ordered repression to the lust and passion of Dracula. Here, however, the tables are turned and if Dracula's lifestyle isn't exactly championed, it's at least shown as being no worse than the hypocrisy and deceit of modern society. The point is made in rather a heavy handed fashion, but so it goes. Although a more counter-culture, youth-friendly message about freedom triumphing over repression was nothing new in 1970, Hammer was still a relative neophyte studio when it came to tapping into the anti-authoritarian trends that had defined and all but escaped Hammer during the 1960s. With Taste the Blood, they're attempting to play a bit of catch-up, so one can forgive the ham-handed way in which they deliver the message. Dracula is, once again, little more than a supporting player, a sort of shadowy puppet master with very little screen time who does precious little more than lurk in the shadows rattling off the body count like the Count from Sesame Street. But then at the same, time, he doesn't have any less screen time or involvement in things than he did in most of the previous films. What Taste the Blood does is the same thing that Horror of Dracula and Prince of Darkness attempted to do, which is to keep Dracula constantly present as a threat, an ominous atmosphere of dread, even when Christopher Lee himself is nowhere to be seen. Only in the finale, which is admittedly half-baked, does Lee get to do his crazed thrashing about, though one has to wonder if the lord of the undead couldn't think of a better way to fight off a weak opponent like Paul than standing on a balcony and throwing garbage at him. It's just one step away from having Dracula swoop down and whack Paul on the head, then flutter up into the rafters to taunt him. The rest of the cast is spectacular. Paul (Anthony Higgins, Vampire Circus as well as a small part in Raiders of the Lost Ark) is more boring than the previous Paul, but no more boring than any of the other straights we've had on parade. Linda Hayden is one of the most attractive women Hammer ever put on display, and she acquits herself well as the other half of the boring romantic couple. The real strength of the cast lies in everyone else, an impressive assembly of solid character actors that perform above and beyond the call of duty, with Geoffrey Keen and Ralph Bates in the lead. For the couple scenes where he's allowed to spring to life, Christopher Lee is as good as he always is. Michael Ripper, who seems to have appeared in just about every movie Hammer ever made, gets promoted from the role of "suspicious barkeep" to "lackadaisical inspector." It's probably one of the best casts ever assembled for a Dracula film, and although it's common to bemoan the lack of Peter Cushing as Van Helsing, there's really no place for him thematically in this film, where the humans are generally so contemptible. Van Helsing's compassionate authority figure would have stood out like a sore thumb.
Taste the Blood continues to take Dracula further and further away from Van Helsing's theory that Dracula is is a perfectly explainable creature well within and soundly defeated by the powers of human reason. In fact, by Taste the Blood, Dracula is hardly even a vampire any more so much as he is some kind of supernatural demonic force. If ever he was the human made monster, you wouldn't know it at this point. The more secular means of dispatching a vampire -- garlic, running water, so on and so forth -- that were previously employed have, by this movie, been dispatched almost entirely in favor of religious iconography. Although Taste the Blood is as steeped in religious imagery as Dracula has Risen from the Grave, it doesn't have any particular comment to direct toward religion the way that previous film did. Religion is simply a matter of necessity as Dracula has become less the prince of darkness and more the Antichrist himself. Or wait, are those the same? Whatever the case, Taste the Blood again presents us with a monster which, unlike Dracula as we knew him in the first couple of films, exists entirely within a religious -- or sacreligious -- realm where bravery and reason have less to do with destroying him than do faith and Christ. Despite the weak ending, Taste the Blood is an exceptional entry into Hammer's Dracula oeuvre. Director Peter Sasdy eschews the ultra-vivid palette that characterized the Terence Fisher films and goes for a more subdued hue to the film, something more akin to reality and less stylized. Buildings and street are dark rather than brightly lit, and there is a palpable sense of decay in everything. Even Christopher Lee grudgingly admits that it turned out to be a good film, though to this day he won't stop going on about how corny the title is - and at least on this, one kind of has to agree with him, though I'd pay good money to see something under the same title debut on the Food Network. Being the final Hammer Dracula film, it was nice to see the series go out on such a respectable note. I'm kidding of course. Taste the Blood would prove successful, and thus there would have to be another Dracula film. We can only wish that Hammer stopped with Taste the Blood, because from here on out it's not so much downhill as it is straight off a cliff and into the abyss. Labels: Horror: Creepy Cults, Horror: Dracula, Horror: Vampires, Stars: Christopher Lee, Studio: Hammer, Year: 1970 posted by Keith at 1:17 PM | 0 Comments |
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